Goldhagen at it again.

A Moral Reckoning The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 344 pp.

This book's title promises a moral treatise, but in fact its structure and tone are forensic rather than philosophical. It begins with an investigation of the facts ("Clarifying the Conduct"), proceeds to the question of guilt ("Judging the Culpability"), and then considers the appropriate punishment ("Repairing the Harm"). As was already apparent in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's best-selling work of 1996, Hitler's Willing Executioners, his characteristic mode is passionately prosecutorial.

Since much of this review will be critical of Goldhagen's methods and conclusions, let me begin by staking out some common ground.

First, Goldhagen is right to insist that the role of the church in the Holocaust must be carefully examined. This enterprise is especially important for Catholics, but it should be open to everyone. Participants should never be dismissed because of their affiliations--it is wrong to suggest, as some defenders of the church have done, that scholars' politics or religion make their criticisms illegitimate, just as it is wrong to dismiss scholars sympathetic to the church as "apologists."

Second, we must recognize Christianity's role in, and responsibility for, the long and tragic history of European anti-Semitism. It is especially important to analyze the continuities between Christian hostility to Jews and modern racial anti-Semitism--an issue to which I will return later on.

Third, we must recognize the church's many errors of commission and omission during World War II. Although I do not share Goldhagen's assessment of the pope's motives, I agree that Pius XII did not sufficiently protest against Nazism's crimes, and especially its crimes against Jews. Many Catholics, including some leaders of the church, condoned and even participated in these crimes. After the war, a few prominent churchmen, some with close ties to the Vatican, helped major war criminals to escape justice.

Finally, we must acknowledge that the church is still struggling to come to terms with this history. My view of "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," the official 1998 statement by the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, is more positive than Goldhagen's. The document is not "self-exculpatory," but it is disappointingly thin and inconsistent--no more than a first step in what must be a long and difficult process of investigation and understanding.

Is A Moral Reckoning a positive contribution to this process? Let me explain why I think the answer to that question must be No.

The first thing to note is that the book rests on a fairly small group of recent publications. Anyone who has read James Carroll, John Cornwell, Garry Wills, Susan Zuccotti, David Kertzer, and Michael Phayer will find no new material in A Moral Reckoning. Moreover, Goldhagen's synthesis of this scholarship gives no indication that while these books have some things in common, they are of very different quality; he uses them uncritically and indiscriminately. Many important works on the church, and especially on Catholicism in Nazi Germany, which might have deepened or qualified his analysis, are missing. Nor has Goldhagen consulted any of the many widely available printed documents on his subject. One has the strong impression that he knew the answers before he started and then took what he needed to confirm them.

Goldhagen often adopts the most doubtful of his sources' interpretations. Consider, for instance, his assertion that Pius XII was an anti-Semite, which rests on John Cornwell's quotation from a report to the Vatican, sent by the future pope from Munich in April 1919, which describes Communist revolutionaries as Jews and includes physical descriptions of them that come close to anti-Semitic stereotypes. Two questions about this piece of evidence immediately arise: First, shouldn't we wonder why, if anti-Semitism was as important to Pacelli and to the church as Goldhagen claims, that these few lines should be, as he admits, the pope's "only relatively extensive [?] utterance about Jews"? Pacelli's critics make a good deal about his silence on the Holocaust; isn't this silence at least worth noting? Second, are these remarks, ugly and disagreeable as they may be, sufficient basis to label Pacelli an anti-Semite and to compare him with the rabid editor of Der Sturmer, Julius Streicher? I really don't think so. A good deal is at stake here because, if the pope was not an anti-Semite, then Goldhagen must consider other motives for the inaction that he (and I) find reprehensible.

Because he has an uncertain grasp of the way the church is organized, Goldhagen persistently overestimates the pope's power and independence. He does not recognize the Vatican's vulnerability, first to the Italian Fascists, then to Nazi occupation authorities. It is not historically legitimate to compare the Vatican's position with that of Denmark; however much we may wish that others had emulated the Danes' courageous resistance to German racial policies, this resistance was possible because of Denmark's uniquely privileged status in Nazi Europe (Denmark, for instance, held free elections in 1943). The Nazis, who were determined to annihilate the Poles, wanted to assimilate the Danes. More important, Goldhagen underestimates the profoundly anti-Catholic policies adopted by the Nazis. It is nonsense to argue that because the church prevailed in its efforts to keep crucifixes in Bavarian classrooms, it could have defended the Jews without risk. I share Goldhagen's view that the German church's leaders should have stood up for Nazism's victims, but we must realize that the cost of doing so would have been high.

