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

Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners was a work of political interpretation. But this study of the Catholic Church and the Holocaust is a work of moral evaluation. Goldhagen reviews trenchantly the attitudes of the pope and the Church, the roots and manifestations of antisemitism, and the arguments of the Church's defenders. Here again, Goldhagen is more concerned with getting to the essence of a phenomenon than in dealing with qualifications and nuance. Whereas the Vatican has tried to separate Nazi "pagan" antisemitism from the traditional Catholic version, Goldhagen asserts that there was a "symbiosis" between the two. As he writes, the Church and the pope "failed during the Holocaust ... because they believed the Jews to be evil and harmful, and because they did not object in principle to punishing the Jews substantially."