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BOOK REVIEW Calling to account In his contentious A Moral Reckoning, Daniel Goldhagen demands retribution from the Catholic Church By Jonathan Dorfman, 11/24/2002
A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair Church By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Knopf, 362 pp., $25
His analysis of the Christian roots of anti-Semitism sounds familiar to readers of books by James Carroll, David Kertzer, and Garry Wills. The Jew-hatred in the New Testament is an old story. So, too, is the rant of Martin Luther, who called Jews "deceitful snakes ... Devil's children." It took Vatican II to repudiate the falsehood that the Jews are Christ-killers, a charge that helped to drive nearly 19 centuries of Christian bigotry. And up to the 20th century, the Vatican publications "L'Osservatore romano" and "Civilta cattolica," which reflected papal thinking, propounded not merely anti-Judaism, or disputes stemming from the Jews' refusal to accept Christ, but the modern ideology of anti-Semitism, the very racial doctrines espoused by Hitler. Yet "Moral Reckoning" is creating a literary and theological slugfest because of something different: the moral framework, including "The Catechism of the Catholic Church," by which Goldhagen judges Catholics. Did the church falsely accuse the Jews of killing Christ? Then, taking what the "Catechism" says about the imperative to correct falsehoods, it must renounce the lie, even if it means cutting the offensive material out of the New Testament. Did the popes endorse racial anti-Semitism, which led to the deaths of innocent Jews? Then, according to the "Catechism," the church must perform restitution -- both moral and financial. Above all, writes Goldhagen, the Vatican must tell the truth about its past, and open its archives to historians who can examine its actions. His argument was first set forth last January in a lengthy essay in The New Republic, "What Would Jesus Have Done?" But unlike the article, a work of polemical firepower, Goldhagen's book is repetitious and poorly organized. His writing is often soggy, as in this sentence: "A great deal of attention has been given to the methods and procedures underlying description and, with the social sciences, to those underlying explanation." Still, enough of the essay's bristle survives to ensure that the book will bring a new swirl of controversy. The reaction to the magazine article was blistering. Michael Novak, in The National Review, called it a "taunt," and said The New Republic "has sunk into the swamp of bigotry as low as it could go." Andrew Sullivan, responding in The New Republic, wrote that Goldhagen's views are "offensive" and "deeply dangerous." In "First Things," Ronald Rychlak took 16 pages to defend the church's actions during the Holocaust. Yet what is striking about these critics is that they agree with much of Goldhagen's historical analysis. Novak writes: " Many evils, sufferings, and humiliations were inflicted upon Jews by Catholics down the centuries, for which tears, repentances, and askings of pardon are in order." Sullivan "fervently endorse[s]" much of his account of Christian anti-Semitism, and adds that the proposal to canonize Pius XII is "obscene." Rychlak sidesteps the larger point of Goldhagen's thesis: that Hitler merely had to adapt to his own perverted ends the Jew-hatred so powerfully engrained in the European psyche by two millennia of theological hatred. To Goldhagen, the Jewish refusal to accept Christ is the primeval source of this hatred, a hatred based on the Catholic doctrine that there is one truth -- the belief that Jesus is the Son of God. Thus, in a statement many Catholics will find offensive, he calls upon the church to undergo a "self-transformation" in its fundamental doctrine on the universality of Christ. But Goldhagen discounts two explosive developments that have reduced the anti-Semitic dangers of this doctrine. The first is the discovery from 20th-century biblical criticism of the Jewish roots of Jesus, which, along with the Dead Sea Scrolls, calls into question the historical inevitability of Christianity. The second is Vatican II. Today, 37 years after "Nostra Aetate," the centerpiece of the church's new doctrine toward the Jews, the legitimacy of the Jewish Covenant is no longer questioned: On Good Friday, for instance, Catholics pray no more for the conversion of the "perfidious Jew." To Goldhagen, enraged by provocations such as the attempt to canonize Pius XII, it is not enough. Even if doctrinaire Catholics still want to convert Jews, the threat to Jewish interests is minimal -- not only because of Vatican II, but also the State of Israel, whose borders can prevent another Auschwitz. Two years ago, John Paul II made this very point. In a visit to Jerusalem, the pope slipped these words into the cracks of the Western Wall, the cradle of the Jewish people: "We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant." Tellingly, Goldhagen makes no mention of Karol Wojtyla's prayer at the wall. "Moral Reckoning" is marred by a shrill tone that calls into question the author's judgment. The matter comes to this: To recount the Christian roots of anti-Semitism is one thing; to mount what can be legitimately viewed as a diatribe against post-Vatican II Catholics is quite another. Still, "Moral Reckoning" is a passionate, if flawed, response to the legacy of Christian anti-Semitism, and can be read profitably as the uneasy blend of a scholar's learning and a Jew's rage at the horrors of the Holocaust. Jonathan Dorfman writes frequently about religion and politics.
This story ran on page D8 of the Boston Globe on 11/24/2002.
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he point of this book is stark and unbending: that the Catholic Church provided a "motive for murder" to the Nazis and should be held to a moral reckoning for its sinful behavior. Writes Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners": "What must a religion of love and goodness do to confront its history of hatred and harm, and to perform restitution?"