God and the Fascists: The Vatican Alliance with Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Pavelic - Softcover

Deschner, Karlheinz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616148373 ISBN 13: 9781616148379

Publisher: Prometheus, 2013

Synopsis

Now available in English for the first time, a controversial work that indicts the Vatican for its actions before and during World War II.In the decade preceding the outbreak of World War II, the Vatican made a devil's bargain with fascist leaders. Anticipating that their regimes would eliminate a common enemy--namely Marxist-Leninist communism--two popes essentially collaborated with Hitler, Mussolini, and the fascist dictators in Spain (Franco) and Croatia (Pavelić).This is the damning indictment of this well-researched polemic, which for almost five decades in Germany has sparked controversy, outrage, and furious debate. Now it is available in English for the first time.Many will dismiss Deschner--who himself was raised and educated in a pious Catholic tradition--as someone who is obsessed with exposing the failings of the church of his upbringing. But he has marshaled so many facts and presented them with such painstaking care that his accusations cannot easily be ignored.The sheer weight of the evidence that he has brought together in this book raises a host of questions about a powerful institution that continues to exercise political influence to this day.

About this title

About the Author:

Karlheinz Deschner (Hassfurt am Main, Germany) is the author or editor of forty-six books including novels, literary criticism, essays, aphorisms, and, above all, critical history of religion and the church.  He is best known for his multivolume Criminal History of Christianity, the tenth volume of which was published in March 2013. He has enthralled and provoked his audiences over the years with more than two thousand public lectures. In 1971 he was called before a court in Nuremberg, charged with “insulting the Church.” He is the first German to be recognized with the International Humanist Award. Among his other awards are the Arno Schmidt, Alternative Büchner, Erwin Fischer, and Ludwig Feuerbach Prizes. Learn more at www.deschner.info.

Review:

“With this book, Deschner is breaking a taboo in German postwar historiography. In his thrillingly written work, he was the first renowned author to document the close collaboration between the Catholic Church and the Fascists, which, in the Balkans for instance, led to probably the best-concealed mass crimes of modern times. It remains the imperishable merit of Deschner to have publicized these and many other facts, thus making them available to a broad public. A real eye-opener!”
 
—Dr. Peter Priskil, author of Salman Rushdie: Portrait of a Poet and Taslima Nasrin: The Death Order and Its Background

"Deschner is probably the most uncompromising author and thinker in the German-speaking world"

—Die Weltwoche (Zurich)

"[This book] has been researched with exceptional scholarly rigor; it has stood up against hundreds of published critiques; and it has been maintained through hundreds of discussions. I can attest to that."

—Blätter für deutsche and internationale Politik (Cologne)

About this edition

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1616148373
• ISBN 13: 9781616148379
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288