What's a Catholic to think about the book version of 'Angels & Demons'?

"Angels & Demons,"

by Dan Brown

Okay, it's taken me some time to get to "The DaVinci Code" pre-quel, but I figured I'd better read the book as well as see the movie if I want to have any credibility in talking or writing about the controversy that has some in the Catholic community feeling anxiety at the least and threatened at the most.

So, here on the day before the movie is released in the United States, let me say this about the book version of "Angels & Demons": Potboiler.

Nothing special in the way of literature, writing or even a good mystery.

Clever use of the geography of Rome? Yep.

A compelling story? Nope.

A page-turner? Not really.

If you haven't figured out half-way through the 700-plus pages where this puppy is going to end up, you need to read more paperback mysteries. If I tell you that the hero -- the same guy who is the super sleuth in "The DaVinci Code" -- gets the girl in the end, will you really be surprised?

The Catholic concern

So why do some in the Catholic community have their undies in a bunch about the movie "Angels & Demons?"

It's not so much that the church is attacked by the plot. The action of some of the clergy and hierarchy might be something some would say clergy and hierarchy would never do, but nowadays with some of the news our priests and bishops make, that argument is specious at best.

What author Dan Brown does is continue an insidious train of thought about the Catholic Church that tends to drive Catholics crazy. It's the matter-of-fact way of writing that makes statements about religion and about the church that have an anti-religion and anti-Catholic bias.

Some examples:

• The theme behind the plot is that science is getting revenge on religion "after centuries of persecution" by the church. References to Galileo and Copernicus are one part of the evidence for that, but conveniently missing are references to the likes of Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian priest who is rightly called "the father of modern genetics," or Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, "the father of modern chemistry," a Catholic beheaded during the French Revolution.


• There's a tangential passage that takes hero Robert Langdon back recalling a Harvard University classroom scene in which he cleverly points to Catholic rituals as being unoriginal and borrowed from other cultures. Take the Eucharist: How the "god-eating" rite of the Aztecs were supposedly "borrowed" by Christianity seems to be quite a stretch, given that a man such as the evangelist Paul, writing in the 1st century, and the writers of the synoptic Gospels for that matter -- pegged between 60 and 115 AD, aren't likely to have even known of the existence of the Aztecs, the first reference to which appears in the 6th century.


• One of the minor characters sees the church as "an innocuous entity...a place for fellowship and introspection...sometimes just a place to sing out loud without people staring at her."

And then, of course, there is that hauling out of the tired demonization of the Catholic Church for its "wealth." Looking down a hallway at the Vatican, one character "was sickened by the opulence," author Brown writes. "The gold leaf in the ceiling alone probably could have funded a year's worth of cancer research."

Is it jealousy that makes others point at the church and say it should give away all the timeless works of art therein to end poverty? Maybe the Louvre should do the same? And while we're at it, let's sell the U.S. Supreme Court Building to the highest bidder and put the court in the rented space of a closed auto dealership. Who needs artistry, craftsmanship and beauty? -- bz

Capture of Holocaust mastermind a must-read story

"Hunting Eichmann,"
by Neal Bascomb

The story finally is told how Holocaust survivors and Israel's spies found the mastermind of Nazi Germany's "Final Solution," the hideously well-organized plan that murdered six million Jews during World War II.


The subject of the quest, Adolf Eichmann, was the diabolical brain behind the extermination plan. It wasn't until 15 years after the war ended that he was finally found and, after a lengthy trial that was front-page news around the world, hanged for his genocidal crimes.


It's a helluva story, nonfiction that reads like a modern mystery with twists and turns, dead ends, near misses and tiny details that yield huge payoffs.


How Israel's Mossad -- helped by tips from survivors of the Nazi death camps -- tracked Adolf Eichmann to Argentina and a miserable shack with no electricity or running water is nothing short of a miracle.


How Eichmann escaped Germany as World War II came to a crashing end around him could be seen as miraculous as well. How this wanted war criminal made his way to South America, however, includes a segment that will cause shame for members of the Catholic community.



Catholic collusion


Part of the network that helped Nazis escape, Bascomb's research uncovered, included Bishop Alois Hudal, "an Austrian and a devotee of Hitler who proudly brandished his golden Nazi Party membership badge."


Bishop Hudal personally wrote to Argentine dictator Juan Peron to request visa for 5,000 Germans and Austrians.


