A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (review)

Like Daniel Goldhagen, I hope to see the Roman Catholic Church "subject itself to a moral reckoning regarding its role in the persecution of the Jews," (p. 289), and to become more "tolerant, publicly self-critical, anti-antisemitic."¹ Although Goldhagen seems grudging in acknowledging them, the Church has made significant moves in that direction. But this book will not advance the process. Its denunciation is so heated, so un-nuanced, so un-cognizant of context, that I fear it could stiffen spines even among Catholics who favor a more responsive, more transparent officialdom, but who will be offended by this seemingly undiscriminating attack.

This volume's near-300 pages (plus forty-nine of endnotes) leave one unsure whether s/he was reading a history, sermon, or polemic. The author's shifting roles as historian, prosecutor, judge, and jury merge in a swell of self-righteousness. Of course there is a place in history for the passionate indictment. Zola's charges in "J'accuse" during the Dreyfus Affair so shocked the establishment that he was forced to flee France; but the assault was 4,000 words—one newspaper page. Jules Isaac's critique of the Christian "teaching of contempt"—a powerful phrase that has been part of the Jewish-Christian encounter since—was also succinct. A superb historian, Isaac rebutted the constituent elements of the "teaching of contempt" point by point. But succinctness is not the strength of Goldhagen's exhaustingly repetitive treatise.

Goldhagen's thesis is straightforward enough: Antisemitism led to the Holocaust. Antisemitism has been integral to the Catholic Church. The Church was the ideational seedbed of Nazi antisemitism but has not properly acknowledged, atoned for, and purged itself of its antisemitic tradition and so bears a moral burden today. That Christian hostility was a (if not the) major source of an antisemitism rooted in the deicide charge, embellished over centuries into a demonology that led Christians to blame Jews for any natural or human calamity, is not a new charge. Catholic and Protestant churches have taken important, if insufficient, steps to acknowledge and repair. Goldhagen adds another charge: that the wartime pope, Pius XII, and his predecessor Pius XI, were "fervent antisemites," and that the leaders of the Church collaborated with the Nazis, sharing their goal of eliminating the Jews. This is a sweeping and simplistic indictment that may satisfy an impulse to hold the Church accountable, but fails to examine the context of the times. Jewish and Catholic scholars alike have criticized it:

Michael Marrus observed that Goldhagen correctly "draws attention to the immediate pre-Holocaust wartime period, when not only the Germans but various collaborationist regimes passed laws defining Jews, marginalizing them in society, stealing their property, and interning many in special camps. Supported by national Catholic hierarchies, this persecution was never condemned in principle by the Vatican." However,

understanding the Church's preference during the 1930s and 1940s for the kind of traditional, authoritarian, and anti-Jewish regimes that predated the French Revolution, is not to show that the pope or the Catholic Church shared Hitler's 'eliminationist' vision. . . The evidence does not show a pope and his minions animated by a blood-curdling antisemitism, as Goldhagen would sometimes have it[;] it suggests a traditionalist, anti-Jewish and blinkered Church leadership that took civic inequality for granted. . . sought to preserve its standing in one country after another. . . , and was concerned above all to maintain its institutional life, administer the sacraments, and survive the war.²

Examining the same issues, Holocaust theologian John T. Pawlikowski, OSM, wrote:

As Papal Nuncio, as Papal Secretary of State, and as Pope, Pius XII supported the notion of a distinctive Catholic social order for most of his life. He shared in Catholicism's strong century-long critique of the liberal social model. While he certainly opposed Nazism...