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

From the internationally renowned author of the best-selling Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust comes this penetrating moral inquiry into the Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust that goes beyond anything previously written on the subject. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen cuts through the historical and moral fog to lay out the full extent of the Catholic Church's involvement in the Holocaust, transforming a narrow discussion fixated on Pope Pius XII into the long-overdue investigation of the Church throughout Europe. He shows that the Church's and the Pope's complicity in the persecution of the Jews goes much deeper than has been previously understood. The Church's leaders were fully aware of the persecution. They did not speak out and urge resistance. Instead, they supported many aspects of it. Some clergy even took part in the mass murder. But Goldhagen goes further. He develops a precise way to assess the Church and its clergy's culpability, which was more extensive and varied than has been supposed. He then devotes the largest part of the book to proposing a new and fuller understanding of restitution, including moral restitution, and shows that the Church has, even according to its own doctrine, an unacknowledged duty of repair. He explores this duty, analyzes the Church's tactics of evasion, and delineates all that the Church must do to redress the harm it inflicted on Jews and to heal itself. Brilliantly researched and reasoned, A Moral Reckoning is a pathbreaking book of profound, and far-reaching, importance. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Harvard scholar Goldhagen, author of the bestselling and controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners, turns to a question left unanswered in his earlier work: to what extent are Catholics and the Catholic Church morally culpable for the Holocaust? As in his earlier book, Goldhagen pulls no punches. In the second paragraph he writes, Christianity is a religion that consecrated... a megatherian hatred of one group of people: the Jews. The story of this hatred, which Goldhagen views as a betrayal of Christianity's own moral principles, has been told many times and, most recently, in the works of Susan Zuccotti and Michael Phayer. In contrast to these accounts, Goldhagen offers not an objective history of the Church's role in the Holocaust but, as the title promises, a moral examination. Goldhagen makes no apology for engaging in a sustained ethical inquiry and rendering judgment. (In fact, much of the book is either a direct or indirect defense of his much-criticized first work.) Goldhagen demands material, political and moral restitution but ends questioning whether the Catholic Church can muster the will to undertake these actions. There is little new information here; a definitive history of this dark chapter must await the opening of the Vatican archives. Readers should not skip the extensive and detailed endnotes, which contain a wealth of fascinating material. 25 b&w photos. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Courting more controversy after Hitler's Willing Executioners, Goldhagen considers the Catholic Church's participation in the Holocaust. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Goldhagen is a confusing writer. In his controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners (1998), he claimed to reject the concept of collective guilt; he then proceeded to collectively brand German culture and Germans as thoroughly tainted with extreme anti-Semitism through his chronic use of sweeping generalizations and maddeningly imprecise language. In his latest work, likely to engender similar controversy, he examines the Catholic Church's responsibility, in terms of its attitudes and actions, for the Holocaust. Again, Goldhagen begins by rejecting collective guilt. However, the Catholic Church is an institution, not a person; so to successfully navigate the minefield of distinguishing between condemning the actions of particular church officials and collectively condemning the entire church requires a refined skill--one that Goldhagen certainly lacks. His assertions regarding the failure of Pope Pius XII to defend Jews is familiar but credible, and his indictments of the blatant anti-Semitism of some prelates in Latvia and Croatia is devastating. Yet his prose is loose and unreflective, and he throws around vague cliches such as vast majority. He seems incapable of distinguishing between mild racial or ethnic prejudice (a near-universal trait) and virulent racial hatred. He claims the anti-Semitism of the Gospels is at the root of Christian anti-Semitism, but he does not distinguish between a clearly anti-Semitic Gospel such as John and the Gospel of Matthew, which is aimed at a Jewish audience and almost certainly written by a Jew. The responsibility of the church and of Christianity in fostering hatred of Jews is an ongoing and deadly serious issue, so expect this contentious book to be asked for in public libraries. Jay Freeman Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved Review [A Moral Reckoning] breaks important new