History lite: Goldhagen, the Holocaust & the truth.

Before the war with Iraq there were at least three petitions, which gathered thousands of signatures, that the pope should take up residence in Baghdad as hostage against the American bombing of the city. Forty years from now, when the reasons for the invasion will certainly be debated by historians and journalists, and such obvious factors as imperial arrogance, regime change, oil, Saddam-obsession, etc., will have lost their cachet, it is likely that some revisionist will point to the failure of John Paul II to put his life on the line as a--if not the--major factor in the precipitation of the conflict. What may seem on its face a farcical suggestion assumes an air of probability when one looks at how the tragedy of the Holocaust has found a--if not the--perpetrator in the person of Pius XII. At least fifteen recent books in English explore this phenomenon.

This notion of the centrality of Pius to the Holocaust found its consummation in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning, reviewed by James J. Sheehan in Commonweal (November 8, 2002). As most readers will remember, Goldhagen's book originated in a review of several works on the church and the Holocaust, "especially books by James Carroll, David Kertzer, Michael Phayer, Garry Wills, and Susan Zuccotti, on which I often draw for the new evidence they have unearthed." What is curious about this list is that the two authors Goldhagen quotes most extensively--Carroll and Wills--are the only two who rely almost exclusively on secondary or tertiary literature, none of which entailed the "unearthing" of new evidence.

Thus when Karl Rahner and Pierre Benoit are accused by Goldhagen of being in the "mid-1960s...prominent Catholics [who] could not restrain themselves from expressing their animosity toward Jews," he bases this judgment on Wills, who never examined the actual writings of the two priests and instead took this "new evidence" from Charlotte Klein's Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology, which was published a quarter-century ago. Moreover, not only did Klein doctor the texts, but what Goldhagen calls the "deicide charge" is rejected by Benoit and is described by Rahner as "pseudo-theology." Again drawing on Wills's "new scholarship," Goldhagen approvingly quotes him at length as being "astounded" that Vatican II's Nostra aetate was "rejected by hundreds of Catholic bishops." What neither Wills nor Goldhagen mentions is that the final vote on the decree had only eighty-five votes against it, and many of these were by delegates from the Middle East fearful of Arab reprisals against Christians for implicitly appearing to support the state of Israel. And where Wills/Goldhagen found the earlier vote "astounding," Yves Congar in his recently published Journal du Concile (he had forbidden publication prior to 2000) wrote with elation of "une enorme majorite," and added, "The church and the council have declared their view."

There is a Quaker saying about such intentionally warped texts: "the water tastes of the pipes." Few would question that the Christian church was a major factor in engendering the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust. Similarly, few would question Goldhagen's judgment: "In many ways, Catholic bishops and priests across Europe supported political transgressions...those who did are morally blameworthy." It doesn't follow from this ethical truism that "Pius XII bears such moral blame" and thus is a "Nazi collaborator." Nor does it negate the fact, underlined in Martin Gilbert's The Righteous, that "Catholic bishops and priests across Europe" also opposed such transgressions. These accusations and omissions not only taste of the pipes; they poison the wells.

Goldhagen's book is so filled with contradictions that it suggests a disconnect in the author's mind or a parody of the genre, sic et non:

Sic: "The Catholic Church itself could change its Christian Bible." Non: "The Christian Bible is not even subject to the exclusive control of the Catholic Church."

Sic: "For all this time that the Germans and their helpers were killing all these Jewish men, women, and children across the continent, Pius XII publicly said nothing." Non: "Why should we care so much whether Pius XII was a righteous man or a blameworthy man? Pius XII was not the Catholic Church."

Sic: "Vatican II initiated only limited changes, and even those changes have reached and been accepted by only a limited number of Catholics." Non: "Vatican II has had an undeniably and substantial positive effect on Catholics' views and attitudes toward Jews."

Sic: "The French Catholic bishops' treatment of the church's actions is superficial and fleeting. The moral accounting is general and vague." Non: "The French Catholic bishops place blame squarely on the church's teachings, on 'the church as such.' They do not palm off the blame onto misguided 'sons and daughters of the church.'"

The schizoid nature of these assertions perhaps explains Goldhagen's amazing definition of the church as a "pan-European institution of world-hegemonic aspiration" which seeks "to subject all of humanity to the pope's unquestioned and untrammeled power."