There is a good reason why Goldhagen underplays the Nazis' hostility toward the church: to acknowledge Nazism's profound hostility to Christianity would undermine his argument that the two are closely related and especially that Christians' hostility to Jews differed in degree, but not in kind from Nazi anti-Semitism. In contrast to "We Remember," which argues that modern anti-Semitism "had its roots outside of Christianity," Goldhagen believes that the church's hatred of the Jews was "the ideational seedbed from which the ideas grew that animated the perpetrators of the Holocaust." This is an extraordinarily complex question that cannot be resolved with facile botanical images of roots and seedbeds.

Goldhagen bases his account on Kertzer's important book, The Popes against the Jews (2001); he adds nothing to Kertzer's analysis beyond citing some references to the Nazis' association of the Jews with the devil. It seems clear to me that centuries of Christian hostility to Jews contributed to the racial ideology of Nazism. Still, two questions remain: First, how much did it contribute, and second, how central was this hostility to the theological and institutional life of the church? Kertzer usefully poses these questions, but his answers are based on rather slender evidence. One thing is certain: the Nazis themselves never doubted that their racial ideology was fundamentally different from, and absolutely opposed to, Christianity. Among the images from Der Sturmer that Goldhagen might have reprinted was a cartoon from June 1938 displaying the regime's three archenemies: a Soviet commissar, a Jewish rabbi, and a Catholic priest.

In his section titled "Repairing the Harm," Goldhagen lays out what the church must do to make restitution for its wrongs against the Jews. His demands range from uncontroversial recommendations (tell the truth, fight anti-Semitism) to a bewildering array of proposals about church governance, Vatican policies toward Israel, and the revision of biblical texts. It is unfortunate, I think, that Goldhagen has allowed himself to be enlisted in the ranks of writers like Carroll, Cornwell, and Wills, who seek to use the Holocaust as a lever to move the church in what they regard as a progressive direction. While this may seem politically attractive, it does not advance either the historical understanding of the Holocaust or the institutional reform of the church.

The most problematic of Goldhagen's remedies is his insistence that the church abandon "supersessionism," its traditional claim that God's covenant with the church replaced his covenant with the Jews, that the church was the New Israel and God now rejected his chosen people. This is a complex theological question. The post-Vatican II church has, in fact, significantly changed the Catholic teaching about "supersessionism," explicitly affirming that God's covenant with the Jews was never abrogated. Indeed, the unfortunate term "supersessionism" has largely been abandoned in discussing these questions. It was, of course, wrong to use the claim that Christ represented the fulfillment of the promises God made to Israel as an excuse to persecute Jews who could not accept Jesus as the promised Messiah. But for the church to abandon the idea, as Goldhagen suggests, that Christ is the definitive revelation of the biblical God would be to hollow out the core of Christian faith. Neither Christians nor Jews should say to one another, "Nothing can improve until you stop being what you are." Tolerance requires learning to live with deeply different beliefs, not insisting that they be revised out of existence.

At the beginning of his third section, Goldhagen writes: "Humility and self-doubt should also inform those who would convince or convert others.... The world in all its complexities and the hereafter in all its unknowability admit a plurality of plausibly good orientations toward this world." Amen. Unfortunately, Goldhagen does not often act upon this wisdom. However humble he may be in person, however self-doubting in the privacy of his soul, however theoretically mindful of complexity, in print his persona is arrogant, self-righteous, and omniscient. In A Moral Reckoning, as in Hitler's Willing Executioners, Goldhagen portrays a world of black and white, guilt and innocence, a world without nuance, moral ambiguity, or honest error. He carries this view of the world into his attitude towards other scholars: those with whom he disagrees are not simply wrong, they are morally deficient and self-serving. The reception of his first book demonstrated the results of this posture: because Goldhagen does not listen to those with whom he disagrees, people have trouble listening to him--which may be why he must continually claim that his views have been misrepresented or distorted by his critics.

About one big thing Goldhagen is right: on the church's role in the history of anti-Semitism and in the Holocaust much more needs to be said. It needs to be said, however, in a voice that encourages sustained dialogue and respectful disagreement.

James J. Sheehan teaches European history at Stanford University. His most recent book is Museums in the German Art World (Oxford).