Taking a stand, for the last time.

Last week, I said that A Pius Stand is coming.

It's finally going to be over.



If you've been with this blog since the beginning -- or if you've read "Pius Origins" link on the sidebar -- you know that this started out as a history paper gone amuck. It was a graduate paper in which I examined the truth behind Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.



SPOILERS FOR A PIUS MAN, but, what I learned from my research was simple. Pius XII did more than any one person to save people in Europe during World War II.  More POWs. More Jews. More refugees. Because life was precious, and if they didn't like it, they could just come and get him.



But if you read any media around Pope Pius XII, you get Hitler's Pope. And Susan Zuccotti. And John Cornwell. And Gary Wills and Michael Phayer. The Wiki page on it has become more balanced, but still incomplete. You don't even want to know what it looked like when I started writing.  All of these great big names trying to spin a story I know to be false, and I spent a whole four months looking at primary documents as a grad student in America. They were journalists and historians. They should have known better.



I don't like liars.



The Pius Trilogy started out as a devotion. One that I tried to make readable for everyone. I wanted the opening to be dark and ominous to trap anti-Catholic to reading on, until they are so hip deep in the book that by the time that the revelation is given, the trap springs shut.



END SPOILERS.



The short version is, this was a devotion.  This was to sing the praises of God and His followers. This was a devotion to the truth, and a war on lies. At the same time, I was making it readable for other people. Heck, one of my friends on Facebook became a friend of mine BECAUSE of A Pius Man, and she's Jewish, I can't make it too much more open and readable than that.



The reason my cast was so big was simple -- I wanted to make it clear that the truth was not some subjective moving target. I needed a doubter, a neutral party, two red herrings, confirmation of the mystery ... well, you'll just have to read it to perform that matching column.



But my premise was that of philosopher Peter Kreeft -- this was an ecumenical jihad, a war against one very specific force of darkness, and one that the religions in A Pius Man could get behind. Because the liars I've been fighting since the beginning all have one thing in common.  What is that thing? Read A Pius Legacy.

But then I couldn't get the Catholic Writer's Guild Seal of Approval for APM. Why? Because the book was too violent, and some poor little dear was squeamish. I know this happened because I had officers of the Guild come up to me and suggested that there needed to be changes in the was the Seal of Approval was handled. Devotion to truth? Devotion to God? Who needs it? I've got a gun-toting Catholic! Run!


Then I had one or two of those officers write positive reviews. I'll take it.



The reason I kept going was that some things needed to be said. Some things needed to be put out there and thrown at people's heads until they either take notice or are bludgeoned to death.  Because the truth is not a game, or a weapon, except against lies. Truth is what happened, and maybe we can speculate about reasons, or about the why of things, and sometimes people will leave a diary detailing what and why they did. Then we hope the poor schmuck isn't a schizophrenic or a pathological liar.



And I kept going because I had to. Because writing is all I have. This trilogy has been my life for ten years. And now it's time for me to say goodbye.

Getting published; Situation Normal

So, I got a call from my agent last Wednesday.  He called at 9pm, and we started talking.



At the moment, it looks a  lot like it's Situation Normal.   And, for those who do not know military acronyms, Situation Normal are the first two words of SNAFU.



On the one hand, my agent is having a grand old time selling projects. As long as they're nonfiction.



And, as you might recall, while A Pius Man has historical elements all over the darned place, it's contained within a framework of a thriller. Which puts me in a new acronym: SOL.



However, my agent suggested I try writing something in nonfiction. Maybe even Young Adult nonfiction.  Maybe something in Ethics, or Religion, or something like that. Something that parents would want their kids to read.  And, after all, I have been spending large parts of my time writing religion articles for Examiner.com.



So ... any thoughts?



Seriously, you folks are the most non-partisan observers I know. Do you think I should write more articles on Catholicism, only make it into a non-fiction book? I can call it Snarky Theology, 101.



There's also the wonderful world of IRA songs. I had an entire thesis in graduate school around Irish rebel songs. Between the text and the appendix, that was almost 150 pages. I would only need about 90 more pages to have a full book ready.



And, there's philosophy. Yes, philosophy. I can literally rewrite philosophy for the basic consumption of the general population. I am snarky by nature, after all.



For those of you who think I should be writing a nonfiction book on Pius XII .... no. Because I'd rather write a novel that people would read than be lost in the shuffle of the two dozen books on the subject.



So, what do you think I should try? Irish rebel songs? Snarky theology? Philosophy? Ethics? Something else all together?  Give me a comment with your thoughts on the matter.

How to exposition like crazy

A Pius Man, as has been noted, has a lot of history in it.

Good ways to deliver data to the audience can be seen all over the place.  Bad ways can be seen in The Da Vinci Code; being pedantic lost me a few pages into that book, and I'm a history major, you would have thought pedantic would have been right up my alley.

However, if you want to see a good, clean delivery of data, you might want to see Masks, chapter 12: The Diversion.  Rebekah has a nice, straightforward and Hitchcockian way of delivering data while having a threat going on in the background.

