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Politics versus religion.

Article Excerpt
Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror, Michael Burleigh, HarperCollins, 2007, 557 pp., $27.95

In April 2007 the Vatican ambassador to Israel announced that he would skip the official Holocaust Day ceremony at a national museum in Israel to protest the museum's depiction of Pope Pius XII as a largely passive bystander to the Nazi genocide of the Jews during World War II. The controversy over the pope's role during the Holocaust continues to be a point of contention and will remain so until historian's gain access to the Vatican archives covering the war years. Meanwhile the absence of a full record of Pope Pius XII's role during the Holocaust has not prevented historians from engaging in an often bitter and vitriolic debate on the subject.

Michael Burleigh, the author of nine books dealing with contemporary European history, including The Third Reich: A New History, weighs in on this dispute which is one among many controversial issues he undertakes in Sacred Causes, his provocative and comprehensive account of organized Christianity's response (especially the Catholic Church) to many of the major events of the past two centuries. This includes the rise of secular ideologies, such as totalitarianism, and in the aftermath of 9/11, the threat of Islam to a predominant Western Christian culture.

Sacred Causes is a continuation of Burleigh's 2005 work, Earthly Powers, which examined the clash of religion and politics from the French Revolution to World War I. In both works Burleigh argues that the moral and ethical foundations of Western civilization derive from Christianity and that since 1789, the primacy of Christian values has been undermined by the tenets of secular ideas. These include not only Liberalism but also ideologies such as Bolshevism, Fascism, and Nazism that have resulted in the annihilation of millions of innocent people. Ironically, notes Burleigh, Marxism, Fascism and the Nazis borrowed symbols from Christianity to create secular "religions" of their own based on a cult of personality, and a mystic fealty to the state, wherein a Mussolini, Lenin or Hitler, by virtue of their person incorporated the will of the nation. The "priesthood" of this new Church promised earthly salvation in return for support of their messianic mission, be it the...

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