Daniel Goldhagen provoked a second storm -- the first one was his book Hitler's Willing Executioners -- when he published A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. (Each of these books was anticipated by articles in TNR.) The indifference (a very polite word) of Pope Pius XII and of much of the Catholic hierarchy towards Nazism was part of an endemic sympathy with fascism, before the war and after. The Church was an ally of the Spanish dictatorship of Franco; the Church was the backbone of anti-Semitism in Poland, also before and after the war. History's verdict on the clergy is devastating in other places, as well: France, Slovakia, even Italy, where the cardinal who was to be elevated to Pope as John XXIII was one of the rare figures to go against the conniving of Pius in his sympathies with the Reich. An article in Thursday's Financial Times from Buenos Aires by Jude Webber focuses not on the escape routes organized by the church for Nazis to be hidden in Argentina, including one Adolf Eichmann. It reports on the conviction of Christian Von Wernich, a Catholic priest, found guilty of seven murders, 31 cases of torture and 42 kidnappings in the "dirty war" of the 70s and 80's. The Argentine Bishops' Conference said it was "pained" by the conviction. I'd bet that the pain was not as severe as even one of the instances of torture for which Von Wernich was convicted.