A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair is a 2003 book by the political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, previously the author of Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996). Goldhagen examines the Roman Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust and offers a review of scholarship in English addressing what he argues is antisemitism throughout the history of the Church, which he claims contributed substantially to the persecution of the Jews during World War II.
Goldhagen recommends several significant steps that might be taken by the Church to make reparation for its alleged role. A Moral Reckoning received mixed reviews and was the subject of considerable controversy regarding allegations of inaccuracies and anti-Catholic bigotry.[1][2]
Background
Goldhagen, the son of a Holocaust survivor, first engaged in serious academic discourse concerning the Holocaust following a lecture he attended as a student at Harvard University in 1983.[3] He gained prominence in the field with the publication of 1996's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which met acclaim and controversy, particularly in Germany.[4] The Journal for German and International Politics awarded him the Democracy Prize in 1997. In awarding the prize for the first time since 1990, the Journal wrote "Because of the penetrating quality and the moral power of his presentation, Daniel Goldhagen has greatly stirred the consciousness of the German public."[5]
Invited by The New Republic to review several books concerning Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust,[6] Goldhagen was inspired to write a review of the literature concerning the question of the "culture of antisemitism" in the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II and its impact on the Holocaust.[7] His impressions first appeared as a lengthy essay in the January 21, 2002, edition of The New Republic entitled "What Would Jesus Have Done? Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust" before their publication by Knopf in extended book form as A Moral Reckoning.[8]
Overview
In The New York Times, book reviewer Geoffrey Wheatcroft said that A Moral Reckoning (2003) presents an indictment of the Roman Catholic Church comparable to Goldhagen's indictment of Germany in Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), saying: "both as an international institution under the leadership of Pope Pius XII (1939–58), and at national levels in many European countries, the Church was deeply implicated in the appalling genocide.... Just as Germans had been carefully taught to hate the Jews, to the point that they could readily torment and kill them, so had Catholics";[9] that author Goldhagen "sees a deep vein of Jew-hatred ingrained within Catholic tradition; and he does not think that there was any difference of kind, between that old religious Jew-hatred and the murderous racial antisemitism of the twentieth century".[9]
In 2003, in The Atlantic magazine, interviewer Jennie Rothenberg Gritz quoted Goldhagen saying that "moral issues" are the "principal substance" of A Moral Reckoning,[6] that his concern was a "consideration of culpability and repair".[6] In a letter to the editor of The New York Times, Goldhagen said that "the book's real content" is in "setting forth general principles for moral repair from which I derive concrete proposals for the Church".[10]Donald Dietrich, author of God and Humanity in Auschwitz: Jewish-Christian Relations and Sanctioned Murder, and a Boston College professor of Theology specializing in Holocaust studies, said that Goldhagen "asks the Catholic Church a question: 'What must a religion of love and goodness do to confront its history of hatred and harm, to make amends with its victims, and to right itself so that it is no longer the source of hatred and harm that, whatever its past, it would no longer endorse?' He has attempted to analyze the moral culpability of Catholics and their leaders, to judge the actors, and to discern how today's Catholics can make material, political and moral restitution."[7]
Goldhagen's book suggests that the Church owes financial reparation and support to Jews and the State of Israel and should change its doctrine and the accepted Biblical canon to excise statements he labels as antisemitic and to indicate that "The Jews' way to God is as legitimate as the Christian way."[1] Failing this, the author proposes disclaimers in every ChristianBible to annotate antisemitic passages and acknowledge them as having led to injury against Jews.[1]
Legal controversy
Apostolic Nuncio to Germany Cesare Orsenigo with Adolf Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop
In October 2002, the district court of Munich required the publisher to withdraw the book or correct the copies,[4] but in spite of the disclosure of the error in Germany, the book was released in English by Knopf with the error intact.[12] A representative of the archdiocese said with regards to the mislabeled photograph that "The implication is that Cardinal Faulhaber was an associate of the Nazis. When one writes about these things, one should be more precise about the truth."[4]
