By Dolores Madlener
STAFF WRITER

It started as an intellectual argument with a fellow attorney, says Ron Rychlak, 43. Nine years later it has blossomed into his newly published book, “Hitler, the War and the Pope.”

“He was one of those colleagues you enjoy debating a point with,” he says. But when the friend said, “The pope was a Nazi,” it shocked Rychlak, a Catholic, raised in a Polish-American home in LaFayette, Ind. where his dad was teaching at Purdue.

“If [John Cornwell’s] ‘Hitler’s Pope’ had been out at the time,” Rychlak says, “I probably would have flipped through it and said, ‘Hey, my buddy’s got a point’ and dropped it.”

Instead he read a book about Christian rescuers of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It was a story that had it all—Nazis, the war and the pope—and it sparked Rychlak’s interest.

He says he began seriously researching other sources because “I couldn’t argue with this friend unless I had everything foot-noted and documented.”

Rychlak claims not to have approached “the case” biased on behalf of Pope Pius XII, although “there was something about a pope being sympathetic to a Nazi that didn’t ring right.” Nonetheless, he says, “I literally did not know who Pius XII was at that time.” The pontiff died when Rychlak was a toddler.

His curiosity with the pontiff’s guilt or innocence did not flow from a built-in fascination with WWII, but it turned him into an authority on the subject.

“That was one of the hardest things—I had to literally teach myself World War II.” His wife Claire, back home in Oxford, Miss., now expecting their sixth child, remembers his research. She told visitors recently, “Ron wrote this book on weekends and at night on his laptop, right there on the living room floor.”

Rychlak, who has taught law at the University of Mississippi for 13 years, after working as a trial lawyer with the firm of Jenner & Block in Chicago, says he wonders how his wife put up with him. “I watched the History Channel every night. We spent a year with Nazi books all over our dining room table. Claire was worried someone was going to come in and wonder about all that stuff!”

But after two years, they realized he had 200 pages of notes in his computer and plenty of proof that Pius was getting railroaded.

The notes became the seed for his fascinating 500-plus page exposition of one of history’s monumental events and two of the figures that dominated it.

“I tried to construct the book like a court case, laying out all the facts (Chapters 1-17), before I began my argument (Chapter 18).” Then follow 10 fundamental questions that the author answers in summation; a razor sharp rebuttal (epilogue) to journalist Cornwell’s book; the endnotes; a 14-page bibliography and an index. The crown to his scholarly and very readable work is the foreword written by Cardinal John O’Connor, who penned it after reading the manuscript during his final illness.

Rychlak believes it has helped to be a lawyer in compiling the book. “In terms of finding the truth, the legal method, when properly applied, is very effective.” He has left no stone unturned to resolve any argument as to where Pius stood and what his motivations were. “I didn’t want readers to ask themselves later, “Gee, is there some uninvestigated fact I don’t know about?”

The most rewarding experience during his investigation was an invitation from the Vatican to use its library. Rychlak says he had a chance to see every document and book that Cornwell saw, and concludes that “Hitler’s Pope” is a fraud. “Cornwell is too smart to have made honest mistakes. He had an agenda.” From discussing the “doctored” photo on its cover to Cornwell’s last chapter where he attacks Pope John Paul II, whom he likens to Pius XII, Rychlak’s epilogue pins Cornwell to the mat of truth.

In a sense, Pius becomes Rychlak’s client in this book. While the Prosecution (Pius’ various critics since his death) have found him guilty, Rychlak sets out a solid defense to convince a fair-minded jury of readers of his innocence.

He also tells what Pius did and didn’t do. “He didn’t use the bully pulpit.” But adds that neither did anybody else who was working covertly. “The underground cannot use the bully pulpit.”

The author cites early critics such as the playwright Rolf Hochhuth, who complained that Pius should have postured more, in order to look good and for the “glory” it would have brought the church.

But he also cites many Nazis sources that Hitler was poised to have an excuse to invade the Vatican where Jews were in hiding. Rychlak says all the good works accomplished under the authority of the pope would have been lost. “All those people (a modest number is 800,000 Jews in Europe) would have been lost.”

As defense lawyer/author, he points out proof of Pius’ personal sacrifices like eating rations during the war, when he could have had regular food, and living without heat in the Vatican to suffer with his people.

He shows the unprecedented bravery of Pius, who jeopardized his own diplomatic neutrality and that of the Vatican during wartime, most notably, when he passed along information of a coup attempt by friendly Germans wanting to overthrow Hitler and sue for a separate peace. They also gave Pius information about troop movements before the invasions of Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland, which he gave to the Allies.

Even the pope’s personality has been distorted, according to Rychlak’s studies. “He’s been depicted as icy, cold and austere. Well, this man was a diplomat, remember — charming, witty, even funny.”

Rychlak learned in reading the biography of Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, that in escorting the future pope around the United States in 1936, Spellman found the English-speaking Cardinal Pacelli charming and with a sense of humor.

As the cause for Pius XII’s canonization progresses, all these facts gain more importance. Rychlak acknowledges that unfortunately, in proving the present case for Pius, his detractors keep bringing up new allegations, “It’s a constant shifting battle,” he says.

College professors at Princeton and Loyola of Chicago, where Rychlak’s dad retired in 1999, have expressed an interest in using the book in class, and the New York Archdiocese is considering it for high school seniors studying the Holocaust.

“Hitler the War and the Pope” is as fascinating as anything in a Grisham novel or on “Law and Order,” but ultimately what Rychlak has accomplished is to give Pope Pius XII his “day in court.”

“Hitler, the War and the Pope,” by Ronald J. Rychlak, published by Our Sunday Visitor, 548 pp, $19.95 paperback, $26.95 hardcover. Available from Pauline Books & Media, (312) 346-4228; St. Philomena Religious Goods, (312) 563-1694; and other bookstores.