A string of monasteries and convents in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy served as refuge to hide and smuggle Nazis away from prosecution, and Eichmann took advantage, finally making his way across Europe to Genoa, Italy, and the Church of San Antonio. Franciscan Father Edoardo Domoter, a Hungarian sympathetic to fleeing Nazi's, sheltered him in the rectory there while Eichmann secured a refugee's passport from Red Cross officials and a visa from the Argentine consulate, and soon was on the passenger ship Giovanna C headed to South America with a number of other former Nazi bigwigs.


Bascomb notes that, while cardinals and priests were involved in helping war criminals escape prosecution, "Pope Pius XII did not officially approve of the Vatican's involvement in the network, but he certainly turned a blind eye to it, primarily because of the church's commitment to act as a bulwark against the spread of communism."



Amazingly detailed research


The capture of Eichmann and especially the deception required to hide him and then spirit him out of Argentina to stand trial in Israel are as close to against-all-odds material as any fiction writer might dream up.


The fact that the Israelis were able to pull it off -- find him, first of all, grab him off the street, secret him away for a number of days and whisk him off to Israel in the first El Al plane ever to visit Argentina -- is terrific storytelling.


Pulling all the pieces of the story together through interviews and historical documents is truly the work of a gifted writer and team of researchers. The 327-page Houghton Mifflin Harcourt book includes an additional 27 pages of verifying footnotes and helpful bibliography and index. Photos taken with hidden suitcase cameras, maps of Eichmann's Argentine neighborhood and even Eichmann's Red Cross passport -- using the alias Riccardo Klement -- bring life and authenticity to the pages.

The world cannot forget

What Bascomb adds, though, as icing on the cake, is the reason that bringing Eichmann to trial on Israeli soil was so important for the Jewish people, especially for the younger generations of Israelis but even more importantly for the world. Bascomb writes in his epilogue:

"As for the rest of the world, the Eichmann affair rooted the Holocaust in the collective cultural consciousness. . . . The Holocaust was finally anchored in the world's consciousness -- never to be forgotten -- by the outpouring of survivor memoirs, scholarly works, plays, novels, documentaries, paintings, museum exhibits, and films that followed in the wake of the trial and that still continues today. This consciousness, in Israel and throughout the world, is the enduring legacy of the operation to capture Adolf Eichmann."

This is history every human should know. -- bz

Pinch-hitting for your dad, Catholic writer shares what your father wanted you to know about living

"A Guy's Guide to the Good Life: Virtues for Men,"

by Robert P. Lockwood

You could read "A Guy's Guide to the Good Life" just for the volume and variety of quotations worth remembering, but Bob Lockwood's sometimes hilarious, always thought-provoking guys tour through prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice, faith, hope and charity digs so much deeper than that.

Lockwood's brief, 140-page Servant Books paperback might accurately be described as something your father would have written if your father had written down all the things he wanted to you to know and remember.

It's a genuine service Lockwood performs, given that many fathers aren't/weren't the gifted writer this long-time columnist for Catholic publications is, and given that so many men tell anecdotally about how little their father ever verbally communicated -- with them or anyone else.

Lockwood pinch hits for dad, passing on soothing-yet-challenging drops of wisdom through stories, most with a Catholic angle, many with a sports angle, often accompanied by a cold beer.

And Lockwood is anything if not a truly gifted storyteller.

A Catholic writer who quotes Meatloaf?

Along the way he quotes men whose words are worth recalling, mixing Charles Dickens, St. Paul, John Lennon, Benedict XVI, Dante (perhaps more than one might care) and John Paul II, among the names you'd recognize. Pop music plays in the background, with lyrics by the Beatles, Skeeter Davis, and Meatloaf helping make his point. Lockwood even manages to channel Cat Stevens.

It all works, though, to base his -- well, it's teaching, when you come right down to it -- in a real world, a world in which Lockwood has lived some 60 years and thinks what he's learned in that time is worth sharing for our benefit.

If there's a goal, it is to make guys ask that crucial question: "What the hell am I doing with my life?"

Lockwood is a creative phrase maker who has penned quotes of his own worth pondering, including a definition of his topic that seems to stick: "The virtues are how we are meant to live. They are what we admire in others and hope to find in ourselves."

Throughout he pesters guys with the thought we can be more -- that a virtuous life isn't too difficult to achieve.

Have an appetizer

Here are just a few tasters of Lockwood on the seven virtues:

"Prudence means living in the truth, not as a self-righteous jerk but as a guy who wants to look at himself in the mirror every morning without fearing that he's sold out."

"Fortitude borders on obstinacy, a willingness to hold steadfast to our principles when life is telling us not to bother."

