A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair [Hardcover]

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 29, 2002

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (October 29, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375414347
• ISBN-13: 978-0375414343
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #825,151 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

When in 1996 I published Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, I was transformed unexpectedly, and almost instantly, into the author of a #1 international bestseller of a book published in 15 languages, and the unwitting progenitor of an impassioned international "Goldhagen Debate," which has since become a fixed part of the western, and especially the German, cultural landscape. The book, about the perpetrators of the Holocaust and ordinary Germans' role in it, told buried truths about the tens upon tens of thousands who carried out Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jews: these perpetrators were willing executioners, willing because they were antisemites who believed that exterminating Jews was right and necessary. Survivors of the Holocaust -- the people who learned of the perpetrators' beliefs firsthand from the perpetrators themselves -- heartily applauded the book, as did younger Germans and people elsewhere who hankered for these tabooed subjects to be finally discussed openly, even as some others clung to various untenable positions with the effect of denying the humanity of the killers and of exonerating them. Immediately, upon its publication, its contributions were recognized. The New York Times wrote: "Masterly...One of those rare new works that merit the appellation landmark." The Philadelphia Inquirer judged it: "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity." It was honored as a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and Time named it one of the two best non-fiction books of the year. In country after country, similar views and admiration greeted Hitler's Willing Executioners -- as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany conveyed with its summation of the effect of the publication of Hitler's Willing Executioners, which it endorsed as "The most spectacular nonfiction success of this year." With time, as a flood of scholarly studies have come out which have substantiated Hitler's Willing Executioners' conclusions, more and more who have read the book's vast amount of new research and evidence and its challenging perspectives have come to appreciate and accept what the Holocaust's survivors had known all along. And so, a front page article in the New York Times on 15 October 2010 announced that the revolution in understanding that Hitler's Willing Executioners produced about the Holocaust has unequivocally become, just fifteen years after the book's publication, the consensus view in Germany. The establishment German Historical Museum in Berlin has opened a major exhibition that confirms and builds upon the conclusions of Hitler's Willing Executioners: "This exhibition is about Hitler and the Germans -- meaning the social and political and individual processes by which much of the German people became enablers, colluders, co-criminals in the Holocaust," said the authoritative Constanze Stelzenmüller, until recently the director of the German Marshall Fund Berlin Office. "That this was so is now a mainstream view, rejected only by a small minority of very elderly and deluded people, or the German extreme right-wing fringe. But it took us a while to get there."

Thus I became a public intellectual, the startling winner of Germany's prestigious Democracy Prize (there have been only six since it was established) awarded only when someone earns it (the previous winner, seven years earlier, was the East Germany democracy movement), with a debate forever a suffix to my name. I have always been determined to write and speak forthrightly about important topics-topics about which many want to hear, even if many others desperately do not want the truth to be heard. Whether it is about Nazism and the Holocaust, powerful institutions' moral duties, or the dangers of Political Islam, I have never held my tongue out of fear of what people, including powerful people, might say.

My most recent project, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, has issued both in a book (which is being published already in eight languages) and a feature length documentary (the first ever to focus on the phenomenon of genocide itself) that had its national broadcast premiere on PBS on April 14. Worse Than War tells people what I have learned about genocides and genocide in my three decades of studying them, explaining not just how to understand their many complex facets, but also how to stop the killing. As Hitler's Willing Executioners did for the Holocaust, Worse Than War poses a powerful challenge to deeply entrenched myths about why genocides happen. It fundamentally reconfigures our understanding of genocide as a global phenomenon and reconceptualizes it as one aspect of a more fundamental form of politics that can be called "eliminationism." I am gratified that Worse Than War, more than a decade in the writing, has already garnered enormous praise, with words such as "magisterial," "pathbreaking," "masterful," "monumental," and "wholly convincing" gracing the reviews.

I hope that you choose to have a look at it. Whether or not you end up agreeing with every conclusion and proposal in Worse Than War, the book and the film offer a plethora of new information and perspectives not just on genocide or eliminationism but on critical aspects of humanity and modernity, society and politics. I hope to rouse your intellect and conscience, even if I at the same time challenge your views about the most foundational matters of politics, society, and human nature.

For more information, please visit http://goldhagen.com/.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Writing poor books about the Holocaust, November 10, 2002

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

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

The interesting thing about this book is that although Daniel Joseph Goldhagen is correct that the Catholic Church's conduct during the Holocaust was grossly inadequate, and that it should make restitution, this is still a mediocre book. For a start this book is largely based on secondary sources; works such as John Cornwell, James Carroll, Michael Phayer, Gary Wills, David Kertzer and Susan Zuccotti. These books are a mixed bag (Zuccotti is excellent, Wills' polemic on the papacy is stimulating, Cornwell is mediocre), but there is little reason to read Goldhagen than the best of these works. (For a start, compare Goldhagen's unforgiving description of the Vatican's response to Mussolini's anti-semitic laws, and then read Zuccotti's critical but more nuanced description.)

