Alex Butterworth: Summons to piety or wake-up for Enlightenment values?

Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al-Qaeda
By Michael Burleigh
Published by HarperCollins

Burleigh's ostensible thesis is that communism, fascism and Nazism appropriated the form and function of religion and suppressed their rivals in hideous orgies of anticlericalism, the better to exploit the unfulfilled spiritual cravings of the masses.

He brings a daunting weight of scholarship to bear on the idea and telling detail abounds, including the icon painters shot by the Bolsheviks for deceiving the devout by their use of luminous paint. Although Sacred Causes is strident in its opinions, its central claim remains coyly implicit: that mankind will always be dangerously adrift without the moral authority of the Vatican to anchor it and Western civilisation is in jeopardy without the solitary bulwark that the Catholic church can provide. This is hardly a credible proposition while the Vatican's relationship with the Nazis remains in question and Burleigh's vigorous defence of its integrity lies at the heart of this book.

He presents the case persuasively, invoking Cardinal Pacelli's denunciation of the Nazis when Vatican Secretary, and his conspiratorial contact with the Allies after becoming Pius XII. But pragmatism is Burleigh's watchword: what were the realistic options for a pope faced, for example, with a Catholic minority in Germany who were hostage to Nazi malice?

His exoneration of the church is premised on what he describes, elsewhere, as its "spiritual goals, which took precedence over evanescent temporal governments".

Could the promise of a 1000-year Reich be viewed as a temporary inconvenience, so long as the church endured? Or could the Stalinist occupation of eastern Europe be seen as a spur to Christian renewal? Burleigh appears to believe so, but not for any lack of empathy with the oppressed.

In one crisp metaphor, Burleigh evokes the spiritual discipline required of those living in totalitarian regimes: "People had to keep the political equivalent of a Bach keyboard variation ringing clearly in their heads, to blot out the ambient ideological Muzak with its bogus messages of happiness, goodwill and progress."

Burleigh is a fine and contentious writer and a hugely accomplished historian, but he is also such a good hater that his vituperation reads like some form of primal-scream therapy. Sadly, his wit is as likely to alienate as to entertain and risks leaving him preaching to the pulpit.

Recoil as one might at some of Burleigh's convictions, he has charted deep currents. Whether this work is to be remembered as a summons to Catholic piety or a wake-up call to Enlightenment values should be the subject of ferocious debate.

- OAMARU MAIL