Goldhagen, who acknowledged that the photo wrongly identified the figure and location, described the lawsuit as a crude diversionary tactic to displace focus from the real issues.[4] Goldhagen stated that the photograph was misidentified by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, from which the picture was obtained.[13] Religious commentator and former priest Paul Collins characterized the mislabeling of the photograph as inexcusable,[14] while The New York Times reported that most historians agreed that "a single mislabeled photo in a 346-page book is a minor error."[4]
Critical reception
Although A Moral Reckoning was favorably reviewed in The Spectator,[15]Kirkus Reviews,[16] and the San Francisco Chronicle,[17] and given a generally favorable overview ahead of an interview in The Atlantic,[6] it was also subject to substantial criticism, even among some of those reviewers who found aspects of the work praiseworthy. The International Social Science Review, which described the book as a "seminal work" and a "valuable introduction to and synthesis of the literature on church and state during the Holocaust", also indicated that the message of the book is "diluted by stylistic problems".[18]The New York Times reviewer Geoffrey Wheatcroft praised Goldhagen's assembly of "an impressive body of evidence" but criticized his repetitiveness, his "misinterpreting the record" and his use of it to promote a particular view, which Wheatcroft deems appropriate for an advocate but reprehensible in a historian.[9] Dietrich, whose review lauded Goldhagen for asking "many of the proper seminal questions", mirrored Wheatcroft's concerns about repetitiveness, misunderstandings and polemics, specifically stating: "The careful reader must closely read the footnotes since in many cases he contextually and theologically nuances his book's claims only there."[7]
Pope Pius XI
John Cornwell, author of Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (1999), praised Daniel Goldhagen's "excellent job in exposing the propagandistichagiography of recent defenders of Pius XII, especially their tendency to confuse diplomatic eulogy with historical fact", but said that Goldhagen errs in identifying a key Vatican figure as an antisemite, a misrepresentation he thinks "can only provide ammunition for the Pius XII lobby".[19][20] The journalist Gritz noted that "[Goldhagen] does not cushion his criticisms of the Church in diplomatic language", and that "even philosophy professor John K. Roth, who favorably reviewed A Moral Reckoning in the Los Angeles Times, said that the adjectives "unpretentious ... indecisive ... moderate ... patient" do not come to mind when reading Goldhagen.[6] Another book review in The New York Times said that A Moral Reckoning is an "impressive and disturbing bill of indictment against" the Roman Catholic Church, yet its imbalanced perspective results in "turning history into a kind of cudgel".[21]
In summer of 2002, before its publication, Ronald Rychlak, author of Hitler, the War, and the Pope, decried it as factually incorrect, releasing a lengthy catalog of corrections to Goldhagen's essay "What Would Jesus Have Done?"[8] After the book's publication, Rychlak published a review in the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, again pointing out factual errors and criticizing the book's tone and conclusions.[22] Following the book's publication, Rabbi Dalin and Joseph Bottum, later co-authors along with William Doino of The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII,[23] in separate articles for The Weekly Standard denounced it as failing "to meet even the minimum standards of scholarship" and "filled with factual errors".[11][24][25] In his review, Paul Collins indicated that the purpose of the book was undermined by poor editing, incoherence and redundancy.[14] Mark Riebling of National Review, who described himself as an admirer of Goldhagen's first book, called A Moral Reckoning "a 352-page exercise in intellectual bad manners" and "a spree of intellectual wilding".[1]
In reply to the charge of historical inaccuracy, Daniel Goldhagen said that the "central contours" of A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (2002) are accurate, because the book's title and first page communicate its purpose of moral analysis, not historical analysis.[6] He stated that he has invited to no avail European Church representatives to present their own historical account in discussing morality and reparation.[6]
Opponents labelled Goldhagen as an "anti-Catholic", as promoting an anti-Catholic agenda. Bottum wrote that its "errors of fact combine to create a set of historical theses about the Nazis and the Catholic Church so tendentious that not even Pius XII's most determined belittlers have dared to assert them. And, in Goldhagen's final chapters, the bad historical theses unite to form a complete anti-Catholicism the likes of which we haven't seen since the elderly H. G. Wells decided Catholicism was the root of all evil".[24] In the Catholic News Service, Eugene J. Fisher, the Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that Goldhagen avoided original research, as "such methodological and factual considerations would definitely get in the way of the demonic portrait of the Church that he seeks to paint".[26]
