Not surprisingly, Bishop Lefebvre also expressed support for Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front and a convicted Holocaust denier. Monsieur Le Pen shared that distinction with Richard Williamson, one of four SSPX priests whom Lefebvre elevated to the rank of bishop in 1988 in defiance of a direct order from Pope John Paul II. Williamson, who is British, routinely referred to Jews as “the enemies of Christ” whose goal was world domination. While serving as rector of the SSPX’s North American seminary in Winona, Minnesota, Williamson declared: “There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies.” He was expelled from the Society of St. Pius X in 2012, but not for his anti-Semitic views. The SSPX called his removal a “painful decision.”

By the time of his death in 1991, Bishop Lefebvre was a doctrinal outcast and something of an embarrassment. But during the 1930s, as storm clouds gathered over Europe’s Jews, a prelate who espoused views similar to Lefebvre’s would have found himself largely in the Catholic mainstream. The Church’s preference for monarchies and right-wing dictators over socialists or even liberal democrats has been painstakingly documented, along with the appalling anti-Semitism of many of the Vatican’s leading spokesmen and policymakers. While few Catholic clerics supported the physical elimination of Jews from European society, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano and the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica cheered laws—in Hungary, for example—that purged Jews from professions such as the law, medicine, banking, and journalism. When Benito Mussolini enacted similar restrictions in Italy in 1938, the men of the Vatican could muster scarcely a word of protest. “The terrible truth,” wrote historian Susan Zuccotti in her remarkable study of the Holocaust in Italy, Under His Very Windows, “was that they wanted the Jews put in their place.”

That was certainly true of Bishop Alois Hudal, rector of the Austrian-German church in Rome. It was Bishop Hudal, not my fictitious Father Schiller, who wrote a viciously anti-Semitic book in 1936 that tried to reconcile Catholicism and National Socialism. In the copy he sent to Adolf Hitler, Hudal penned an adulatory inscription: “To the architect of German greatness.”

An Austrian national who was said to be obsessed with Jews, Bishop Hudal moved about Rome throughout the war in a chauffeured car that flew the flag of Greater Germany. Two and a half years after the Allied victory, he hosted a Christmas party attended by hundreds of Nazi war criminals living in Rome under his protection. With Hudal’s help, many would find sanctuary in South America. Adolf Eichmann received assistance from Bishop Hudal, as did Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. All with the knowledge and tacit support of Pope Pius XII, who believed such monsters to be a valuable asset in the global fight against Soviet communism.

Pius’s critics and apologists have engaged in a decades-long quarrel over his failure to explicitly condemn the Holocaust and warn Europe’s Jews about the death camps. But his indefensible support of wanted Nazi mass murderers is perhaps the clearest evidence of his innate hostility toward Jews. Pius opposed the Nuremberg Trials, opposed the creation of a Jewish state, and opposed postwar attempts to reconcile Christianity with the faith from which it had sprung. He excommunicated every Communist on earth in 1949 but never took a similar step against members of the Nazi Party or the murderous SS. Nor did he ever explicitly express remorse over the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

The process of Jewish-Christian reconciliation would therefore have to wait until Pius’s death in 1958. His successor, Pope John XXIII, took extraordinary steps to protect Jews during World War II while serving as papal nuncio in Istanbul, including issuing them lifesaving false passports. He was old when the Ring of the Fisherman was placed on his finger, and sadly his reign was brief. Not long before his death in 1963, he was asked whether there was anything to be done about the devastating portrayal of Pius XII in Rolf Hochhuth’s searing play The Deputy. “Do against it?” the incredulous pope reportedly replied. “What does one do against the truth?”

The culmination of John XXIII’s bid to repair relations between Catholics and Jews in the wake of the Holocaust was the milestone declaration of the Second Vatican Council known as Nostra Aetate. Opposed by many Church conservatives, it declared that Jews were not collectively responsible for the death of Jesus or eternally cursed by God. The great historical tragedy is that such a statement had to be issued in the first place. But for nearly two thousand years, the Church taught that Jews as a people were guilty of deicide, the very murder of God. “The blood of Jesus,” wrote Origen, “falls not only on the Jews of that time, but on all generations of Jews up to the end of the world.” Pope Innocent III wholeheartedly agreed. “Their words—‘May his blood be on us and our children’—have brought inherited guilt upon the entire nation, which follows them as a curse where they live and work, when they are born and when they die.” Were such words spoken today, they would rightly be branded as hate speech.

The ancient Christian charge of deicide is universally regarded by scholars as the foundation of anti-Semitism. And yet the Second Vatican Council, when issuing its historic repudiation, could not resist including the following seventeen words: “True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ.” But what source did the bishops use to justify such an unequivocal declaration about an event that took place in a remote corner of the Roman Empire nearly two thousand years earlier? The answer, of course, was that they relied on the accounts of Jesus’ death contained in the four Gospels of the New Testament—the very source of the vicious slander they were at long last disavowing.

Needless to say, the Second Vatican Council did not suggest excising the inflammatory passages from the Christian canon. But Nostra Aetate nevertheless set in motion a scholarly reappraisal of the canonical Gospels that is reflected in the pages of The Order. Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy will no doubt take issue with my description of who the evangelists were and how their Gospels came to be written. Most biblical scholars would not.

No original draft of any of the four canonical Gospels survives, only fragments of later copies. It is widely accepted by scholars that none of the Gospels, with the possible exception of Luke, were written by the men for whom they are named. It was the Apostolic Father Papias of Hierapolis who in the second century provided the earliest extant account of their authorship. And it was Irenaeus, the heresy-hunting leader of the early Church in France, who declared that only four of the many gospels then in circulation were authentic. “And this is obviously true,” he wrote, “because there are four corners of the universe and there are four principal winds.” Paul Johnson, in his monumental history of Christianity, asserted that Irenaeus “knew no more about the origins of the Gospels than we do; rather less, in fact.”

Johnson went on to describe the Gospels as “literary documents” that bear evidence of later tampering, editing, rewriting, and interpolation and backdating of theological concepts. Bart D. Ehrman, the distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, contends they are riddled with “discrepancies, embellishments, made-up stories, and historical problems” that mean “they cannot be taken at face value as giving us historically accurate accounts of what really happened.” The Gospels’ depiction of Jesus’ arrest and execution, says Ehrman, “must be taken with a pound of salt.”