Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933-1945

American Catholics had long been a crucial voting bloc in the United States, particularly in the Democratic Party. With the nation mired in economic depression and the threat of war looming across the Atlantic, in 1932 Catholics had to weigh, perhaps more seriously than ever before, political allegiance versus religious affiliation. Many chose party over religion, electing Frankiln D. Roosevelt, a Protestant. No stone goes unturned in this volume, which grew out of an international conference in 1998 held at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, New York. From the multiplicity of Catholic responses to the New Deal, through Roosevelt's diplomatic relationship with the Vatican during the Second World War, and on to the response of the United States and the Vatican to the Holocaust, this book expands our understanding of a fascinating and largely unexplored aspect of Roosevelt's presidency. A complex blend of religion and politics, with the added ingredients of economics and war, this diverse, insightful collection promises an intellectual feast for those with an interest in virtually any aspect of American history during the Roosevelt era.

"Taken as a set, these stimulating essays shed new light upon the complex relationships between Franklin Roosevelt and the American Catholic community during the New Deal and between the United States and the Vatican during World War II. The book covers a remarkable range of personalities, issues and controversies and is especially insightful in exploring the multifaceted wartime diplomacy between Pius XII and the Roosevelt administration. These essays avoid polemics and deepen genuine historical understanding of an important subject." - Rev. Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C. Associate Professor of History, University of Notre Dame

"David Woolner and Richard Kurial have put together by far the most

stimulating and readable account of the remarkable relationship between

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Catholic hierarchy. A patrician Protestant

president, FDR, as this book shows in rich and lively detail, appealed to

Catholic Americans to sustain him and defied critical Protestant opinion by

naming the first U.S. ambassador to the Vatican." - William E. Leuchtenburg, Author of The FDR Years and of In the Shadow of FDR: from Harry Truman to George W. Bush

"This collection of papers is a useful volume, providing information, insight, and references and questions for further research for the scholar as well as for the interested reader." - James F. Garneau, The Catholic Historical Review

DAVID B. WOOLNER is Executive Director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and Assistant Professor of History at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, USA. He is the editor of The Second Quebec Conference Revisited: Waging War, Formulating Peace - Canada, Great Britain and the United States in 1944-1945 (Palgrave, 1998).

RICHARD KURIAL is Dean of Arts and Associate Professor of History at the University of Prince Island in Charlottetown, Canada. He is completing Visions of an Arctic Empire: The Diplomatic Wrangle over Wrangel Island.

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