However, welcome to A Pius Man ... based off of a graduate paper I did on the subject.

Which means about a metric ton more information.

Thankfully, a lot of what I've done with it has been a matter of cutting away ....

What do I mean?

It's sort of like having a cliffhanger in the middle of a scene: "Your hero is about to have his head bashed in ...."

Next scene: discussing history and what the latest information means.

Repeat as needed.

Run, as pissed off readers throw novels at you.

And, of course, people CAN skip the history ... if they don't mind missing the major plot points I slip in.

I'm evil and I'm glad.

Muahahaha....

That is all. 

Ten Commandments of Atheism

If you look at the group of professional atheists, who I will generally refer to as the Dawkins-Hitchens crowd, they like to say that they're better than everyone else, because they're moral for no good reason, other than the fact that “it's what's right.” They aren't beholden to any sky daddy, they don't need no stinking afterlife, they're just plain good.

At the other extreme, atheists have been called ethical parasites. They can't come up with their own ethical code, so they leach off of the customs established by religious codification of morality and ethics. They can't come up with a standard of right and wrong, so, therefore, they mindlessly ape those around them and call themselves perfect.

… I'm not with either of them.


On the one hand, I have noticed that the most horrific things of the 20th century happened at the behest of atheist thought. No matter what he said in public, according to his nearest and dearest, Hitler worshiped nothing, and Stalin may have merely worshiped himself … at the end of the day, Communism killed a hundred million people. Some atheists, like Sam Harris, have tried to ignore communism, saying that it's really just another religion. Um, sure Sam, whatever you say...

Mr. Harris also says that he's a Bhuddist, which isn't a religion, but “a philosophy” … Dear sir, I would like to introduce you to a few million people in India who would like to disagree with you on that.

You have Richard Dawkins, the Joseph Goebbels of atheism … which isn't derogatory. His position at Oxford was the “Professor for Public Understanding of Science.” Maybe you prefer Minister of the Propagation of the Faith (The name for what Catholics used to call the Inquisition)? He thinks that you can have morality based off of scientific principles. He also thinks that you can use science to replace all of the poetry, art, music, and everything else religion has inspired.

While Fractals versus the Pieta doesn't seem like a fair fight, let's stick with morality for a moment.

I'm going to look at England for a moment. Not because Hitchens and Dawkins hail from there, but because they have a really fricking thorough census process. When they put down "religion," they have options from Catholic to Jedi Knight.

When you look at their prison statistics, 31.6% of the inmates have "no religion." 15.1% of Britons checked  none, Jedi Knight, agnostic, atheist, or heathen in the 2001 nation survey. However, Christians make up 71.8% of the total population, yet are only 39.1% of the prison population....

Hmm.... I'm a historian, not a math major. So someone else can do that math....

However, does this mean that atheists can't be good? Please, give me a break. I think that atheists can generate their own ethics the same way Aristotle did. And, preferably, they would come up with it in a better fashion, since his science sucked. Well, his physics sucked, his observations on people work fairly well.

The term atheists want is “natural law.” The Catholic Church also has this law in effect, uses it all the time. You can also use natural law to generate about half of the ten commandments … I wouldn't say they boil down to George Carlin's two commandments, but reasonably close. The important part is that, if you want to jettison faith, there's Aristotle, go adopt him. You have a nice, solid philosophy already there. Someone, pick it up!

But, no, they don't. Instead of saying “Let's stick modern science into Aristotle,” the Dawkins-Harris crowd says “Let's chuck out the last few thousand years and start all over.”

Right, because science totally works that way.

Some may notice that I don't count prominent Atheists like Daniel Dennett or Christopher Hitchens. Dennett is Christian-friendly, and comes with none of the arrogance of Harris or Dawkins.

Hitchens … I like Hitchens. He's the kind of snotty British character that is eternal. From what I can tell, he doesn't like anybody. Not even Mother Theresa … when the Church considered putting her on the road to being a Saint, the Devil's Advocate flew Hitchens in are one of the witnesses for the prosecution (long story; he had reasons. I don't agree with them, but I understood them). Hitchens' idea of an atheist morality is that he would like to screw everything that moved, without STDs … I can't fault a man that honest.

I would like someone like my friend Matt to try updating Aristotle, without Christianity. My old friend Colleen would be nice too. It's not hard, nor is it rocket science.

“We observe that in nature that those who screw around a lot tend to become infected with all manner of nasty viruses. This may be nature's way of telling us that it is a good idea to keep it zipped. Or, otherwise, to stay with one person for extended periods of time.” (This is a personal belief. I've met enough people that became intolerably neurotic after they became sexually active, I would abstain from sex until marriage, even if I were an atheist. So would Matt. Committed relationships, for the win).

But, I don't think anyone is going to try adopting natural law anytime soon. Under that rubric, what is “natural” is pretty much anything that sustains or supports life. A plastic heart valve to replace an artery is “natural,” in that it supports a natural function; the heart pumping blood.

