A Moral Reckoning

The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair

By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

KNOPF; 344 PAGES; $25

The subtitle of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's new book, "A Moral Reckoning," comes directly to the point: "The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair." The Roman Catholic Church played an active role in centuries of anti-Semitism and knew from the start that the Jews were being persecuted then exterminated. The church, under the leadership of Pope Pius XII , did nothing to stop that Germanic frenzy of mass murder and genocide. If anything, according to Goldhagen's overwhelming study, the church encouraged participation in the Holocaust.

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Strong words for a church whose foundations have been rocked in recent years by the desire of women to be ordained priests, single-issue concerns such as abortion, birth control and gay rights, and the horror of its members at the willful and widespread misconduct of priests who sexually abuse altar boys. Now it is being blamed for the Holocaust.

Goldhagen's book is the logical continuation of his earlier "Hitler's Willing Executioners," and it draws on such predecessors as "The Sword of Constantine" and "The Popes Against the Jews." Like these books, Goldhagen's draws a line in the blood and says that the church willingly crossed that line many times in previous centuries and during the Holocaust. These books are not argumentive so much as declamatory. They don't debate the question of the church's responsibility for the Shoah; this simply is a given. If you accept such a premise, you are in for a devastating reading experience. Be assured that this is a painfully thorough investigation; like any ghastly crime, its perpetrators stand bathed in the blood of innocents.

Written with restrained fury, this book carefully sketches the long history of anti-Semitism in the church, based on the false premise that the Jews killed Jesus -- himself a Jew. It runs through the centuries of numerous pogroms, persecutions, enforced exiles, down to the systematic attempt to wipe out the Jewish "race" as part of Hitler's Final Solution. Although the pope had to know the details of the Jewish massacres in Poland, Eastern Europe and Russia -- from the very start -- he failed to speak out to Catholics who were busily exterminating the Jews, Goldhagen maintains.

"What must a religion of love and goodness do to confront its history of hatred and harm?" Goldhagen asks. Pope Pius XII was so partial to the unholy German cause as to vigorously suppress an encyclical, Humanis Generis Unitas, which had been authorized by his predecessor, the equally anti-Semitic Pius XI.

The encyclical would have spoken out against the persecution of any minority, without singling out the Jews. It would have been a watered-down protest but would have carried the weight of the Catholic Church behind it.

But Pius, in his pre-papal role as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, was responsible for the concordat the Vatican struck with Hitler in 1933, shortly after the dictator came to power. Throughout the Holocaust, Goldhagen writes, the only time that church officials spoke out was to protest the persecution of Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Otherwise, they cheerfully released to the Nazis genealogical information regarding who had been a Jew in the past,

which the Gestapo used with murderous efficiency.

Goldhagen attacks academics who ignore that "the Germans killed willingly, freely, and with no force behind their murderous actions." At the end of the war, "a few superhuman monsters -- Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann -- were left in focus. They garnered almost all the attention, diverting our gaze from the tens of millions of Germans who, in some way, willingly supported and embraced Nazis, Hitler, and the country's other leaders."

These ordinary Germans, who made this regime and its crimes possible were, after the war, "miraculously transubstantiated overnight into beings who had been terrorized and coerced, and were unknowing. . . . Germans were divested of moral responsibility, pre-emptively exculpated because little or nothing was left to investigate morally."

These and "other political and intellectual distortions" left the study of the Holocaust containing "virtually nothing about the central actors, the perpetrators of the mass murders." The only ones to investigate them extensively were "the German judges who, after the war, sat in judgment" of them. Again and again, the courts judged the perpetrators "guilty for having killed Jews. They judged the perpetrators guilty, according to the most stringent rules of evidence, for having killed because of their 'base motive' of 'race hatred.' "

The message of this book is chillingly simple. The overwhelming majority of Germans hated the Jews, just as their parents had hated the Jews, because these were the people who put Christ to death. They had been told so by their church, by their spiritual leaders and teachers for thousands of years. The chill is hardened by the fact that Goldhagen claims no German ever suffered for refusing to kill or to harm a Jew. Numerous individuals rebelled, as did a few German churchmen, and none was harmed.

By contrast, the Danish people and the Danish Lutheran Church actively spoke out against anti-Semitism, and the citizens went out of their way to hide and to safeguard Danish Jews from the German occupying troops -- without ever suffering reprisals, air raids or slaughters. Jews were saved by clergy and citizenry; they were hidden, disguised as altar boys and smuggled into neutral Sweden. In this, the Danes were joined by some priests in Italy and a few other European countries. In Slovakia and Croatia, however, Catholic priests and church leaders openly sided with the Nazis and even participated in the mass murders. German priests accompanied the killer SS Einsatzgruppen into Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Russia, hearing confessions and dispensing the sacraments to the Catholic killers.

"A Moral Reckoning" is not just the story of how a church betrayed its members by encouraging them to the ultimate in savagery. It is an indictment of the church, its leaders and its pope for supporting a Holocaust that it had long provoked. Yet today the Roman Catholic Church is on the threshold of declaring Pope Pius XII to be a saint. This book will not make that sainthood easier to digest for believer and non-Christian alike.

Goldhagen's restraint is eloquent, even when he portrays that great Catholic order of priests, the Society of Jesus, a.k.a. the Jesuits, as more anti-Semitic than the Nazis, requiring that candidates for the order be free from any Jewish blood for at least five generations. However, "in 1923 the Jesuits further 'moderated' their racism by reducing the blood purity requirement to four generations." Thus, to become a member of the Society of Jesus, one could not be related to Christ or any of his apostles or early followers.

This is not a book for the ambivalent or the casually curious. It is a thundering indictment that makes no apologies and takes no prisoners.