In the book The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, Philip Jenkins said that A Moral Reckoning, along with anti-Catholic conspiracy theories and other "anti-Church historical polemic", belongs to the pseudohistory category of books about anti-Catholic "mythic history", historical manipulation, and national demonization, such as the Black Legend about Spain, and said that publishers publish such books because they sell many copies, not because they mean to "destroy or calumniate Catholicism".[27] Furthermore, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights president William A. Donohue said that Daniel Goldhagen "hasn't a clue about Catholicism", and that he "separates himself" from other critics of Pope Pius XII "by demanding that the Catholic Church implode: he wants the Church to refigure its teachings, liturgy, and practices to such an extent that no one would recognize a trace of Catholicism in this new construction. That is why Goldhagen is not simply against Pope Pius XII: he is an inveterate anti-Catholic bigot."[28] Moreover, Rabbi Dalin accused Goldhagen of engaging in a "misuse of the Holocaust to advance [his] ... anti-Catholic agenda".[11]
↑ In 2004, Cornwell said about his work Hitler's Pope, that subsequent evidence and debate had convinced him that Pius XII had such "little scope of action" as to render it "impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war". In that review, Cornwell said that with respect to Pius XII, "We have no way of entering his conscience." The Economist (December 9, 2004) "The papacy". (sample) economist.com. Accessed March 6, 2008. Cornwell, "Review: History: A Moral Reckoning by Daniel Johan Goldhagen".
↑ See Doino, William; Joseph Bottum and David G. Dalin (November 28, 2004). The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII. Lexington Books. ISBN0-7391-0906-5.
↑ Fisher, Eugene J. "Review of A Moral Reckoning"Archived October 12, 2007, at the Wayback Machine Written for Catholic News Service. Hosted with permission by Ethical Perspectives, Journal of the European Ethics Network. Accessed January 4, 2008.
Feldkamp, Michael F., Goldhagens unwillige Kirche. Alte und neue Fälschungen über Kirche und Papst während der NS-Herrschaft, München 2003, ISBN3-7892-8127-1
Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli with his papal name being Pope Pius XII, was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 2 March 1939 until his death in October 1958. Before his election to the papacy, he served as secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, papal nuncio to Germany, and Cardinal Secretary of State, in which capacity he worked to conclude treaties with various European and Latin American nations, including the Reichskonkordat treaty with the German Reich.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust: Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide, and The Devil That Never Dies (2013), in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent antisemitism.
Hitler's Pope is a book published in 1999 by the British journalist and author John Cornwell that examines the actions of Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII, before and during the Nazi era, and explores the charge that he assisted in the legitimization of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany, through the pursuit of a Reichskonkordat in 1933. The book is critical of Pius' conduct during the Second World War, arguing that he did not do enough, or speak out enough, against the Holocaust. Cornwell argues that Pius's entire career as the nuncio to Germany, Cardinal Secretary of State, and Pope, was characterized by a desire to increase and centralize the power of the Papacy, and that he subordinated opposition to the Nazis to that goal. He further argues that Pius was antisemitic and that this stance prevented him from caring about the European Jews.
The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis is a 2005 book by American historian and Rabbi David G. Dalin. It was published by Regnery Publishing.
Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy is a book by Susan Zuccotti which examines the role of the Catholic Church in providing aid to Jews in Italy during the Holocaust, and is critical of the actions of the papacy in this regard.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen, in which he argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German political culture which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argues that eliminationist antisemitism was the cornerstone of German national identity, was unique to Germany, and because of it ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. Goldhagen asserts that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes rooted in religion and was later secularized.
Michael F. Feldkamp is a German historian and journalist.
Jules-Géraud Saliège was a French Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Toulouse from 1928 until his death, and was a significant figure in Catholic resistance to Nazism in France. He was elevated to the cardinalate in 1946 by Pope Pius XII. For his efforts to protect Jews during the Nazi Holocaust he was recognised as Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Ronald J. Rychlak is an American lawyer, jurist, author and political commentator. He is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law and is holder of the Jamie L. Whitten Chair in Law and Government. He is known for his published works, career as an attorney, and writings on the role of Pope Pius XII in World War II.