If life is considered natural, death is unnatural, including everything that stops life from happening. If something stops a natural function, it is unnatural … This should be where the pro-abortion lobby comes gunning for me. But I've covered that already in my politics blog, so leave me alone.

A modern, atheist natural law would have to address the whole “when does life start” question. I could mention that some studies link abortion to an increase in depression and cancer rates, and say that it implies that abortion is a bad idea, given that the human body doesn't seem to appreciate it. But what do I know? (And, because I even considered mentioning abortion, I expect most people to ignore everything else I say and latch into this one small section with a death grip. Just watch.)

To any atheist who starts a discussion on where life begins, just be careful. Peter Singer and James D. Watson (of Watson and DNA) have both discussed holding off on giving birth certificates to newborns. One wants to wait ten days to run tests for genetic defects, and the other wants to wait a few days, if the parents want to have a retroactive abortion; both for eugenics reasons. Eugenics make me nervous.

If I were an Atheist, how would I run the universe?

While George Carlin's routine is funny, I think I wouldn't keep it as “the two commandments.”
[Read below the break.]

Guest Blog: Murder in the Vatican Author Ann Margaret Lewis.

Welcome to the blog for my novel A Pius Man.



The Good News: No Snarky Theology this week.  After Communion, Lent, Sex, and Evolution, I'm taking a break.



The Even Better News: Today, we have a guest blog from Murder in the Vatican author Ann Margaret Lewis.



Since Murder in the Vatican deals with tales from the Sherlock Holmes canon that involve Holmes working with Leo XIII, I asked if she could blog about history in fiction, religious historical character in fiction, or "something like that".   As you can see, I was very helpful about picking out a topic for her.



The below was the result.



For the record, I have not doctored or altered her text in any way.  In fact, the only "edit" I made was that she insert some hyperlink footnotes to some of her statements.



And, here we go.

With Religious Characters, Honesty is the Best Policy

Ann Margaret Lewis

You can’t help but notice: people of religious faith make popular villains—especially with secular publishers and film studios. From The Three Musketeers and Hunchback of Notre Dame, to DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons. From the Godfather series, to even Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. From Voltaire’s Tartuffe, to TV shows like Showtime’s Borgias and films, comic books and animated films like Happy Feet. The list goes on and on.



So it’s safe to say that making a villain a person of religious conviction isn’t an unusual convention. A great source of conflict and interest is a character who goes against their own supposed principles, or warps them to their own ends. And in any case, to many in the secular world, someone who believes something to the exclusion of all else, someone who isn’t a relativist, has to be close-minded bigot, right?



On the contrary, having principles and sticking by them does not always mean that. Real people are not so cut and dried. What one needs to be, when creating characters and even creating their villains, is honest. Otherwise, the whole convention just gets to be….well…cliché.



When I wrote Murder in the Vatican, I did my best to portray Pope Leo XIII in a way that was, I hope, honest. I would be just as honest in writing about a shameful pope like Alexander VI. But I wasn’t interested in a crummy pope. I’ll leave that for Showtime to cover (yawn). Our secular culture is so hungry to see religious figures as corrupt, they rewrite history to try to turn those who were fine people into villains—as is this case of the pope of this blog, Venerable Pius XII. And not just he, but Benedict XVI as well—if he isn’t a Nazi (here Benedict’s the story in his own words), then he’s a protector of paedophiles (never mind that he was one of the one’s trying to do right in that regard).



So it stands to reason that I decided to do something—well—different—to go against the grain. The religious folks in my book aren’t the villains. While, Pope Leo is a man of his time, he is also a man of the future in thought. He was a son of a noble family, quite different from his predecessor and successor (Pius IX and Piux X) both of whom came from humbler beginnings. Perhaps that is why Leo has not been put on the sainthood track, though his care for the poor and the working class was legendary. But I realized through simple research, all I had to do was write Leo as he was to the best of my ability to have an interesting character.



Sherlock Holmes himself says in the story “A Case of Identity”—“Life is infinitely stranger than the mind of man can invent.” I would suggest to the would-be storytellers of the world that before you go with the tired cliché of a corrupt religious character, try making them three dimensional, tell the truth about them. Give them a point of sympathy, for most humans have one. It is far more satisfying for your readers/viewers (not to mention less bigoted).

About the Author: Ann Margaret Lewis

Born and raised in Waterford, Michigan, Ann Margaret Lewis attended Michigan State University, where she received her Bachelor's degree in English Literature. She began her writing career writing tie-in children’s books and short stories for DC Comics. Before Murder in the Vatican: The Church Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, she published a second edition of her book, Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Alien Species, for Random House.

Ann is a classically trained soprano, and has performed around the New York City area. She has many interests from music to art history, to theology and all forms of literature. She is the President of the Catholic Writers Guild, an international organization for Catholic Writers and the coordinator of the Catholic Writers Conference LIVE. After living in New York City for fifteen years, Ann moved to Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband Joseph Lewis and their son, Raymond. Together they enjoy their life in the heartland.