A Moral Reckoning (2002)

A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair is a 2003 book by the political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, previously the author of Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996). Goldhagen examines the Roman Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust and offers a review of scholarship in English addressing what he argues is antisemitism throughout the history of the Church, which he claims contributed substantially to the persecution of the Jews during World War II.

Goldhagen recommends several significant steps that might be taken by the Church to make reparation for its alleged role. A Moral Reckoning received mixed reviews and was the subject of considerable controversy regarding allegations of inaccuracies and anti-Catholic bigotry.

Background

Goldhagen, the son of a Holocaust survivor, first engaged in serious academic discourse concerning the Holocaust following a lecture he attended as a student at Harvard University in 1983. He gained prominence in the field with the publication of 1996's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which met acclaim and controversy, particularly in Germany. The Journal for German and International Politics awarded him the Democracy Prize in 1997. In awarding the prize for the first time since 1990, the Journal wrote "Because of the penetrating quality and the moral power of his presentation, Daniel Goldhagen has greatly stirred the consciousness of the German public."

Invited by The New Republic to review several books concerning Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, Goldhagen was inspired to write a review of the literature concerning the question of the "culture of antisemitism" in the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II and its impact on the Holocaust. His impressions first appeared as a lengthy essay in the January 21, 2002, edition of The New Republic entitled "What Would Jesus Have Done? Pope Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust" before their publication by Knopf in extended book form as A Moral Reckoning.

Overview

In The New York Times, book reviewer Geoffrey Wheatcroft said that A Moral Reckoning (2003) presents an indictment of the Roman Catholic Church comparable to Goldhagen's indictment of Germany in Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), saying: "both as an international institution under the leadership of Pope Pius XII (1939–58), and at national levels in many European countries, the Church was deeply implicated in the appalling genocide.... 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"; that author Goldhagen "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 antisemitism of the twentieth century".

In 2003, in The Atlantic magazine, interviewer Jennie Rothenberg Gritz quoted Goldhagen saying that "moral issues" are the "principal substance" of A Moral Reckoning, that his concern was a "consideration of culpability and repair". In a letter to the editor of The New York Times, Goldhagen said that "the book's real content" is in "setting forth general principles for moral repair from which I derive concrete proposals for the Church". Donald Dietrich, author of God and Humanity in Auschwitz: Jewish-Christian Relations and Sanctioned Murder, and a Boston College professor of Theology specializing in Holocaust studies, said that Goldhagen "asks the Catholic Church a question: 'What must a religion of love and goodness do to confront its history of hatred and harm, to make amends with its victims, and to right itself so that it is no longer the source of hatred and harm that, whatever its past, it would no longer endorse?' He has attempted to analyze the moral culpability of Catholics and their leaders, to judge the actors, and to discern how today's Catholics can make material, political and moral restitution."

Goldhagen's book suggests that the Church owes financial reparation and support to Jews and the State of Israel and should change its doctrine and the accepted Biblical canon to excise statements he labels as antisemitic and to indicate that "The Jews' way to God is as legitimate as the Christian way." Failing this, the author proposes disclaimers in every Christian Bible to annotate antisemitic passages and acknowledge them as having led to injury against Jews.

Legal controversy

In 2002, the book's German publisher—Siedler Verlag, a sister company of Random House—was sued by the archdiocese of Munich as a result of the misidentification of a photograph, falsely asserting the presence of Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, whom Rabbi David G. Dalin calls "a famous opponent of the Nazis", at a Nazi rally. The picture actually depicted Apostolic Nuncio to Germany Cesare Orsenigo participating in a May Day labor parade in Munich—not a Nazi rally in Berlin.

In October 2002, the district court of Munich required the publisher to withdraw the book or correct the copies, but in spite of the disclosure of the error in Germany, the book was released in English by Knopf with the error intact. A representative of the archdiocese said with regards to the mislabeled photograph that "The implication is that Cardinal Faulhaber was an associate of the Nazis. When one writes about these things, one should be more precise about the truth."

Goldhagen, who acknowledged that the photo wrongly identified the figure and location, described the lawsuit as a crude diversionary tactic to displace focus from the real issues. Goldhagen stated that the photograph was misidentified by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, from which the picture was obtained. Religious commentator and former priest Paul Collins characterized the mislabeling of the photograph as inexcusable, while The New York Times reported that most historians agreed that "a single mislabeled photo in a 346-page book is a minor error."