According to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the Catholic Church has some explaining to do.
The author, who recently released his second controversial book about complicity during the Holocaust, took aim at the Catholic Church in a lecture Monday night at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. The church’s long history of virulent anti-Semitism, he said, played a central enabling role during the Nazi era, leading directly to the expulsion, persecution and deaths of millions of Jews.
And now the church must own up.
Goldhagen, a scholar at Harvard’s Center for European Studies, made waves with the 1996 release of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” which exposed the culpability of the German masses during the Holocaust. The bestseller stirred great controversy, especially in Germany.
Now he is evoking similar distress among Catholics with his new book, “A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair.” The book offers an unflinching indictment of the Vatican and its wartime offenses against the Jews.
Looking more GQ than National Review with his jet-black garb and stylishly spiky hair, Goldhagen drove home several points during his presentation — first and foremost, the themes of judgment and repair. According to the former Harvard professor (now full-time writer), it is the duty of victims and civilization in general to hold accountable those individuals and institutions that commit crimes against humanity, and to impel them to make restitution.
With that in mind, Goldhagen laid out his abbreviated case against the church, not only for its complicity in the Holocaust, but for its millennia-long campaign to vilify and harm Jews. With the false claim that Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus, the Catholic Church has always viewed the Jews as a “guilt-laden people,” he said.
This mentality inspired the pogroms, the blood libels, the Crusades and, in more recent times, the anti-Semitic vitriol that poisoned several generations of Christians, he said. And when the theologically based anti-Semitism of the church collided with the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazis, the perfect storm of the Holocaust was born.
From the Concordat (a notorious mid-1930s pact between Hitler and the church), to the collaboration between Nazis and Catholic clergy in parts of Europe, to the unconscionable silence of Pope Pius XII, the church behaved abominably during the war, he contends.
Yet, as Goldhagen pointed out repeatedly, the church has avoided taking responsibility for its past, except in the most ambiguous and self-exculpatory manner. That, he said, must change.
In his book, Goldhagen puts forth a set of principles that could serve as a template for repair. These include an acknowledgment of the full truth, efforts to combat injurious deeds and steps to ensure that such crimes can never be repeated. On all three fronts, the Catholic Church has failed miserably, he maintains.
The church, he said, has never opened its archives to the scrutiny of researchers and has instead launched a decades-long whitewash of its wartime behavior.
Moreover, the church has dragged its feet in amending some of its educational and liturgical standards, which he says perpetuate anti-Semitic lies.
Most fundamentally, Goldhagen called on the church, indeed on all Christianity, to re-examine its holiest texts. Quoting several inflammatory passages from the Gospels, Goldhagen went on to say, “The church must confront the anti-Semitism of the Christian Bible. It must stop spreading notions that invite antipathy. If the Bible said the same things about blacks or Americans, what would we say about it then?”
Conceding that the beliefs of any religion must be respected, Goldhagen left it to others to deal with that problem. “We cannot mandate what the church does with its Bible,” he said. “Change must come from the Catholic Church and Christians themselves.”
Goldhagen applauded the few symbolic steps taken by Pope John Paul II, and said he believes the pope is sincere in his sorrow over the Holocaust. But he faulted the pope for not doing enough.
His stance did not go unchallenged. One audience member asked why Goldhagen “picks on Catholics” and not other complicit institutions.
He replied: “Just because others are guilty does not absolve one of blame.”