ground. . . . Not a word is wasted in a book that can only be read with profit by all -Spectator An impressive bill of indictments. . . . The strength of Mr. Goldhagen's argument is that it makes strikingly clear the ways in which the Inquisition, the pogroms, and the Holocaust are links in the same dread historical chain. -The New York Times Insisting that it is high time to 'call a spade a spade,' [Goldhagen] has written a post-Holocaust moral reckoning with Christianity, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular, that pulls few punches and guarantees a hard-hitting bout over history, ethics and theology. Goldhagen's book is unlikely to leave its readers indifferent. Its significance, however, depends less on immediate reactions and more on what happens 10, 20 or even 100 years after its appearance. Goldhagen may be helping to create a new Christianity. It will take time to tell. -Los Angeles Times From the Trade Paperback edition. From the Inside Flap From the internationally renowned author of the best-selling HitlerÂ's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust comes this penetrating moral inquiry into the Catholic ChurchÂ's role in the Holocaust that goes beyond anything previously written on the subject. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen cuts through the historical and moral fog to lay out the full extent of the Catholic ChurchÂ's involvement in the Holocaust, transforming a narrow discussion fixated on Pope Pius XII into the long-overdue investigation of the Church throughout Europe. He shows that the ChurchÂ's and the PopeÂ's complicity in the persecution of the Jews goes much deeper than has been previously understood. The ChurchÂ's leaders were fully aware of the persecution. They did not speak out and urge resistance. Instead, they supported many aspects of it. Some clergy even took part in the mass murder. But Goldhagen goes further. He develops a precise way to assess the Church and its clergyÂ's culpability, which was more extensive and varied than has been supposed. He then devotes the largest part of the book to proposing a new and fuller understanding of restitution, including moral restitution, and shows that the Church has, even according to its own doctrine, an unacknowledged duty of repair. He explores this duty, analyzes the ChurchÂ's tactics of evasion, and delineates all that the Church must do to redress the harm it inflicted on Jews and to heal itself. Brilliantly researched and reasoned, A Moral Reckoning is a pathbreaking book of profound, and far-reaching, importance. From the Back Cover [A Moral Reckoning] breaks important new ground. . . . Not a word is wasted in a book that can only be read with profit by all -Spectator An impressive bill of indictments. . . . The strength of Mr. Goldhagen's argument is that it makes strikingly clear the ways in which the Inquisition, the pogroms, and the Holocaust are links in the same dread historical chain. -The New York Times Insisting that it is high time to 'call a spade a spade,' [Goldhagen] has written a post-Holocaust moral reckoning with Christianity, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular, that pulls few punches and guarantees a hard-hitting bout over history, ethics and theology. Goldhagen's book is unlikely to leave its readers indifferent. Its significance, however, depends less on immediate reactions and more on what happens 10, 20 or even 100 years after its appearance. Goldhagen may be helping to create a new Christianity. It will take time to tell. -Los Angeles Times From the Trade Paperback edition. About the Author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, born 1959, grew up in the Boston area. He attended Harvard University where he received a BA in social studies and a masters and doctorate in political science. He subsequently was a political science professor at Harvard for many years, teaching courses on a range of subjects, including European politics, democracy, and genocide. In 1996 he published Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, which led to more prolonged and heated discussion around the world than just about any book in memory. It was an international bestseller that instantly turned Goldhagen into an international public figure, whose views are eagerly sought on both sides of the Atlantic. It won him many accolades, including Germany's Democracy Prize, given only every three years, for his singular contribution to German democracy. The laudatio at the prize ceremony was delivered by perhaps Europe's most esteemed and influential intellectual and philosopher, Jürgen Habermas. Shortly afterwards, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing, and was in the midst of composing a book on genocide in our age (forthcoming with Knopf), when he produced an essay on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust for the New Republic, entitled, What Would Jesus Have Done? In writing it, he realized that some of the most crucial questions concerning the Holocaust and our public life more generally had been barely addressed, and certainly not answered properly, so he decided to temporarily put aside the book on genocide and write A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its unfulfilled Duty of Repair. Hugely anticipated here and in Europe (the Los Angeles Times wrote last spring, Those inclined to handicap this fall's publishing season already are giving long odds that the year's most contoversial nonfiction book will be historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning.), it is a book that the Church and the public will not be able to ignore. It has already induced the leading Cardinal of the German Catholic Church and the Archbishop of Vienna to respond in interviews in their country's major magazines. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 Christianity is a religion of love that teaches its members the highest moral principles for acting well. Love your neighbor. Seek peace. Help those in need. Sympathize with and raise up the oppressed. Do to others as you would have them do to you. Christianity is a religion that consecrated at its core and historically, spread throughout its domain a megatherian hatred of one group of people: the Jews. It libelously deemed them, sometimes in its sacred texts and doctrine, to be Christ-killers, children of the devil, desecrators and defilers of all goodness, responsible for an enormous range of human calamities and suffering. This hatred-Christianity's betrayal of its own essential and good moral principles-led Christians, over the course of almost two millennia, to commit many grave crimes and other injuries against Jews, including mass murder. The best-known and largest of these mass murders is the Holocaust. The question for Christians, especially for the Catholic Church, is, 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 a hatred and harm that, whatever its past, it would no longer endorse? This is the question also of this book. Who did what? Why did they do it? In what ways are they culpable? These are the three big questions of the Holocaust. In Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, I tackled the first two questions, focusing on the ordinary Germans who were the principal perpetrators of the Holocaust and showing that they slaughtered Jews because, moved by antisemitism, they believed that killing them was just, right, and necessary. This was also generally true of those Lithuanians, Poles, Ukrainians, and others who participated in the mass murder. Because the book's purpose was to explain the perpetration of the Holocaust, not to judge the perpetrators, in it I stated openly that it is a work of historical explanation, not of moral evaluation.For this reason the book left untouched the third, equally explosive subject of moral culpability. It also did not take up the principal post-Holocaust questions: Who is responsible for making amends with the victims, and what must they do? In Hitler's Willing Executioners I presented no explicit moral judgments about culpability and no program of repair. It was, of course, obvious that I condemn the Germans' and their helpers' eliminationist persecution and mass murder of the Jews and their persecution and slaughter of other victim groups, including the mentally ill, Roma and Sinti (commonly called Gypsies), homosexuals, Poles, Russians. When the book appeared at the end of March 1996, those, especially in Germany, who abhorred the airing of the obscured facts and unwelcome truths that it contained attacked the book and me personally, including by leveling the fictitious charge that I was explicitly passing the moral judgment of collective guilt.These attacks, many manifestly disreputable, did, however, indicate something fundamental that lay behind the large furor around the book, something that deserves our attention. Hitler's Willing Executioners unwittingly provoked a moral uproar, and a moral subtext continually enveloped-and partly derailed-the extensive written and verbal discussion around the book. The book sought to restore to Germans their humanity, which had heretofore generally been denied them by the standard dehumanizing characterization of them as thoughtless, automatonlike cogs in a machine. It therefore challenged the existing conventional view, and pointedly insisted that Germans be seen and treated for what they were: individual moral agents. It investigated their views of Jews, and of the justness of the eliminationist persecution, including physical annihilation. It brought forth and emphasized critical information that had for long been denied, obscured, and covered up-even though some of the information had for decades been available-that so many of the perpetrators knew that they could avoid killing but chose to torture and to kill their victims, and were often demonstrably gleeful about it. It showed that the conventional notion that the German people in general were terrorized is a myth and that, exceptions notwithstanding, Germans essentially assented to the violent eliminationist persecution of the Jews. All of this, however implicitly, forcefully made unavoidable the previously widely avoided moral question: Who is culpable, in what way, and for what? Germans and people in other countries were suddenly grappling with the problems of moral judgment in a way that many of them never had; human beings had replaced abstract structures and impersonal forces as