A MORAL RECKONING

The Role of the Catholic Church

in the Holocaust and

Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair.

By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.

Illustrated. 362 pp. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

Six years ago, a sharp controversy erupted around ''Hitler's Willing Executioners,'' by the young Harvard scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. His book argued that the Germans who carried out the great murder of the European Jews were not handpicked or hardened soldiers, but ordinary men, typical of a German population that had a much clearer idea of the fate of the Jews than it was willing to acknowledge in the postwar years. This wasn't a novel claim: ''Ordinary Men'' was indeed the title of a book on the same subject by the historian Christopher Browning, one that Goldhagen drew on (although he also tended to disparage it).

Goldhagen maintained that the Germans had been conditioned by a long national tradition of ''eliminationist'' anti-Semitism. At some level of consciousness, many Germans did not merely dislike and despise Jews, as all too many people in all too many countries did, but thought them subhuman or evil and thus worthy of extermination. Only in Germany did a rabidly anti-Semitic regime come to power, as he put it, ''bent upon turning anti-Semitic fantasy into state-organized genocidal slaughter.''

In ''A Moral Reckoning,'' Goldhagen now turns from nation to religion, and indicts the Roman Catholic Church in comparable terms. Both as an international institution under the leadership of Pope Pius XII, and at national levels in many European countries, the church was deeply implicated in the appalling genocide. Nor was it merely a question of complicity. 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, Goldhagen believes. He does not accept the idea that National Socialism was more pagan than Christian in its inspiration; he 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 anti-Semitism of the 20th century.

As in his previous book, Goldhagen has assembled an impressive body of evidence, not all of it new: some was adduced recently in ''Hitler's Pope,'' by John Cornwell, which is especially eloquent as the work of a Catholic who had hoped to exonerate Pius XII. And once more, Goldhagen makes his case more as prosecutor than historian, with an insistent adversarial tone. Even sympathetic critics of ''Hitler's Willing Executioners'' noted that he played up evidence that suited him and skirted evidence that didn't, as an advocate is entitled and even expected to do, but for which an historian might be reprehended.

In ''A Moral Reckoning'' that strident tone seems all the more emphatic because the book is so remarkably repetitious. The same points are made, the same arguments are advanced, more or less the same sentences are reiterated, over and over again. Or even the same phrases: within the space of two quite short paragraphs Goldhagen describes Civiltà Cattolica as ''this authoritative Vatican journal . . . this authoritative Vatican journal . . . this authoritative journal of the Vatican . . . the Vatican's journal,'' by which point the attentive reader may have gathered that Civiltà Cattolica was an authoritative Vatican journal. Nor is this merely a stylistic flaw from which editing could have saved Goldhagen: the repetitiveness matches the general manner of the book. Hedoesn't construct a true argument, or even give a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, so much as follow the old debater's maxim of: tell 'em what you're going to say, say it, tell 'em what you've said.

All of which is a pity, since the subject is profoundly important, Goldhagen is a diligent researcher and much of what he says needs saying. In that blackest night of human history, not too many people behaved heroically or even decently. And yet by any standards the behavior of the Catholic Church was deeply dismaying.

The pope's record was bad enough; he pointedly refused to condemn the murder of the Jews, about which he was well informed, until he tried to cover his tracks when Germany had plainly lost the war. Worse was the conduct of Catholic priests and prelates in many countries where the Catholic Church -- or very many of its clergy and laity -- warmly embraced the New Order. In Croatia, massacres of Serbs and Jews were led by Franciscans (of all gentle names), and Jews were sent to their deaths in Slovakia by a Nazi client state ruled by a Roman Catholic prelate, Monsignor Josef Tiso, subsequently executed as a war criminal.

It would be hard to argue with Goldhagen if he had simply recounted this history, or even if he had stopped after claiming that moral restitution by the Catholic Church is still needed. But he goes on, and in the process makes what a lawyer would call a number of bad points.

Certainly there is much evidence of Christian racial -- as opposed to religious -- Jew-hatred over many centuries. But there is also contrary evidence. The church accepted Jewish converts, even as priests and nuns, and some of them were killed in the Shoah. In 19th-century Italy there were scandalous episodes like the Edgardo Mortara affair, in which a Jewish boy was secretly baptized and kidnapped by the clergy. But Catholic Italy was not the Third Reich: Hitler didn't baptize Jewish children, he murdered them.