But there are other problems. Goldhagen was not trained as a historian, but as a political scientist, and this book shows certain weakness. He is abusive to other scholars, especially those such as Christopher Browning and H.U. Wehler who pointed out the many flaws in Goldhagen's previous book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners." There is a certain moral crudeness about Goldhagen's stance. Most scholars on the subject do not have to endlessly repeat and demonstrate their horror of anti-semitism the way Goldhagen does; they do not assume that their readers are moral idiots. He makes statements such as "In the long and sorry history of hatred that has shamed and demeaned the peoples of the Western world during the last two thousand years, more people have been deeply prejudiced against the Jews than against any other group." Is this true, and how would one go about proving it? At one point, after delineating the Church's contemptous attitude towards Jews, Goldhagen confronts those who ask if the Church was always so poisonous, why was there not a Holocaust so much earlier. Goldhagen responds by pompously saying that a successful genocide requires both a willing leadership and a willing population. Oh. But why didn't these two arise under Catholic rule? Goldhagen also engages in polisci jargon, and we are subjected to his attempts to shoehorn moral judgements into polisci quadrants. There is a certain sloppiness in his thinking. At one point he states "The Church, more than probably any other major non-Nazi institution in Europe, taught people a hate-filled, dehumanizing, and eliminationist view of Jews--that they were a guilt-laden people, a view that led many of its adherents to suport and often willingly to participate in the Jews' persecution." But later he suggests that one reason why many Italian Jews were resecued is because Italy had a low level of anti-semitism. But why would that be the case, since Italy is the home of the Vatican, while most Germans were Protestants, (and Protestants were much more likely to vote Nazi before 1933 than Catholics)?

The problem with this book, as with Goldhagen's previous one, is his simplistic view of ideology. The fact that a group has a particular ideological tenent, and that the people that group wishes to influence act in a way that is in accordance with that tenent does not show that ideology caused the act. After all the Church supports love and peace, and has condemned prostitution and fornication, and for the past 17 centuries its success on these grounds has been rather limited. That until Vatican II the Church held all Jews collectively guilty for the death of Jesus is, on both moral and historical grounds, false and poisonous. But what does this mean about actual Catholic relations with actual Jews? "Between the idea/And the reality.../Falls the Shadow," and Goldhagen does not illuminate it. "Virtually all Catholic clergy and a large percentage of their parishioners held the Jews to be guilty of grave crimes and offenses. This conclusion seems incontestable." A gross exaggeration in my view, which can only be justified by assuming that everyone who holds an ideology holds all its tenents and takes them to their logical conclusion.

This is a pity because occasionally Goldhagen does make an intelligent point. The Catholic Church has denounced Communism since 1864, it excommunicated all the world's Communists in 1949, and it frequently denounced it as a "satanic scourge" and "fatal plague." It would be impossible to say that Anti-semitism received this sort of denunciation (or abuse). Goldhagen does point out that if choices weren't easy for the Vatican, they weren't easy for many people that we condemn as collaborators. German bishops could criticize the Nazis on euthanasia, its pagan tendencies and its violations of the Concordat. But it approved the invasion of Russia, many influential Vatican and German Catholics assisted the Nazi's escape after 1945, while Protestant and Catholic chaplains seem to have done almost nothing to impress upon their charges the utter foulness of the crimes they were committing. But otherwise Goldhagen's reach exceeds his grasp, and that's not what's scholarship for.

48 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An Immoral Reckoning, November 28, 2002

By 

Catherine A. McClarey (Dwight, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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

Religous bigotry is never pretty. Let us not mince words: Goldhagen hates the Catholic Church and this book is a weapon to attack it. In attempting to blame the Holocaust on the Church, Goldhagen is perverting history to the same extent as anti-semites do when blaming the Jewish faith for Communism because some prominent former Jews, Trotsky and Karl Marx for example, were at the forefront of the Communist movement. Such an argument is laughable and so is Goldhagen's. Why is the anti-semite libel restricted to the fever swamps of extremist groups while Goldhagen's screed is sold by a mainstream publisher? Because anti-Catholicism is the cherished hate of many of the elites in our society and because this tome is a useful weapon in the ongoing culture war in the U.S. Sloppily researched and blatant in its distortion of events and documents this book has nothing useful to say about the historical record, but is of value as an artifact of current political controversies and the use of "scholarship" to stir up religous hatred for political ends.