Implicit in the slurs is the notion that the threat of excommunicating mass killers would have somehow altered their behavior. Drawing on what has become historical cliche (James Carroll repeats it five times in Constantine's Sword), Goldhagen asks, "Why did Pius XII excommunicate all Communists in the world, but not excommunicate a single German or non-German who served Hitler--or even the Catholic-born Hitler himself? There is no good answer." Yes, there is, but it depends on the exercise of a little common sense. Pius's admonition in the context of the cold war was directed primarily to Catholics supporting the Communist Party in Italian elections. As to the "untrammeled power" behind such papal decrees, it may be noted that the party in Italy grew more rapidly after its condemnation than before. But the real common-sense question is: Who can imagine that criminals would go against their own mobilized passion for torture and slaughter, and become Christian martyrs because of threats from the Vatican? The only empiric work on membership in the Einsatzgruppen by the sociologist Michael Mann shows that the majority of the killers studied were committed Nazis with histories of violence in prewar life. This is reinforced by the anecdotal evidence marshaled by Omer Bartov in Hitler's Army. Can one imagine the pope saying to such men: "Anyone who aids or abets violation of the commandment, Thou shalt not kill, is deprived of the sacraments of the church and of the fellowship of its communion"? This is redundancy verging on bathos.

During and after World War I, Pope Benedict XV's office as mediator had been insultingly rejected by the leaders of the West--even David Kertzer in The Popes against the Jews refers to the papacy as "perilously isolated." Suddenly a quarter-century later, Goldhagen expects a pope three years after his election to exercise some mysterious power called "excommunication" that will influence those leaders' successors ("the Catholic-born Hitler himself") and their followers. Even up to the seventeenth century when the papacy wielded some moral power, whole countries were excommunicated--to no avail. And in the fourteenth century--what Barbara Tuchman calls the "calamitous century"--popes were excommunicating rival popes! The notion that in the twentieth century excommunication would have functioned as a magic nostrum raises questions about the disconnect in Goldhagen's state (or states) of mind referred to earlier: Could those "millions of willing executioners" he wrote about six years ago have been affected in any way by the pope's reversal of the "unfulfilled duty" that Goldhagen is writing about now?

Perhaps recognizing this contradiction, Goldhagen takes the weakest instance available and, bulldozing historic facts aside, asserts, "The pope's defenders typically fail to discuss the famous and most relevant case for assessing the efficacy of acting on behalf of Jews, that of Denmark." Yet the rescue of the Jews in Denmark had little to do with heroic clergy. By the time of Pius's famed and defamed Christmas message in 1942, "Nazis were slaughtering Jews across Europe"--but that "Europe" did not include Denmark, which Hitler referred to as "a model protectorate." When the razzia was ordered by Berlin late in the following year, the Reich puppet ruler in Denmark allowed the information to be leaked to the rescuers, and prevented the German navy from intervening. The Jews escaped to nearby Sweden whose "neutrality" was assured by exports that propped up the Wehrmacht--which indeed was "slaughtering Jews across Europe." Goldhagen observes with an omniscience born of an almost pathological detachment from facts: "Did Pius XII know of the Danish church's protest? Of course he did. Here was a model of successful action against the annihilation of the Jews that Pius XII chose to reject."

But let us suppose that Pius had done everything Goldhagen could wish for--suppose that everything Goldhagen describes as the failure of Catholics from the pope on down had never happened, would this diminish the criticism? Apparently not: "To frame the issue as whether or not Pius XII spoke out or acted forcefully enough to save the Jews is to obscure broader themes that are, in many ways, more important." So what Goldhagen imagines he is targeting is not really what his subtitle indicates, "The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust," but rather is--he now alleges--the two- millennia teaching of Jewish culpability for Christ's death fostered and enforced by the Christian church. And here, indeed, he is "on target." Yet in this he would be joining Catholics, now literally from the pope on down, in acknowledging the evil of that teaching of "contempt," and the need for its repudiation. Does Goldhagen know this? To take a page out of his script, the answer is, "Of course he knows it." But does this satisfy his grievances?

From his begrudging acknowledgment ("deeply flawed and tepid") that Vatican II marked a revolution in Christian attitudes toward Jews to his even more niggardly concession that John Paul II has dramatically furthered that revolution, the answer to that question is: probably not. This impression is reinforced by his drumbeat insistence on what both church and pope unquestionably failed to do. The last sentence in the book--which he believes has proved why and how the church must "no longer be the source of hatred and harm"--is this self-congratulatory observation: "Now that the answer has been given [by Goldhagen], the question for the Catholic Church becomes: Will it muster the will to do what it must?" (I reckon that an ancillary question for Goldhagen is: Will he muster the will to demand that the media conglomerate that publishes his book, Bertelsmann, fulfill its "duty of repair" for eagerly supporting the Nazi regime, and subsequently engaging historians to cover up that fact?)

How can the cycle of recrimination between Catholics and Jews about the church's role in the Holocaust be broken? Most people would say it is already on the way to being broken in the achievement of John Paul II. And in response to the compulsively automatic riposte of Goldhagen ("it's not enough"), one can only admit, of course it could be improved; what could not? Of course, the process of re-education could be accelerated; what could not? Of course, matters could be better...Of course...

In brief, Goldhagen's book also provides a classic illustration of the axiom: The better is the enemy of the good.

Justus George Lawler is the author of Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust (Continuum).