"Sometimes our priorities can get a little out of whack. There's where temperance comes in."

"Justice doesn't always come searching for us in the way we like."

"Faith is a pilgrimage, never an endpoint."

"Hope is not mere wishing but the serene and full confidence that God will never abandon us."

"We think of charity as giving out a little spare change."

Now for full disclosure: I've known Bob Lockwood for better than 30 years now, watched him fight the personal and professional battles guys fight, and consider the wisdom he shares as valuable -- and as fun to read and as thought provoking -- as listening to his gravelly voice tell a story, with a cold beer, of course, and with a ball game on the tube. -- bz

How Protestants -- and Nixon -- tried to keep JFK out of the White House

"The Making of a Catholic President:

Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960"

by Shaun A. Casey

Protestants and Republicans failed, but they did their damnedest to try to keep a Catholic from becoming president of the United States.

This incredibly detailed account proves -- with the hard evidence of preserved letters and memoirs -- that under the guise of fighting to preserve the principle of separation of church and state, large Protestant denominations and influential Protestant leaders teamed with the Republican Party and its nominee in the 1960 election -- Richard M. Nixon -- to feed anti-Catholic prejudice among the large Protestant voting majority.

Famous names like the Rev. Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale are uncovered as joining in, nay, leading the charge, in order to keep the Catholic Kennedy from the White House.

Casey's research shows how Protestant ministers and church leaders used their pulpits and their printing presses to blatantly state that no Catholic could ever be trusted to uphold the U.S. Constitution as president.

The anti-Catholic bias came out via the preaching sermons that attacked JFK, airing radio and television programs that did the same, running lengthy articles against Kennedy in Protestant magazines like Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis, and printing and distributing hundreds of thousands of pamphlets in an attempt to sway the election Nixon's way. Leading the chorus of anti-Catholicism was the Republican National Committee.

Nixon involvement uncovered

If only the American public had known about the duplicitous ways of Richard Nixon during the 1960 presidential campaign, the country may never have heard of a bungled burglary at the Watergate complex because Nixon's credibility would never have allowed him to even run for the presidency later, no less be elected or approve of criminal activity to try to win re-election.

While publicly vowing not to raise the issue of a candidate's faith, Nixon surreptitiously had former Missouri congressman O.K. Armstrong working the anti-Catholic bias angle across the country with Protestant church leaders and especially the anti-Catholic group Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Armstrong recruited organizations like Citizens for Religious Freedom, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Assemblies of God and the National Council of Churches to use speeches and printed material to show how a Catholic president would undermine the country.

Armstrong worked under the guidance of Albert Hermann of the Republican National Committee, who was the organizer of anti-Catholic forces for Nixon.

Bias clouded issues

Casey points out that the issues of the day in 1960 were public funding for Catholic schools, the appointment of a U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, a supposed threat to separation of church and state, and especially the fear that the Vatican would direct a Catholic president in how to govern the country. What comes through the historical evidence is first the fear by Protestant elites that the United States would no longer be a "Protestant nation," and second that both Protestants and Republican leaders feared Catholic voting power.

Interestingly, President Dwight Eisenhower had won the majority of Catholics in both the 1952 and 1956 elections.

In going after the anti-Catholic vote, Nixon took up a suggestion from Rev. Billy Graham, who wrote in a letter to the then vice president, "when the chips are down I think the religious issue would be very strong and might conceivable work in your behalf." Graham in fact shared his mailing list with the anti-Kennedy efforts.

Nixon, however, had a problem of his own: Civil rights. In order to gain Protestant votes, he had to win a large percentage of conservative white southern voters, so he could not be seen as progressive on race and have any chance at the southern vote. In hindsight, that foretold the Republicans' "Southern Strategy" that took electoral voters from the formerly Democratic "Solid South" camp for election after election in the later part of the 20th Century.

Kennedy and his faith

"The Making of a Catholic President" shows how the Kennedy camp came to realize the serious threat that JFK faced from anti-Catholic bigotry and how he and his strategists determined to confront the issue directly.

Kennedy sought out and listened to Protestant leaders and then addressed their fears.

Over and over during the primaries and the general election campaign JFK voiced his opposition to tax dollars for Catholic education, his opposition to an ambassador to the Vatican, and his commitment to the constitution of the country over the dogma of his faith.

He entered the West Virgina primary, winning the votes of that overwhelmingly Protestant populace, then into the lions' den of the Houston Ministerial Association, where he gave a speech and answered questions from that hostile Protestant audience.

