The great Piazza San Pietro is a five minute walk from where I’m living during Synod-2015.

As a child, Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli was moved when an uncle told him of a missionary who been crucified. He said that he wanted to be a martyr but "without the nails."

Vatican officials threatened last week to boycott a Holocaust Remembrance Service at Jerusalems Yad Vashem because of what they claim to be a profoundly misleading account of Pope Pius XIIs response to Nazi anti-Semitism.

A new authentically Jewish history of Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust needs to be written in order to help bring some long-overdue recognition to this "righteous gentile," a man whose legacy is as one of the century's great friends of the Jewish people.

Daniel Goldhagens recent essay for the New Republic, "What Would Jesus Have Done? Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust" attacks Pacelli as an anti-Semite and the Church as a whole as an institution thoroughly, and perhaps inextricably, permeated by anti-Semitism.

Pope Pius XII has been unfairly blamed over the past fifty years: for not having denounced Hitler publicly, for his perceived inaction against the Nazis, and for his failure to help the Jews.

The 1963 play, "The Deputy" by Rolf Hochhuth, which presents Pope Pius XIIs silence during the holocaust as criminal, inhuman and cowardly, almost certainly generated the largest controversy in the history of drama.

On Sunday, April 3, the Washington Post's Parade magazine printed an interview with Pope John Paul II. Tad Szulc, the author, seemed to focus on Catholic-Jewish relations. While praising the popes since John XXIII, he seemed to accuse Pope Pius XII of remaining silent about the holocaust during World War II.

It is impossible within a short space to take issue with all the mistakes made by John Cornwell in his new book, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII.