Top Ten Radio Shows of The Catholic Geek

My metrics are back on Blog Talk Radio. I can finally say what was the most listened to podcasts of all time! Yay!

Since the #900 blog just came up, I figure it's time to look back over my 47 episodes (yes, I've taken one vacation too many) and find out what the top episodes are.

My highest rated show is .... John C. Wright on Somewhither. Are we at all remotely surprised?

Second highest? Tom Knighton on SP4.

Third? Synods and Starships with Matthew Bowman doing the show.

Fourth -- shocker -- the first appearance of Mr. and Mrs Wright.

Followed shortly thereafter by .... John C. Wright on Iron Chamber of Memory

Maybe I should just give them the radio show. Hmm....

Next up is Marina Fontaine's appearance, talking about her book Chasing Freedom.  Followed by Kia Heavey's Animal Farm with Cats.

Number eight is ... a show that never was. My guest didn't come on, and I flew solo the whole way. 206 listeners.

Number 9 is ... my Superbowl edition, where I also monologued. Huh. Maybe I should do that more often.  186 hits.

Number 10? Honor at Stake and Sad Puppies Bite Back.  Yeah. I don't get it. My bottom three from the top ten list is just me showing up to the show and talking. Hell, this one was all about reading from my work. I think I prerecorded this one. This is the lowest listener count at 182 listeners.

Not bad for someone who's only been on a whole year, huh?

Hitler Finds Out About the Dragon Awards

Brought to you by The Catholic Geeks general and Novel Ninja Matthew Bowman.

I would have spread the joy of that link around on the Catholic Geeks blog, but WordPress doesn't want me to embed videos anywhere. Damnit.

TONIGHT on The Catholic Geek: Potluck Podcast with the Novel Ninja

The Catholic Geek: Potluck Podcast



Again, since I'm not doing the show this Sunday, Novel Ninja and CG owner Matthew Bowman is taking over! Co-starring and CG author Lori Janeski.  Matthew and Lori will be talking about superheroes, Catholic news, TV shows, Star Wars, ISIS and the refugee crisis, and more. Plus, special guest: Strawpope Frank! Yes, Frank's back in the news, even though it's getting ever more easy to tell the difference between him and Pope Francis.

All that and more, plus your calls!

From History to Vampires: Why Honor at Stake?

A question I haven't gotten, and that I had expected, would have been, well, how the bloody blue Hell does one go from The Pius Trilogy to vampires?  Like with Honor At Stake, coming out on Sept 1?

Step one: Once upon a time, I did some fan fiction.  Actually, no, I didn't. My sister did a fan fiction once. I took it, made it far more interesting, and rewrote it as an independent book.  I then decided that the book was a little too ... compact. The first sixty pages of the book? I expanded all of it into Honor At Stake.

As I started expanding it ... well, everyone say it with me: It just spiraled.

The novels were basically "Catholic vampires," where I kicked the mythos into compliance with standard theology, and then did a little rewrite of history since 1789, and....Anyway...

Step two:  one of my Facebook groups wanted something "Dark." A fellow member, Erin Lale was an acquisitions editor at Eternal Press / Damnation books, and she had nothing in her email.  So, I sent in my book, and well...Nothing happened. At all.  No word, no nothing. I got a reply at 1pm the next day saying that it was received.

That evening, I was cleaning out my spam folder.  There was a 6pm response, that very day. Five hours after the confirmation email.

That was when Erin told me they wanted Honor At Stake.

Short version ... I wrote it when I felt like it, I wasn't entirely certain that anyone else would be interested, and now, surprise, they do.

My new Radio Show: The Catholic Geek

Yup. No joke this time. I'm not even a guest star. This is happening.  I will have my own radio show, The Catholic Geek, Starting this Sunday, June 7th, from 7pm-9pm, EST.

The fact that the radio show happens to share the exact same name to the blog that I'm now contributing to?  Yeah, not even a little bit of a coincidence.

The fact that my first two guests are the founders of said website?  Slightly more of a coincidence.

One of the two guests is the Novel Ninja, Matthew Bowman, who I briefly "SWATted" during the latter end of the Sad Puppies war.

As you can tell from the title of the show, I'm going to be covering topics that are either nerd or Catholic related.  This of course means that I will never, ever cover politics .... And if you believe that one, I'm sorry. I am so, so sorry.

Some of this schedule is a work in progress, but I will be updating these as we go along.

June 7^th, Matt Bowman and Lori Janeski -- The Year of the Geek

June 14, An E3 preview with Ian Crom

Marina Fontaine on Joss Whedon andAvengers

June 21 

E3 Wrap-up

His Tankness himself, Tom Knighton, on Sad Puppies

June 28

I will have co-host Karina Fabian, and a panel on Infinite Space, Infinite God

July 5^th

Steph Souders

Catholic images and themes in Babylon 5, the fiction of C.S. Lewis, and a retrospective on A Canticle for Leibowitz.

July 12^th

Vanessa Landry, a report on LibertyCon.

July 19^th

Ava Armstrong -- military technology.

CatholicFiction(.net), and "Dereliction of Duty"

Sometimes, I love my fellow Catholics.

And sometimes, they are brain-dead stupid.

If you look at this article from CatholicFiction.net, you'll see this great example of brain death.

Science fiction has also been derelict in its duty. Who does science fiction serve? Sci-fi is a significant buttress propping up the established church of Scientism. Sci-fi flatters both rightist and leftist elites: square-jarred heroes battle alien savages along the outer space frontier while proclaiming anti-religious and anti-natalist platitudes. As an avid reader of the genre, I have come up with a list of the major shortcomings of the genre.

While I can think of some particular examples of what this nimrod (a creature from the black lagoon named Nito Gnoci), this is just ... "Avid reader?" Really?

Funny, as an avid reader myself, Nito, you're an idiot.

If you've followed the guest posts I've written for Right Fans, or read my reviews of Karina Fabian's work, you'll probably note that this very concept is already starting to get under my skin.  But, sure, there are problems within science fiction -- science fiction fans know that "sci-fi" started as a derogatory term -- so let's play this out some, shall we?

If you compare and contract the article excerpts here with the original article, you'll note that I've cleaned up the lousy formatting.

1) Aliens

Aliens: Sci-fi stories often involve contact with numerous alien civilizations.In 1950 Enrico Fermi, in conversation with his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, famously asked “Where is everybody?” (Meaning: If alien civilizations exist why haven’t we heard from them?) I don’t think the question has received a satisfactory answer. It is unlikely other technologically advanced civilizations exist within our galaxy. If they existed they would have already explored the galaxy, a process which takes only some hundreds of thousands of years, which is a mere moment in geologic time.

Ummm ... doesn't this presume that the aliens are more advanced that us?  This is a presumption that Rod Serling never made.  In fact, there are three distinct episodes that immediately come to mind (Third Planet from the Sun being one of them, I forget the titles of the other two).

Also, if there are other life forms out in this galaxy, doesn't that mean that they could be as advanced as we are, or maybe even less so?

This argument basically reads: If there are aliens, therefore they must be more advanced, therefore they don't exist because otherwise we would have heard of them by now?  What idiot thinks like that?

Not to mention that this presumes that any technological advancement is leaps and bounds ahead of us.  In fact, Nito assumes that aliens would advance at ONE EXACT RATE OF SPEED.  Yikes. Nito the nimrod presumes so, so much.

I'm not saying that there are aliens, but there's a lot of space out there. As Douglas Adams noted, space is big. Really big. The idea that we're the only ones in the galaxy is kinda presumptuous, don't you think? Also, the author limits himself to this Galaxy.  There are more galaxies than just ours out there.

2) Bad predictions

Sci-fi often features time travel or routine intergalactic travel. Instead of dubious scenarios that involve debating with Socrates or zooming to the Andromeda Galaxy for the weekend, sci-fi should focus on less speculative but still astonishing advances in medical, communication, and computer technology. Sci-fi readies us for a future that will never come, and too often assumes the future will mirror the past, an assumption both unrealistic and unimaginative. After all, what is the starship Enterprise but a British or American colonial gunboat?

Um, excuse me.  When 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was written, it was science fiction, and now we have nuclear submarines. Is that not predictive enough?

But Robert Heinlein created mechanical suits of armor for soldiers to fight in, and our modern military is designing it.  Captain Kirk had the first flip phone. Doctor Crusher had the first tablet, and Captain Picard read off the first e-reader. J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5 developed a star fighter called Starfuries -- which NASA wants to use a model to design space construction craft. The science fiction show had the most functional design.

Oh, wait, medical technology? You mean the people who've been designing a medical tri-corder from Star Trek and the people who've made an actual Doctor Who sonic screwdriver aren't enough for these people? Are we kidding?

Oh, and these things will never come? Maybe not in our lifetime, some of them, but we've already got scientists who are coming up with variations on warp drive.  Presuming that Einsteinian physics will always be physics is like saying that Newtonian physics is the end all and be all of physics. Hint: it's not.  Considering what quantum physics might end up giving us, we might end up with better technology than warp drive.

Hell, we've already got the early stages of a transporter, dang it. Meaning that Nito the Nimrod not only doesn't know science fiction, HE DOESN'T KNOW SCIENCE!!!!

Anatomy of a Breakup, 2: Emotional Fall out, and (Bruce) Banner moments

Happy Valentine's day.  If you are having a good Valentine's day, with a great date all planned (or already done, if you're smart and did it on the weekend), then you might want to read today's earlier article, and this one, so you can be happy you're not me. Trust me, if you want to appreciate what you have, it's good to know what happens when you lose it.

Now, the earlier article was all about an example of a relationship / friendship falling to pieces.  In this cases, it fell apart over the course of months with one party not even being aware of it.

That ignorant buffoon I speak of is, of course, myself.

So, how should a character react to having a relationship suddenly and expectantly go south on him? Well, in A Pius Man, when relationships go south, guns are pulled out.  Earlier, I mentioned CS Lewis' book On Grief, and my reaction was much the same as the traditional stages of grief ... well, partially.

Denial: I didn't cry, mainly because my body has forgotten how to cry in full-out sobbing format. There were tears, but not all that much. I was quite, quite numb. I don't know if it counts as denial, but I couldn't think very clearly.  This woman was my best friend for years.  She brought out every good instinct in me.  My friends could see it, I could see it.  I was a better person because she was in my life.  She defined all of my best qualities, and made me want her good qualities. There had to be a mistake here.  Just because she didn't "love" love me, didn't mean the friendship was over, did it? That didn't make sense. Could it? I had to be wrong. I had to have misread it. I had to have been illiterate. This was my best friend. I told her everything. And I mean everything.  She would have told me to my face if she believed what I read -- at least on the phone.

Bargaining: My next thought was to make certain I understood everything involved, included that this was the end of the friendship as well. I asked her if I should cancel my ticket to California -- a plan we had been working on for 8 months now -- and she said yes.  Not only was she not in love with me -- which I could live with -- but she didn't even want to hang out. She couldn't care about me as a friend. That nail gun sound is sealing the coffin on our friendship.

Anger: Oh, I have that part down.  As I write this (the week of the 5th), I am quite a powder keg.  I have had to de-friend people on Facebook whom I normally tolerate because I am ready to tear them a few new orifices.  I am generally not a "nice" person, though I shoot for merely "good".  This week, I want to hurt something.  On the bright side, my cardio class and punching bag routines went over like a dream. Lift weights? No problem. Roll out the punching bags and beat them across the floor? Hell yes.

The strange thing is that I'm not angry at anyone in particular. Everything, yes, but no one person. I'm not even angry at the one who initiated this.  Could I do things to hurt her, even though she's 3,000 miles away? Sure, that's easy. I could write to her father to tell him about the whole relationship from start to finish, and he's a bastard, and no mistake; there is Facebook, and the internet, and all the various and sundry ways you can hurt someone that way -- it's not rocket science, any internet troll can do that.

Would I do anything to hurt her, though? No.  That has no interest for me, and it makes me physically ill to even contemplate doing it.

It's possible that I took my confusion to be anger -- it's possible, since I'm quite confused. This came out of nowhere, even though she said she'd been writing the letter for months. Her telling me to redeem my ticket implies that she was jerking me around about the California trip as recently as three weeks before the letter. So, was she lying to me the whole time? Did something happen since then?

There is a lot of adrenaline flowing in me.  I have redhead genes (redheads do have surges of adrenaline, more than the average person), but my heart will sometimes race, and I feel all the fear and excitement of a particularly dangerous roller coaster ride, only without any of the enjoyment such a ride should entail.  It is the fear and excitement more akin to my being strangled in Krav Maga, back to when I had no idea what I was doing, and the training partner was really trying to kill me. Only this time, there is no endorphin chaser once the choke is broken, but my body feels like it's constantly under attack.
[More below the break.]

Anatomy of a breakup, part 1: "Dear John"

[I think at the end of the day that this is a writing resource. For those of you who have never had a bad breakup, enjoy -- because this is what you'll never have to go through, and you will never need to. I am recording it all for you right now.]

This is just some of how I do chivalry in my novels

When CS Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, lost his wife, he went out and wrote a book about it.  It was simply called On Grief.

Last week, as you may have noticed, a very dear friend, in fact, someone I was in love with, sent me a Dear John letter.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, a breakup letter. At least, it usually is.

In this case, it was kind of confusing on multiple levels, and not that simple. I was in love with her; her, not so much. I didn't make it a secret, nor did I force the issue. But "breakup" is the way to summarize what happened.

Anyway, why am I writing this? Well, I thought last week that I would simply go into hibernation and leave the blog alone. My mood is not healthy. I was usually an inch away from biting someone's head off. Several "friends" of mine whose disrespectful views I usually tolerate got on my last nerve, and it was either cut off all contact, or eviscerate them in a public forum online.  And I even partially failed at that, too.

However, this is Valentine's day. And, ironically, the Dear John letter arrived almost a year to the day after one of my last blogs on the subject of romance in writing. So, this is sort of perfect timing.

So, in the tradition of CS Lewis, more or less, I am going to give you the anatomy of a breakup.

[As a disclaimer, I know what you're thinking -- is he using his blog to take subtle shots at this ex-friend of his? No. That would presume she reads the blog. As I noted last time, it was a 50/50 chance she read that blog, and it's a sure thing that the odds are even less this time, don't you think?  Also: I am not reading the letter, I am not quoting it, I am reconstructing it as best as I can from memory.]

[More below the break.]

Author Review: John Ringo, Part 3, the Thrillers. (Still, with Free Books.)

Here we go again.

As mentioned, John Ringo has written a LOT in the past decade.  He's only been writing since 1999, but he's been pumping out almost three to four books a year ever since.

However, despite the previous posts, he hasn't written only political-heavy science-fiction and fantasy novels. But, they're all published by Baen, so they're still free for download.

To start with there's this one character of his who's a navy SEAL ....

The Paladin of Shadows (series)

.... This one is odd.

Ghost --- This first book is made of a series of three vignettes, and stars one Mike Harmon, a veteran who is not a very nice person, but he does qualify as a good man. Ringo opens this book with a quote from George Orwell -- We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on our behalf.

Mr. Harmon is one such rough person.


“Ghost” is the code name of former Navy SEAL Mike Harmon. Trapped on a far-left college campus, the veteran feels isolated and discriminated against. But when he sees a co-ed being kidnapped, he charges in to save the day, only to find himself in the middle of a terrorist plot that takes him all the way to Syria, where he lands in the middle of a terrorist stronghold, and eighty hostages, all of whom are slated to die.

The second vignette... skim it. Trust me.  It's a thirty thousand word story that's twenty thousand words of bondage porn and deep-sea fishing.

Vignette three finds Harmon in Eastern Europe, and he finds himself hip deep in a plot to nuke Paris.

Kildar—Harmon, still moving through Eastern Europe, finds himself trapped in the middle of a valley during a snowstorm. He buys lodging to hold up in during the winter, but this new home comes with an interesting piece of real estate -- the entire valley.  The home also comes with a title for the owner.  The title is Kildar.

However, Harmon still has a problem.  The Valley is in the middle of a pathway for Chechen terrorists killing everyone in their way. Now, Ghost has to train the locals to stop the invaders, or else everyone is going to die.

Unfortunately for the Chechens, killing is what Ghost does best.

Choosers of the Slain: A US Senator has a problem.  The daughter of a major money donor has been disappeared into the Balkan sex slave trade.  Here's five million dollars, could Harmon and his merry band of mountain warriors do something about the matter?

And when Ghost and company discover that some of the clientele in this sex trade happen to be from Washington D.C. ... well, there's a reason I picked up certain songs from this author.

And, there's a reason that the cover looks like the movie poster for a James Bond film.

Unto the Breach.  After the incident with the slave trade, people in Washington figure that Mike "Ghost" Harmon is a great person to call upon when the situation is both dire, and politically inconvenient.

This time, a scientist has been kidnapped by terrorists.  The problem?  He's an expert in biological warfare.

And that's not even the problem.   The problem is when the terrorists follow Harmon home, back into the valley he has lived in for years. But the local people are warriors by culture, and by blood, and they've been itching for a good fight. And all Hell breaks loose.

Remember when I mentioned where I first heard Dragonforce?  This was the book.


A Deeper Blue.


Biological weapon at Disneyland, with a shootout at the Holy Rodent Empire.

I think that's all you need to know for this one. It was fun.






The Last Centurion. I'm still not sure what to make of this one. To start with, this is a non-Mike Harmon novel.  Technically, it's science fiction, but only because it's set a few years into the future.  The United States has invaded Iran, beaten it, and is still there, even though President "the Bitch" has ordered a half-asses withdrawal. This book was published in 2008, so you can guess who he means.  The world has been hit with a global pandemic, the Earth is in crisis, and American army officer "Bandit Six" is trapped in the middle of Iran, with no support, no help, and the only way out is through the hostile territories of six countries..

This is a heavily political novel.  Ringo WANTS to piss off everyone with SOMETHING in this book—he didn't piss me off, but I'm odd. It's a one-shot, and written in blog format, with all that the genre entails. It was written in early 2008, before Swine Flu, the rise of Obama, and the first 100 pages, you will NOT know what's going on... okay maybe you will, but it took me a few pages to get into this one. He shoots at Fox news, environmentalists, the army, the peaceniks ... pick someone, he shoots at them.

Writing A Pius Man, part 4: Selling yourself.

A Pius Man was done. The time had come. Sell the book to... anyone, really.

For those of you who have never researched how a book goes from the pen of the author to the hands of the reader, a quick sketch of the process.

Agents represent the author. 
Their mission: sell your book to a publisher for the highest possible value. Agents make between 10%-15% of the money the author gets. Which isn't bad work if you're the agent for Stephen King. Having 10% of however many millions of books sold adds up to real money. However, 10% of a ten thousand dollar advance isn't much, and ten thousand isn't a common opening bid for an advance on a book.

Advances are made by the publisher, and tend to be broken up into three parts: signing with the publisher, the arrival of the first draft; prompt delivery of the final draft. The publisher is the one that buys the book from you. That's where the money comes from, that's how the book is distributed.

Editors work for the publisher, and goes over the manuscript with a fine tooth comb. They are generally the people who are the feelers for the book. The agents have to cultivate contacts, pitch the book to editors, convincing them to at least look at it.

Simple, right? The author pitches to an agent. The agent pitches the book to an editor in a publishing company. The editor pitches the book to the company s/he works for. The publisher sells the book to you, the audience. The agent doesn't make money until the author does. The publisher doesn't make money until the books fly off the shelves.

But wait, there's more.

How A Pius Man came to be: Part 3. Writing

Part three: The Creative process—AKA: Writing the darn thing.

During a winter break, I had gone through great pains to finish my thesis. It had been more or less a cultural analysis of Irish Rebel songs, which, like my books, had a lot of property damage, and fighting, with merry and bouncy tunes and boy, were these people having way too much fun.

That made up three credits of a semester where I had only two other classes, and no social life. The paper was mostly finished before the semester had even begun. I was even more finished when I pounded out two term papers before the first month was out.

What part of “no social life” do you not understand?

I started writing A Pius Man in February, 2004. I was finished with it by April. There were a lot of nights where I was up until three in the morning. The story wouldn't get out of my head or leave me alone. For the first time in my life, instead of making it up when I went along, I did an outline. I drew sketches and diagrams.

The sad part is, I kept footnoting the darned thing.

And it all came naturally to me. Two spies would follow the lead of a dead terrorist looking in the Vatican archives, and discover yet another dead researcher from the archives—a crime investigated by Giovanni Figlia. They would have to find Giovanni Figlia and his entourage from the Secret Service and the Egyptian police. And with modern technology, it was easy for the spies to know what the primary investigators were doing. “Sinister looking priest #1” would have to keep up as well, to make certain that nothing inconvenient would be discovered. The Interpol cop from Ireland would have to fly in and confirm that all this was, yes, linked together to Pope Pius XII.

And, thanks to maps on the internet, I can make the bus terminal arriving from the airport be one point on a straight line from the Vatican to the Spanish steps.

Should any of my other books see the light of day, you'll note that I have a pattern of property damage at public places. A gunfight in a science fiction convention; a battle at the Cloisters; a shootout at a Fireworks factory in Long Island; the Muir woods in San Francisco; a hostage situation at a Barnes and Noble bookstore; a chase with MacGyver moments in CostCo. Been there, done that, blown it up.

And for some reason, I couldn't get one image out of my head—an armored SUV going down the Spanish steps.