That event may be the most often recalled remarks by Kennedy about the impact of his religion on his actions in office.

"Whenever an issue may come before me as President . . . I will make my decision . . . in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise."

Kennedy's statement echoed a quote that appeared in a Look magazine feature on him Feb. 16, 1959: "Whatever one's religion in his private life may be, for the officeholder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution in all parts -- including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state."

At the time, Kennedy was chided by writers in Catholic magazines like the Jesuit's America and lay-run Commonweal "for yielding too much ground to the Protestant worriers," as author Casey put it.

What is more interesting, and which deserves similar book-length treatment, are thoughts Casey brings up in his epilogue.

For further reflection

JFK carried 83% of the Catholic vote in 1960, 34% of the white Protestant vote, and 50% of the regular-attending black churchgoers, but won the electoral votes of hugely Protestant Texas, perhaps in part thanks to running mate Lyndon Johnson.

But Casey asks: "What was the nature of Kennedy's Catholicism?"

The answer according to one priest who knew him well was that he was a conventional Catholic of his day who understood the structures and traditions that were the church of 1950s Boston.(That priest was a certain Father John Wright, a confidant of then-Senator Kennedy who offered extremely valuable advice about how to handle the issue of his faith. The priest later became the Bishop of Pittsburgh and a John Cardinal Wright.)

Even is one disavows some of the alleged moral failings that have come to light about JFK in the years since his assassination, considering the current climate of pressure on Catholic candidates from some of the American hierarchy and other corners of the church, one has to wonder if today JFK would be able to pull 83% of the Catholic vote, or if the fact that we now have had a Catholic president would take the cachet off electing a Catholic for Catholic voters.

Still more to think about

Casey's epilogue offers cause for reflection for other, more important issues for today's Catholic.

In pointing out how JFK sought understanding from Protestants, not endorsement, Casey says:

"As religion has increasingly become connected to the political divide in this country, it has reinforced a gulf among faith communities such that members of the religious Right and the religious Left routinely demonize one another and, in doing so, ape the worst aspects of American political culture."

He adds two more thoughts:

First, the political independence of faith communities is good for both the faith communities and the nation. Second, endorsements of politicians by faith communities are usually misguided.

"The Making of a Catholic President" should be read by every Catholic -- and every Protestant -- eligible to vote. -- bz

Baseball, kids and a child's book to be appreciated by young and old

"A Glove of Their Own,"

by Debbie Moldovan, Keri Conkling and Lisa Funari-Willever,

illustrated by Lauren Lambiase

All summer long it happened every day at Edwards School Playground on Chicago's Southwest Side.

The grounder would stick in the shortstop's glove, he'd whirl and fire to the pitcher -- pitcher's hands "out" -- for the third out before the batter could step on first base, an old newspaper with the rock on top (so it wouldn't blow away).

The four-five-six guys in the field would run in for their turn at bat, and the team that had been batting took the field. Inevitably somebody from the team in the field flipped his glove to one of the guys who didn't have a glove.

That was baseball -- and still is -- in the free-of-all-cares world of kids and summer vacation, and it's what makes "A Glove of Their Own" more than just a nostalgia piece, although the first few paragraphs above are evidence that it certainly is that.

As good a growth- and person-building experience as organized sports can be when caring, trained, thoughtful coaches and supportive parents make them so, there's a special growing up that happens in pick up games -- games umpired not by adults but by children's sense of fair play, games not pressurized by league standings or playoffs, games in which kids don't have to "make the team" but just show up in order to get to play.

This colorful, child-sized book won't win any awards for plot, although it's cute enough.

It won't take a Newberry Award for creative writing.

Details in some of the illustrations will make the trained-eyed sports person wince: The hands of the batter separated on the bat? YIKES! The first baseman standing right in the middle of the base and the runner headed straight into him? Quick, dial 911!

But youngsters in the primary grades who like sports will love the story and its rhyming cadences. And the messages in this short, simple child's book are sure to sew seeds of generosity and caring for those less fortunate, like youngsters who have to play baseball without a glove of their own.

I can't wait to have my grandsons read it to me. -- bz

P.S. -- Franklin Mason Press, the publisher, has partnered with Danjulie Associates in a nonprofit effort to raise funds for sports equipment for needy youth. A portion of book sales are donated to selected youth sports organizations, and the company also will partner with groups to do book-selling fundraisers. For details, visit www.franklinmasonpress.org. And kudos to Jack Hannahan and Robb Quinlan, two Minnesota Catholic high school products, for their support of this worthwhile project.