[Preface: One one thinks of the Catholic Church, their most immediate association is is the Vatican and Italy. Therefore every unwarranted attack on Catholicism is an attack on Italy, even thouugh while many Italians are becoming more secular, they still hold dear their Catholic Traditions.]

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen again assumes his role as a hyperbolic propagandist. His latest "A Moral Reckoning" is considered "one-dimensional", a "moral hammer", "polemic blistering", "slapdash scholarship", "overblown moralizing", and serious errors evoking lawsuits leading the book to historical oblivion.

Goldhagen (as a member of "Team Smear", including other members,  Susan Zuccotti, David Kertzer, and John Cornwall) does great injustice toward the attempts of Jewish and Christian harmony.
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Thanks to H-Italy@ H-Net.MSU.Edu, Paul Arpaia, Editor

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair.

Reviewed by Mark Edward Ruff, Concordia University, Portland.
Published by H-Catholic (February, 2004) [Excerpted]

Six years ago, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a young Harvard political scientist, ignited a historical controversy with his book "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust". He asserted that "ordinary Germans" eagerly took part in a national crusade to eliminate Jews because of widespread anti-Semitism, not peer pressure, coercion, or ignorance....numerous critics assailed his one-dimensional explanation for the Holocaust and accused him of reviving old-fashioned allegations of collective guilt.

In an effort to rebut these critics, Goldhagen has since reached for bigger fish. In his latest book,"A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair", he takes his moral hammer to the Catholic church. ...His polemic triggered blistering reviews and a legal action in Germany, the result of slapdash scholarship and overblown moralizing. ...Errors led the archdiocese of Munich to seek an injunction against the German publisher, a subsidiary of Bertelsmann, with a possible fine of up to $250,000. Now, little more than one year after its publication, A Moral Reckoning seems destined for theological and historical oblivion.

...Why should such a provocative work so signally fail in virtually every one of its claims? In no small measure, its manner of genesis virtually guaranteed its implosion. The editor of The New Republic asked Goldhagen to review a number of recent books on the relationship between Pius XII and the Holocaust. As he read the nearly dozen books on the subject, most by authors such as Susan Zuccotti, Michael Phayer, Garry Wills, James Carroll, David Kertzer, and John Cornwall, who have written critically on the church's conduct during this era, he began to sculpt a book-length manuscript on his central question, "What must a religion of love and goodness do to confront its history of hatred and harm, and to perform restitution?"

[RAA: Is the Catholic Church the ONLY Religion of Love and Goodness. If the Jewish Religion and Protestantism are also, are they too liable for Restitution?]

What should have remained an extended essay became an unwieldy 300-page tome, one replete with redundancies, turgid prose, definitions that are self-referential, and passages that are out of sequence.... More damaging is the fact that Goldhagen brought no original research to this book. He took instead the contentions of the above-mentioned authors at face value and expressed them in even more strident form. In so doing, he fashioned a manuscript that superficially spans two millennia.

He appears utterly ignorant of questions of biblical exegesis and problems of translation. To quote his central assertion: "The Christian Bible's message has remained the same since its text was codified. And its message is unmistakable: The Jews killed the son of God who is God. All Jews are guilty of this crime....  For their rejection of Jesus, they are to be punished. Jews, the willful spurners of Jesus, cannot gain salvation, cannot go to heaven. And their religion, which cannot bring them to salvation, has been made invalid, superseded, replaced by Christianity" (p. 267)."...

Goldhagen's formulation: "Matthew tells of John the Baptist dubbing the Jews, called Pharisees and Sadducees, 'you brood of vipers'" (p. 263). He ignores the fact that Jewish life in the first century was sectarian: John was an apocalyptic prophet, attacking members of other Jewish sects. To characterize the Pharisees and the Sadducees as "the Jews" completely overlooks the points that Christianity began as a Jewish movement and that first-century Judaism was pluralistic....

Goldhagen dismisses any distinction between anti-Semitism, as an ethnic and racial notion, and anti-Judaism, as an inter-Jewish dialogue taking place between the emerging Christian communities and Pharisaic Judaism. (He continually places the word "anti-Judaism" in quotation marks.)

He similarly distorts another passage from Matthew...contradicted by other commentators...

Goldhagen's attempts to link the anti-Semitic foundational biblical texts to the anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages to the complicity in the Holocaust invariably fall by the wayside. Instead of painting 2,000 years of history under one brush, he should instead have posed a more differentiated question: why did a religiously based anti-Semitism emerge at certain times and certain places, and less so at other times and locations?

Even concerning the twentieth century, he conflates the behavior of the Catholic church in all European nations, East and West, never acknowledging that nationality may have been a more important factor than religion in shaping the conduct of churchmen. Goldhagen cites a number of horrific expressions of anti-Semitism by prominent churchmen in Croatia, Poland, and Slovakia, and on these points he is correct--there were a number of churchmen who were anti-Semitic.

But he glosses over the efforts of the Dutch clergy to oppose Nazi policies of annihilation as well as Angelo Roncalli's (later Pope John XXIII) rescue of nearly 25,000 Jews. Why were these leading clergy not rabidly anti-Semitic, if their foundational texts were as anti-Semitic as Goldhagen insists? Why was German Protestantism far more important in shaping Nazism than Catholicism?

Goldhagen himself is even aware of this, pointing out that Streicher underscored the influence of Luther on his own vitriolic anti-Semitism (p. 163). Explaining such positions would seem to be Goldhagen's understanding of the church not primarily as a religious, but as an authoritarian political, institution.

According to the author: "The Church has a state, vast material holdings, formal diplomacy; it makes treaties of cooperation and has more than one billion adherents. Its doctrine, like the ideology of a state, is political, and it has consequences who are not Catholic. Historically, the Church has been animated by an analogue of aggressive nationalism, preaching exclusivity, a conquering imperialism of the soul, and disdain and hatred of others, particularly Jews" (p. 96).

Similarly, "[b]ut to the professional experts on politics, it is incontestable that the Catholic Church is a political institution and should be analyzed and treated as such." This, again, is a half-truth, for the church's influence stemmed not from its economic power or territorial status but rather from its adherents.

In light of this understanding of the church, it would be interesting to note how Goldhagen would respond to Stalin's famous quip, asking how many divisions the church could muster. Yet Goldhagen wants to have his cake and eat it, too. In other places, he judges the church as a moral institution, holding it to an even tougher standard, in light of its claim to be "unfailingly holy" and servant of God.

Other aspects of this book evoke an almost surreal reaction. Laudatory comments on the back of this book's cover jacket refer to Hitler's Willing Executioners, not his current subject.... Perhaps most bizarre is Goldhagen's insistence that the church should make restitution for its moral bankruptcy during the years of National Socialist rule by excising all anti-Semitic passages from the New Testament.

It should "[d]eclare these falsehoods false and sinful, and remove them from the text" (p. 274). Would other Christian denominations follow suit? The Catholic Church should call for a "public convocation of all Christian churches in a collective effort to resolve the problem of the Christian Bible's anti-Semitism" (pp. 275-276)

This flight into fantasy only underscores the hollowness of what often seems to be a badly written piece of pulp (non)fiction. One is left with the impression that Goldhagen objectifies the Catholic church (and Christianity) in much the same manner in which he accuses the church of doing so to Jews. This is a shame, for this powerful subject--deserves much more careful and nuanced scrutiny.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 362 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $25.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-375-41434-7; $16.00 (paper), ISBN 0-375-71417-0.