10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars See the Jews as Pope John Paul II did: "Christians' elder brothers", January 22, 2010

By 

Alter Wiener (Hillsboro OR U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (Paperback)

Daniel Goldhagen asserts that the Catholic Church bears responsibility for fostering anti-Semitism. He is especially critical of Pope XII and the high echelon in the Catholic establishment that did nothing to prevent or even to protest the Nazis slaughter of millions of Jews. He substantiates his assertion by authentic documents that many priests and bishops actively cooperated with the Nazis. Although I had been personally affected by anti-Semitism, I have not been aware the extent of any Church's collaboration with the Nazis. Seeing in A MORAL RECKONING, one photograph of Roman Catholic nuns marching in a parade together with Nazi troops and another picture of Roman Catholic priests giving the Nazi salute is shocking to me; it is defamatory to God. Goldhagen argues that the two millenniums of anti-Semitism stemmed from anti- Judaism theology. He brings to the surface episodes of persecutions, inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms, and ghettoization initiated by Christians against Jews that had eventually led to Hitler's "Final Solution" to the so-called "Jewish problem" Goldhagen quotes Christopher Budd, a Catholic Bishop of England (page 236) who wrote: "The death of Jesus and the death of millions of Jews this century are tragically and inextricably linked. For centuries Jews have been pilloried, persecuted and blamed for the death of Jesus....this was fertile soil in which the evil of Nazism took root with catastrophic effect."

As a kid growing up in a small town in Poland, I was quite often harassed by Catholic kids. At school and outside the school, the epithet "Jesus killer" still rings in my ears. I did not understand at the age of eight and I do not fathom it at the age of eighty four why do I have to be blamed and suffer for something attributed to my ancestors' putative sins, thousand of years ago. Why tarring an entire people with the same brush of hatred for eternity. Why was I hated before I was born and why have I been hated since. Catholics in Poland disliked me because of the religion I was born into. The Germans hated me because of my race, my bodily constitution. It is just prejudice at its worst. Furthermore, Christianity started by the Jew, Jesus. It is indeed ironic for Christians to hate Jews - the very people that Jesus came from. The Jews did not kill Jesus; the Romans did. It is senseless as Sebastian Haffner, a German opponent of the Nazis wrote in 1939: "the Nazis assertions about the Jews are such plain nonsense that one demeans oneself when one discuss them even if only to refute them" (p.142). The same applies to everybody. Individuals should be judged on his or her merits or character and not on the race, religion, ethnicity or color of the skin. Hatred is self destructive. Stereotyping or sweeping guilt by association is essentially unfair and illogical. We can all sing together with different voices in a very successful choir.

There are two races of people in this world: the race of the decent people and the race of the indecent people. They are present in all groups of society. If every person on this planet shares the same beating rhythm of the heart, the same red color of the blood streaming in the veins, then the commonality of the human race transcends all the differences among man and peoples. Anthropology has proven that peoples and races are fundamentally very much alike. We have to focus on the common denominator that characterizes all of us humans rather on our differences. Fascination with ourselves prevents us from seeing the beauty of others. Pluralism may be dealt with by valuing each other and discovering each other. There is a certain genius in all of us. We are like diamonds. Every stone is different. The quality and flaws keep changing. The hardest stone becomes a shimmering diamond if cut and shaped correctly. If a person breaks out of all the barriers imposed upon him he will thrive and carry others with him. Bloodshed among nations,religions, races, ethnic groups etc. will end only when everyone sees one another as equal humans. Each person has equal worth. Reconciliation rather than polarization among ethnic and sectarian groups is the solution. Whatever our religious and ethnic differences are, we are one human family with a common destiny.

Konrad Adenauer, the first German Chancellor after WWII, wrote in 1946 "The German people as well as the bishops and clergy bear great guilt for the events in the concentration camps." However, I am not seeking vengeance against those who kept me incarcerated in concentration camps during the Holocaust. I do not ask penance from Christians for anti-Semitic acts committed in the past. All I am asking for is to be seen as member of the human race, equal to you and everybody is equal to me. We are all God's children who are entitled to have a peaceful and dignified life. My heroine, till the last day of my life, has been a German woman who had risked her life to help me. She was a righteous person as there were some other compassionate Germans. Goldhagen lists German clergymen who did speak up against anti- Semitism, against Nazism. Some priests risked their own life to save Jewish lives. Goldhagen has been unfairly accused as anti-Catholic for writing A MORAL RECKONING. Goldhagen is not anti-Catholic. His diligent research, for which he deserves our appreciation, led him to conclude that certain doctrines, theology, liturgy, or practices by the Catholic Church sprouted hatred for Jews. Ergo, Christians do have a moral responsibility to admit of its past anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism and see the Jews as Pope John Paul II did: "Christians' elder brothers"