actors, and they, Germans and others, were shown to have been animated by views that most people today abhor, and, in substantial numbers, to have willfully done terrible, criminal things. The facile moral excuses and rationalizations-that Germans had been terrorized, had not known about the crimes, and so on-that had exculpated so many people and comforted so many more were, however implicitly, exposed as hollow. Moral charges were in the morally charged air. Because of the barrage of false views imputed to me, I wrote a foreword to the German edition of the book (since reprinted in other editions, including the English-language paperbacks) that contained the following: Because the analysis of this book emphasizes that every individual made choices about how to treat Jews, its entire mode of analysis runs contrary to, and provides powerful argument against, any notion of collective guilt. I clarified, if briefly, my views about collective guilt, which I have always emphatically rejected, but the question of how we might judge the perpetrators and other involved people for their actions during this period-the moral issues-I left aside, so in the discussion about my book they remained mainly subterranean. It is true that in answering the first two principal questions of the Holocaust-who did what, and why did they do it?-the book provided the necessary foundation for answering the third question: In what ways are they culpable? It also makes it possible to move to the next stage of investigation-the post-Holocaust stage-which is to ask: Based on the answers to these three principal questions, what social, political, and moral responses and measures should we conclude are desirable or even necessary? That Hitler's Willing Executioners implied and set the stage for such a further investigation was recognized by Jürgen Habermas. In his speech Goldhagen and the Public Use of History Habermas explained: Goldhagen's investigations are tailored to address precisely those questions that have polarized our public and private discussions for the past half century. . . . The truly fundamental question at issue [is]: What does it mean to assign the responsibility for historical crimes retrospectively-if it is just this reckoning that we are now undertaking with the goal of generating an ethical-political process of public self-understanding? Goldhagen provides a new stimulus to a reflection about the proper public use of history. With this book, I take up the moral issues and their social and political implications that remained unaddressed though immanent in the first book, exploring them in a general way while focusing empirically on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust. It is precisely my hope to further generate a general ethical-political process of public understanding and self-understanding, which in the particular instances of the Church and other relevant institutions also includes institutional self-understanding. What Hitler's Willing Executioners did for explaining the contours and causes of the Holocaust, for restoring the human beings to the center of our understanding of its perpetration, this book is intended to do for clarifying moral culpability, for judging the actors, and for thinking about how they and others might best right their wrongs. Lift the Moral Blackout In the vast realm between the sound bite of media talk shows and op-ed pages on the one hand and the technical discourses of philosophical and theological tracts on the other, the serious investigation of issues of morality and judgment is rarely to be found. Sustained, accessible moral argument and evaluation-especially when it is sustained moral judgment-is not in vogue. It is fine to judge maleficent or lascivious politicians in moralizing, snap, and flip ways. It is fine to judge the perpetrators of spectacular domestic and other crimes who provide the daily theater of pathology that spices up the personal and social lives of our voyeuristic societies. These are sport, big-game hunting, where the hunters risk nothing and gain satisfaction and glory. But it seems to be decidedly not fine to discuss seriously in public how to judge the people with whom so many feel affinity, who have or may have committed grievous offenses such as ordinary Germans and the ordinary citizens of other countries during the Holocaust. Serious moral inquiry cuts close to the bone of the investigator. It leads to where our principles, once we establish them, and logic lead us. It is a journey, once embarked upon, over which we have little control, and which sometimes, often, touches down along the way, or even terminates in unpleasant places with disturbing views of others and ourselves, and disquieting conclusions about what others or we must do. Our moral culture is degraded partly by the flipness of our public culture, partly by the abdication of many people in the academy of their obligation to engage moral issues, or engage them in a way that both meets a high standard and is accessible to those who are not professional philosophers. One does not have to be a cultural conservative-I am not-to recognize and criticize all this. Our moral culture is also degraded because in our pluralistic world-a world g...