We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah is a document published in 1998 by the Catholic Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, under the authority of Pope John Paul II. In this document the Vatican condemned Nazi genocide and called for repentance from Catholics who had failed to intercede to stop it. It urges Catholics to repent "of past errors and infidelities" and "renew the awareness of the Hebrew roots of their faith" while distinguishing between the Church's "anti-Judaism" as religious teaching and the murderous antisemitism of Nazi Germany which it described as having "roots outside Christianity."
The relations between Pope Pius XII and Judaism have long been controversial, especially those questions that surround Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. Other issues involve Pius's Jewish friendships and his attitude towards the new state of Israel.
The papacy of Pius XII began on 2 March 1939 and continued to 9 October 1958, covering the period of the Second World War and the Holocaust, during which millions of Jews were murdered by Adolf Hitler's Germany. Before becoming pope, Cardinal Pacelli served as a Vatican diplomat in Germany and as Vatican Secretary of State under Pius XI. His role during the Nazi period has been closely scrutinised and criticised. His supporters argue that Pius employed diplomacy to aid the victims of the Nazis during the war and, through directing his Church to provide discreet aid to Jews and others, saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Pius maintained links to the German Resistance, and shared intelligence with the Allies. His strongest public condemnation of genocide was, however, considered inadequate by the Allied Powers, while the Nazis viewed him as an Allied sympathizer who had dishonoured his policy of Vatican neutrality.
Three Popes and the Jews is a 1967 book by Pinchas Lapide, a former Israeli Consul to Milan, who at the time of publication was a deputy editor in the Israeli Prime Minister's press office. The "three popes" are Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), Pope John XXIII (1958-1963), and Pope Paul VI (1963-1978).
Pope Pius XII's 1942 Christmas address was a speech delivered by Pope Pius XII over Vatican Radio on Christmas 1942. It is notable for its denunciation of the extermination of people on the basis of race, and followed the commencement of the Nazi Final Solution program to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The significance of the denunciation is a matter of scholarly debate.
The conversion of Jews to Catholicism during the Holocaust is one of the most controversial aspects of the record of Pope Pius XII during The Holocaust.
Pietro Tacchi Venturi was a Jesuit priest and historian who served as the unofficial liaison between Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader of Italy from 1922 to 1943, and Popes Pius XI and Pius XII. He was also one of the architects of the 1929 Lateran Treaty, which ended the "Roman Question", and recognized the sovereignty of Vatican City, which made it an actor of international relations. A claimed attempt to assassinate Venturi with a paper knife, one year before the treaty's completion, made headlines around the world. Venturi had begun the process of reconciliation by convincing Mussolini to donate the valuable library of the Palazzo Chigi to the Vatican.
Yad Vashem, the state of Israel's official Holocaust memorial, has generally been critical of Pope Pius XII, the pope during The Holocaust. For decades, Pius XII has been nominated unsuccessfully for recognition as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor Yad Vashem confers on non-Jews who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust altruistically and at risk to their own lives.
Seat 12, also known as Operation Seat 12, was an alleged disinformation campaign of communist propaganda during the Cold War to discredit the moral authority of the Vatican because of its outspoken anticommunism. The existence of the plot was alleged in 2007 by Ion Mihai Pacepa, a general who headed the Romanian secret service before defecting to the West in 1978.
During the Holocaust, the Catholic Church played a role in the rescue of hundreds of thousands of Jews from being murdered by the Nazis. Members of the Church, through lobbying of Axis officials, provision of false documents, and the hiding of people in monasteries, convents, schools, among families and the institutions of the Vatican itself, saved hundreds of thousands of Jews. The Israeli diplomat and historian Pinchas Lapide estimated the figure at between 700,000 and 860,000, although the figure is contested.
The Pius War refer to debates over the legacy of Pope Pius XII and his actions during the Holocaust. The phrase was first coined in a 2004 book of the same name.
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