SCRUTINY & THEN SOME : The church & the Holocaust.

David I. Kertzer's The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican and the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (Alfred A. Knopf) is the latest in a stream of books examining the role of the church in the Holocaust. Historian Marc Saperstein's review ("An Indictment: Half Right," September 28) did a superb job of explaining Kertzer's strengths and weaknesses. I've reviewed the book for the Washington Post's Book World, and last month appeared on a panel at New York University to discuss it.

I was apprehensive about participating in the discussion. Public forums about the church and the Holocaust usually draw a hostile audience in Manhattan. More anxiety-provoking, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, was to be the moderator. The New Republic is not known for its dispassionate approach to this question. Professor Kertzer would also be on the panel, along with Commonweal contributor Jack Miles and Columbia historian Istvan Deak. Miles is the author of the Pulitzer prize-winning God: A Biography, and his new book, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (Alfred A. Knopf), has just been published. Deak is a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books. His Essays on Hitler's Europe (University of Nebraska Press) is indispensable for anyone interested in this difficult subject.

As it turned out, the evening went well. Wieseltier was evenhanded, and did a fine job as moderator. I was asked to speak first, after Wieseltier had made a few remarks about the relationship between evil and religion and evil and modern secular ideologies. "It's a wash," Wieseltier argued, as to whether the forces of religion or explicitly atheistic regimes have been the source of greater violence.

My remarks were brief--probably too brief--but they seemed to get the discussion going. I wanted to make three points. First, Kertzer had done a brilliant job of refuting the self-exonerating claims made in the 1998 Vatican document "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah." The Vatican had argued that there was a sharp line separating traditional Christian anti-Judaism from Nazi racial and "neopagan" anti-Semitism. Using the Vatican's own archives as well as articles from the Catholic press of the time, Kertzer demonstrates that the Vatican was a prominent source of anti-Semitic slander in the nineteenth century.

Kertzer is less successful in bringing to life the worldview of the nineteenth-century popes. Readers are likely to come away from the book with the impression that the popes and their henchmen were paranoiac, credulous, and driven by unmotivated hatred. How these men understood their duties and obligations, much less how their faith shaped the decisions they made, remains an enigma.

Finally, as Saperstein noted in his Commonweal review, Kertzer overreaches. The causal connection between nineteenth-century Catholic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is never established, merely asserted. Kertzer states that "traditional Catholic forms of dealing with the Jews became transformed into modern anti-Semitism," but he never accounts for the influence of pseudo-scientific Nazi doctrines of racial purity, something essentially alien to Catholicism. Nor does he sufficiently acknowledge the impact of shattering events such as World War I and the Depression. In short, Kertzer's effort to link Nazism to medieval Christian bigotry does not give enough weight to the undeniably "modern" aspects of the Holocaust.

Deak, whose command of this history is encyclopedic, raised similar questions, always emphasizing the complexity of historical analysis. He also wondered aloud why so many books have been written about the Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust and so few about other, equally fallible institutions. Deak's unwillingness to accede to Kertzer's thesis earned him the lion's share of questions from the audience, all of which he answered, with great patience and authority.

Deak's question about why the Catholic Church is the object of such disproportionate scrutiny is one shared by many. I think there are several reasons. To begin with, the unfortunate effort to canonize Pius XII has focused attention on the issue. The continuity and visibility of the papacy also make for an inviting target. Nor is it surprising that critics are eager to debunk an institution that makes such large claims for its own moral authority. Moreover, there is no reason for anyone to accept the dubious historical assertions of the Vatican. Catholics should be grateful when such errors are corrected. Most important, perhaps, as Paul Elie pointed out in the New York Times Magazine several years ago (April 26, 1998), John Paul II's predecessors are now being judged by the human-rights advocacy of this papacy, and they inevitably fall short.

But there is a measure of bias at work as well. Notre Dame historian John McGreevy's essay, "Thinking on One's Own: Catholicism in the American Intellectual Imagination, 1928-60" (The Journal of American History, Spring 1997), is illuminating in this regard. McGreevy argues that Catholicism has played a crucial role in shaping the self-understanding of liberal intellectuals. For modern thinkers like John Dewey, Catholicism represented a subversive threat to fundamental American values involving democracy, scientific progress, personal autonomy, and secularization. In short, liberals instinctively defined themselves over and against Catholicism. At a deep level, Catholicism was seen as the corrupting and oppressive "Other." All you have to do is pick up a copy of the Nation, the New Republic, the American Prospect, or the New York Times to see how alive that ecclesiastical bogeyman is. Just the other night, a New York Times reporter on the "Jim Lehrer News Hour" described Osama bin Laden as "the pope of terrorism." You had to laugh even while cringing.

With our politics so dominated by abortion, questions of church/state separation, and the ongoing debate about the family, that enduring liberal suspicion of Catholicism has been given new energy. It is possible to see it at work in the enthusiastic reception of the work of Catholics such as James Carroll, John Cornwell, and even Garry Wills, who have all made arguments similar to Kertzer's. The church is far from perfect. By and large, however, it is no longer a force for obscurantism or reaction, but rather an advocate for human dignity and religious freedom. That fact is still "news" to many.