After that, the characters had to connect the dots, do the research, find a personal connection to the situation, and most of all—what is worth killing over for a secret over sixty years old? No offense to anyone on any side of the “debate,” but if someone proved that Pope Pius XII was a Nazi, or that he was a hero, who would kill for that?

End result: the book was eight hundred pages long. Two hundred thousand words, when the average novel was only one hundred thousand. And I had brought in EVERY, SINGLE, CHARACTER I had ever written, over a dozen books, excluding the science fiction ones. Because what had started with a simple and straightforward murder turned into an all out war, and I needed every person I could conceive of to support what protagonists I had standing. A very small army of light against a large army of darkness, and I didn't even have Sam Raimi.

From 2004-2007, there were several variations on the story. The first had an additional character. One had a character introduced from the very beginning who was used to bring in most of the history; he didn't disappear, but he was shifted. One version took out about 50% of the story and made it around five hundred pages.

Then there was the easy version. Split it up into three books. One character gets deleted, one gets transferred into book two, several sequences get shifted so that the character moments aren't all in one place or another, and ta da, instant trilogy.

Two major plot points in the story became a matter of what intelligence agencies call “blowback.” When someone fires a gun, gunpowder residue gets on the shooter's clothing, even though the gun is pointed away from the shooter.

In the world of intelligence, blowback means that an operation has come back to bite you on the ass: either an assassination went wrong and the target wants to return the favor; some dictator dislikes you blowing up his favorite weapons research facility and would like to bury you, that sort of thing.

If I used the blowback as the basis for completely different books, then dang, book one is only over a hundred thousand words. Excellent. Fill in details and character in books two and three, not to mention “previously, in A Pius Man” moments that I can use to pad the book.... or keep the audience up to speed. Either way....

And then, after all this was done, it was time for the hardest part of all. I had to sell it.

After all, it was only one book, being marketed to a publishing industry that was swamped with hundreds of manuscripts per day, manned by people who had to slog through this slush of paper.

How hard could it be?

Don't ask.

How A Pius Man Came to be: An essay in five parts

How A Pius Man came to be: Part 1

I read a book once....

Anyone who knows me is aware that this isn't new.

However, it was written by an author who I had just gotten into. I was a history major, it was a history book written by someone who taught philosophy and wrote novels on occasion. It was on Pope Pius XII and his history during the holocaust—essentially: what did he do, what did he know, and when did he know it.

The interesting thing is that it was less of a researched book and more like a composite collection of primary documents. The major source was from a book written in the 1960s from an Israeli Diplomat to the Vatican, who had also fought in World War II with the British. The second collection of sources were from contemporary newspapers. Most specifically, the New York Times.

Okay. Interesting book.

Two months later, I started a graduate course called the History of Total War. The term paper was supposed to be about the events of a major conflict.... Hmm, let's work on Pius XII. I read one book, time to work on another.

And it was insane.

The primary material all pointed to one, glaring and obvious conclusion. Everything written from the 1940s-1960s pointed in one direction. Testimony from Jews in the camps, in Rome, in positions of power within the global community, the newspapers, the books by journalists, the books by diplomats in Rome, even statements and documents from the Nazi hierarchy pointed one way and one way only.

Then we hit the 1960s, and everything from the previous twenty years was chucked down the memory hole so fast, you would have thought Rod Serling had put it as a twist to a Twilight Zone episode.

Since then, we've had a “debate.” One side believes that Pope Pius XII either: did nothing about the Holocaust; said nothing about the Holocaust; or was actively responsible for the Holocaust. On the other side, you have folks who think Pius XII was a saint, spoke out against the Holocaust, acted against it, was a grand spymaster. In the middle—and there are few in the middle—refer to him as “cautious and prudent.”

Along the way, I came across authors who were not historians. I've come across people who had used proven forgeries from criminals convicted for the forgeries used as “evidence” in this debate. I've even come across historians who had done jail time for publishing their lies. And I've come across some deliberate liars: for example, one idiot said that “X person should have done Y thing”... but cited articles where it was STATED that X did Y, making the author either brain dead or a liar.

One of the most interesting things about this is why I refer to it as a “debate,” in quotes. One side of this conflict doesn't acknowledge the other. One side will take the opposition's statements and theories, vivisect them with a scalpel, the end result looking like shredded wheat, and the second side acts as though there are no alternate theories, interpretations or evidence.

