A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair

In this book Daniel Jonah Goldhagen cuts through the historical and moral fog to lay out the full extent of the Catholic Church's involvement in the Holocaust, transforming a narrow discussion fixated on Pope Pius XII into the long-overdue investigation of the Church throughout Europe. He shows that the Church's and the Pope's complicity in the persecution of the Jews was much deeper than has been understood. The Church's leaders were fully aware of the persecutions and they did not speak out and urge resistance. Instead, they supported many aspects of the persecution. Some clergy even took part in the mass murder. But Goldhagen goes further and develops a new, precise way for assessing the Church and its clergy's culpability. He then shows that the Church has, even according to its own doctrine, an unacknowledged duty of repair. He explores this duty, analyzes the Church's tactics of evasion, and delineates all that the Church must do to repair the harm it inflicted on Jews and to heal itself.… (more)