Lessons from a sad history

This week we are publishing a review of a book, provocatively titled A Moral Reckoning, by the US Jewish historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who presents the Catholic Church as complicit in the Shoah (or Holocaust).

The review takes a dim view of Goldhagen’s approach to history, one that seems to rely on the selective use and interpretation of the facts to suit the author’s own prejudices.

Alas, Goldhagen’s combative method guarantees maximal media coverage, especially in quarters that already view the Church with an acute degree of suspicion and even unqualified antipathy.

It has happened before. The 1999 book Hitler’s Pope by John Cornwell, which made a range of allegations against Pope Pius XII, received wide and mostly sympathetic coverage, not-withstanding the fact that it was mauled by most historical experts on the subject.

In contrast, the many books that defended Pope Pius from charges of complicity in the Shoah have been largely ignored by the mainstream media, limited to dissemination in academic and Catholic circles.

As with his previous book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Goldhagen’s j’accuse against the Church will doubtlessly benefit from much hype–mostly, one may predict, of a sensationalistic and uninformed nature. It is fair to presume that many consumers of the secular media will buy into Goldhagen’s polemic.

At least readers of the Catholic media will have access to alternative viewpoints.

At the same time, however, the publication of Goldhagen’s book (and others like them) present a challenge to Catholics to review the Church’s attitude to Judaism, and the treatment of other marginalised groups, then and now.

We may never forget that over almost two millennia, the Church, through the anti-Semitism of its members and aspects of its theology, contributed to creating the conditions which the Nazis and their collaborators exploited in the brutal persecution and extermination of Jews.

For this, Pope John Paul has issued a genuine mea culpa, fully in line with the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, which aimed at reversing the Church’s institutional anti-Judaism.

The likes of Goldhagen unjustly choose to ignore or downplay these profound developments. Catholics are quite entitled to take offence at that.

However, Catholics may not believe that Nostra Aetate, assorted mea culpas and the sustained (though occasionally troubled) dialogue between the leaders of Catholicism and Judaism is enough to gloss over past inequities committed in the name of the Church.

While looking backwards only serves little purpose, we must always remember the sad history of anti-Judaism in the Church.

With this in mind, Catholics are called to assert, in words and in deed, that no form of bigotry may ever be tolerated in and by the Catholic Church again.