And some of these people are hilarious. Both sides have biases. Cynthia Ozick, for example, is an eighty year old Jew who thought that nuns would kidnap and convert her when she was young, and her opinion hasn't changed much. St. Margherita Marcchione is a Catholic nun. John Cornwell hates his father, his seminary, his country, jumped over the wall of the priesthood in Britain (for which he has my sympathy), and more or less hates Church theology, the entire hierarchy, and possibly every Catholic. James Carroll wants the Catholic church to become the Unitarians. Though there is one lawyer from Missouri with a degree in history—I'm not sure where his bias comes in.

Anyway, by the time I was finished reading both sides, I thought it was fairly clear who was right. Hell, I had enough primary documents to work on that alone. I left motivations alone, because I wasn't going to break out my Ouija board and try to have a séance with a dead pope to ask him what he was feeling or thinking at the time. These are the actual events; to the best of our knowledge, this is what happened, and this is how the people reacted to it AT THE TIME.

For example, Mit Brennender Sorge, a papal encyclical condemning Fascism, released by Pope Pius XI, was unequivocally pointed at the Nazis. How do we know this? Well, check the title. Most encyclicals are written in Latin. This was written in German, not Italian, not Spanish. No one was going to mess with the translation when it hit Germany's borders. It had to be smuggled into the country after it had been banned from the press. When the Hitler Youth beat up parishioners coming out of church, attacked priests, went after Catholic groups, and banned the encyclical all together, one can possibly conclude that the Nazis took it personally.

The average reader is probably looking at the above paragraph and thinking “this guy needed a masters degree for that sort of thing? Duh.” The average reader would be right. No, I wasn't going for high intellectual value. Much of the paper was a plain, simple, narrative telling of events, and many of the conclusions were as “duh” worthy as the above paragraph.

Anyway....

I won't tell you the name of the book that started this whole mess. But after I finished the paper, it was good night and good luck. End of Fall semester.

Then came some of the other books. Novels where the history was so bad, it was painful to read. “What sort of idiot thinks Churchill was a Catholic?”

Or “An entire convent of nuns commit mass murder, and can keep their mouths shut with that secret for sixty years? What?”

And there was The Da Vinci Code. Yes, you know I had to get there. That anyone was getting their history from it was... interesting.

It had been a theory of my family for years that we are better informed by our fiction reading than by our news media.

Tom Clancy had airplanes running into buildings in the early 1990s.

David Hagberg sent his protagonist assassin after Osama bin Laden before anyone considered bombing him.

Dale Brown, in 1990, came up with unmanned aerial drones armed with missiles—twelve years before predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles started wiping out terrorists.

But people were getting their history from fiction? And they were getting it from a man who wanted to be a songwriter when he grew up, took one art history course, and whose major was in literature. Huh.

Did that inspire me on a rampaging crusade? Sadly, no. Didn't care. It was an odd little book, and even ignoring the “history,” I didn't find it entertaining. In fact, I prefer James Rollins as far as historical puzzles go—he gives me some grounding in why he's saying what he's saying. Simply, Dan Brown just wasn't fun for me. My problem, no one else's.

Then I read a completely different novel, also using historical events as a background to the primary action. Premise... nothing new, really. Evil Nazi Catholic church, blah blah, snore. Okay, so what? Big deal.... But, hmm, wait, I know that character's name. It's historical. I know that name too. Hmm....

Skip to the back of the book to read the author's note, which collected the works used to create that novel. I had normally assumed that this author had read one side of the argument, and wrote another evil Catholic church story based on that. But, no, I had read these books. All of them. He had done his homework, and had completely and utterly come to the wrong conclusion, directly contradicting details that both sides agreed on, then saying it was true. I could take it if he had just said “I'm writing fiction, not commenting on a historical debate.” But he took a side and lied about facts that everyone agreed on.

Dominoes fell in my brain. People not only read this crap, they believed this crap. Most readers would have almost no intellectual background to separate the wheat from the chaff (seriously, how many people have history degrees focusing on the religious and cultural activities of Europe in World War II?)

My reaction was somewhere akin to the quote of the eminent physician and research scientist, Doctor Bruce Banner. Hulk smash.

Fine. Simple. Easy. Two could play at this game. If people got their history from entertainment, I would take up the strangest project ever imagined. I would write a thriller that was (a) thrilling, (b) factually accurate about the Catholic Church in the Holocaust.

Now how the HELL was I going to do that?

That's covered in part two.