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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/01/RV64077.DTL
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Chilling study blames Catholic Church for the Holocaust
Reviewed by Brian Richard Boylan
Sunday, December 1, 2002
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/01/RV64077.DTL
A Moral Reckoning
The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
KNOPF; 344 PAGES; $25
The subtitle of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's new book, "A Moral Reckoning," comes directly
to the point: "The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled
Duty of
Repair." The Roman Catholic Church played an active role in centuries of anti- Semitism
and knew from the start that the Jews were being persecuted then exterminated. The
church, under the leadership of Pope Pius XII, did nothing to stop that Germanic
frenzy of
mass murder and genocide. If anything, according to Goldhagen's overwhelming study, the
church encouraged participation in the Holocaust.
Strong words for a church whose foundations have been rocked in recent years by the
desire of women to be ordained priests, single-issue concerns such as abortion, birth
control and gay rights, and the horror of its members at the willful and widespread
misconduct of priests who sexually abuse altar boys. Now it is being blamed for the
Holocaust.
Goldhagen's book is the logical continuation of his earlier "Hitler's Willing
Executioners," and
it draws on such predecessors as "The Sword of Constantine" and "The Popes Against the
Jews." Like these books, Goldhagen's draws a line in the blood and says that the church
willingly crossed that line many times in previous centuries and during the Holocaust.
These
books are not argumentive so much as declamatory. They don't debate the question of the
church's responsibility for the Shoah; this simply is a given. If you accept such a
premise,
you are in for a devastating reading experience. Be assured that this is a painfully
thorough
investigation; like any ghastly crime, its perpetrators stand bathed in the blood of
innocents.
Written with restrained fury, this book carefully sketches the long history of anti-
Semitism
in the church, based on the false premise that the Jews killed Jesus -- himself a Jew.
It runs
through the centuries of numerous pogroms, persecutions, enforced exiles, down to the
systematic attempt to wipe out the Jewish "race" as part of Hitler's Final Solution.
Although
the pope had to know the details of the Jewish massacres in Poland, Eastern Europe and
Russia -- from the very start -- he failed to speak out to Catholics who were busily
exterminating the Jews, Goldhagen maintains.
"What must a religion of love and goodness do to confront its history of hatred and
harm?"
Goldhagen asks. Pope Pius XII was so partial to the unholy German cause as to
vigorously
suppress an encyclical, Humanis Generis Unitas, which had been authorized by his
predecessor, the equally anti-Semitic Pius XI.
The encyclical would have spoken out against the persecution of any minority, without
singling out the Jews. It would have been a watered-down protest but would have carried
the weight of the Catholic Church behind it.
But Pius, in his pre-papal role as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, was responsible for the
concordat the Vatican struck with Hitler in 1933, shortly after the dictator came to
power.
Throughout the Holocaust, Goldhagen writes, the only time that church officials spoke
out
was to protest the persecution of Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Otherwise,
they
cheerfully released to the Nazis genealogical information regarding who had been a Jew
in
the past,
which the Gestapo used with murderous efficiency.
Goldhagen attacks academics who ignore that "the Germans killed willingly, freely, and
with
no force behind their murderous actions." At the end of the war, "a few superhuman
monsters -- Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann -- were left in focus. They
garnered almost all the attention, diverting our gaze from the tens of millions of
Germans
who, in some way, willingly supported and embraced Nazis, Hitler, and the country's
other
leaders."
These ordinary Germans, who made this regime and its crimes possible were, after the
war, "miraculously transubstantiated overnight into beings who had been terrorized and
coerced, and were unknowing. . . . Germans were divested of moral responsibility, pre-
emptively exculpated because little or nothing was left to investigate morally."
These and "other political and intellectual distortions" left the study of the
Holocaust
containing "virtually nothing about the central actors, the perpetrators of the mass
murders." The only ones to investigate them extensively were "the German judges who,
after the war, sat in judgment" of them. Again and again, the courts judged the
perpetrators "guilty for having killed Jews. They judged the perpetrators guilty,
according to
the most stringent rules of evidence, for having killed because of their 'base motive'
of 'race
hatred.' "
The message of this book is chillingly simple. The overwhelming majority of Germans
hated
the Jews, just as their parents had hated the Jews, because these were the people who
put
Christ to death. They had been told so by their church, by their spiritual leaders and
teachers for thousands of years. The chill is hardened by the fact that Goldhagen
claims no
German ever suffered for refusing to kill or to harm a Jew. Numerous individuals
rebelled,
as did a few German churchmen, and none was harmed.
By contrast, the Danish people and the Danish Lutheran Church actively spoke out
against
anti-Semitism, and the citizens went out of their way to hide and to safeguard Danish
Jews
from the German occupying troops -- without ever suffering reprisals, air raids or
slaughters. Jews were saved by clergy and citizenry; they were hidden, disguised as
altar
boys and smuggled into neutral Sweden. In this, the Danes were joined by some priests
in
Italy and a few other European countries. In Slovakia and Croatia, however, Catholic
priests
and church leaders openly sided with the Nazis and even participated in the mass
murders.
German priests accompanied the killer SS Einsatzgruppen into Poland, Latvia, Lithuania,
Estonia and Russia, hearing confessions and dispensing the sacraments to the Catholic
killers.
"A Moral Reckoning" is not just the story of how a church betrayed its members by
encouraging them to the ultimate in savagery. It is an indictment of the church, its
leaders
and its pope for supporting a Holocaust that it had long provoked. Yet today the Roman
Catholic Church is on the threshold of declaring Pope Pius XII to be a saint. This
book will
not make that sainthood easier to digest for believer and non-Christian alike.
Goldhagen's restraint is eloquent, even when he portrays that great Catholic order of
priests, the Society of Jesus, a.k.a. the Jesuits, as more anti-Semitic than the Nazis,
requiring that candidates for the order be free from any Jewish blood for at least five
generations. However, "in 1923 the Jesuits further 'moderated' their racism by
reducing the
blood purity requirement to four generations." Thus, to become a member of the Society
of
Jesus, one could not be related to Christ or any of his apostles or early followers.
This is not a book for the ambivalent or the casually curious. It is a thundering
indictment
that makes no apologies and takes no prisoners.
Brian Richard Boylan, the author of 14 books, has interviewed numerous Nazi fugitives,
ranging from Eduard Roschmann to Josef Mengele.
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page 1
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