History as Bigotry

...He identifies Christianity, and particularly the Catholic Church, as the preeminent source of anti-Semitism in the world— ancient, medieval, and modern...

...He is off by three decades about the beginning of the process for Pius XII's beatification and misidentifies the role of Peter Gumpel (who is not the "advocate" but the independent judge of Pius's cause...

...With all that in mind, it is perhaps worth putting on record some of the failings of A Moral Reckoning...

...Nor is the fact that when Mendes lost his medical professorship as a result of Fascist anti-Semitism, Pacelli personally intervened on his behalf...

...It's not that these are particularly important errors, but that they are simple errors—easy to look up, easy to check...

...Goldhagen's misrepresentation of St...

...Indeed, it is still central to Catholic thought today, and it has an "obvious integral relationship to the genesis of the Holocaust...

...While indicting Pius XII as an anti-Semite and a collaborator with Nazi Ger-many—and ignoring any contradictory Rabbi David G. Dalin, a visiting fellow at Princeton University's James Madison Program, is working on a book about Pius XII, John Paul II, and the Jews...

...Eichmann wrote that the Vatican "vigorously protested the arrest of Jews, requesting the interruption of such action...

...Relying entirely on Hitler's Pope, Gold-hagen takes what was already an outrageous misreading of a 1919 letter (sent by Pacelli to Rome while serving as papal nuncio in Bavaria) describing a group of Bolshevik revolutionaries who had led an uprising in Munich—which Goldhagen extends to: "The Communist revolutionaries, Pacelli averred in this letter, were 'all' Jews...

...His 1996 Hitler's Willing Executioners argued that blame for the Holocaust should be placed on all Ger-mans—for "eliminationist" anti-Semitism was widely spread among prewar Germans and intrinsic to the German character...

...But Goldha-gen doesn't limit his anti-Catholic diatribe to Pius...

...In 1964 Cardinal Paolo Dezza, the wartime rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University, published a signed article stating unequivocally that during the German occupation of Rome, Pius XII explicitly told him to help "persecuted Jews" and do so "most willingly...

...Commenting on the Vatican's alleged link to Nazi war criminals, he claims that Alois Hudal, an Austrian prelate and Nazi sympathizer, was "an important Catholic bishop at the Vatican," as well as a "close friend" and "confidant" of Pius XII...

...Goldhagen is no stranger to controversy...

...Documents introduced at the trial provide further evidence of Vatican efforts to halt the arrest and deportation of Roman Jews...

...But soon after the concordat was signed, Pacelli wrote two articles in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, unequivocally arguing that the Church had negotiated a treaty and nothing more—a treaty that implied no moral endorsement of Hitler or Nazism...

...During his 1986 visit to Rome's chief syna-gogue—the first time any reigning pope entered a synagogue—John Paul II publicly acknowledged and apologized for the Church's sins...

...With Pacelli's direct assistance, Mendes and his family were able to escape and eventually settle in Israel...

...And more recently, Gaspari came across new documents, establishing that as early as 1940 Pius XII explicitly ordered his secretary of state, Luigi Maglione, and Maglione's assistant, Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Paul VI), to send money to Jews protected by the bishop of Campagna...

...In his very first papal audience with Jewish leaders, on March 12, 1979, John Paul II reaffirmed the Second Vatican Council's repudiation of anti-Semitism "as opposed to the very spirit of Christianity," and "which in any case the dignity of the human person alone would suffice to condemn...

...Then there's the caption that identifies a photo as "Cardinal Michael Faul-haber marches between rows of SA men at a Nazi rally in Munich"— except that the man in the picture isn't Faulhaber but the papal nuncio Cesare Orsenigo, the city isn't Munich but Berlin, and the parade isn't a Nazi rally but a May Day parade...

...Pope Pius ordered churches and convents throughout Italy to shelter Jews, and in Rome itself 155 convents and monasteries sheltered five thousand Jews throughout the German occupation...

...In short, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's polemic against Pius XII, John Paul II, and the Catholic Church fails to meet even the minimum standards of scholarship...

...More specifically, with the Catholic Church...

...Pacelli was instrumental in drafting the Vatican's historic 1916 condemnation of anti-Semitism...

...On and on the factual errors go, the sloppy handling of dates, persons, and places all culminating in the selective use (or ignoring) of evidence to portray Eugenio Pacelli (later Pius XII) as the fount of the era's anti-Semitism...

...Last fall, Goldhagen expanded that essay into a book, a curious and furious production entitled A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, about the Vatican's role during the Holocaust...

...the Vienna ghetto in 1626, not 1570...

...Pacelli's concordat "helped to legitimate the Nazi regime in the eyes of the world and consolidate its power at home," Gold-hagen insists...

...In his 2001 book Gli ebrei salvati da Pio XII, Antonio Gaspari compiles additional testimonies...

...Bruno Walter, the brilliant Jewish conductor of the Munich Opera whom Pacelli befriended shortly after arriving in Munich in 1917, recounts that Pacelli helped free Walter's Jewish fellow musician, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who had been imprisoned during a pogrom...

...Despite my fury at Goldhagen's misuse of the Holocaust to advance an anti-Catholic agenda, I had hoped to join the vast conspiracy of silence in which most Holocaust scholars have, delicately and politely, pretended that A Moral Reckoning doesn't exist...

...You can't trust anything Goldhagen reports...

...But Goldhagen can acknowledge none of this...

...Oh, and the fact that the irascible Faulhaber was a famous opponent of the Nazis...

...Goldhagen claims that "neither John Paul II nor any other Pope has seen fit to make . . . a direct and forceful public statement about Catholics' culpability and the need for all the members of the Church who have sinned during the Holocaust to repent for their many different kinds of offenses and sins against Jews...

...As it happens, Alois Hudal was never a bishop "at the Vatican," much less an "important" one, but rather an obscure rector of the Collegio dell' Anima in Rome, where he was placed to confine him to a post of little significance...

...The recent book by David Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican: Espionage & Intrigue from Napoleon to the Holocaust, shows how much Hitler distrusted and despised Pius XII...

...These facts are also never mentioned in Goldhagen's one-sided polemic...

...As Ronald Rychlak has noted, Goldhagen's exposition on St...

...In the June/July 2002 issue of F'irst Things, Ronald J. Rychlak published an extensive and damning list of errors in the New Republic article— astonishingly few of which Goldhagen has bothered to correct...

...Pius himself granted sanctuary within the walls of the Vatican, and his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, to countless homeless Jews...

...The Nazi deportations of Italy's Jews began in October 1943...

...In 1994, at the personal initiative of John Paul II, the Vatican established diplomatic relations with Israel...

...Indeed, the book is so flawed—its facts error-prone, its arguments tendentious, and its conclusion, equating Christianity in its essence with anti-Semitism, both bizarre and dan-gerous—that most scholars in the field have simply tried to ignore it...

...Zuccotti's principal charge, mindlessly repeated by Goldhagen, is that there is no credible evidence that Pius XII ever explicitly ordered his subordinates to assist Jews in Italy...

...But Goldhagen can't accept mere criticism: "Nazi Germany's first great diplomatic triumph," he has to label it, forgetting that the Four Powers Pact between Germany, France, Italy, and England preceded it, as did League of Nations recognition...

...Much of this is lifted straight from anti-Pius books like Susan Zuccotti's Under His Very Windows—and thus Goldhagen repeats the errors of those books and adds extras, all his own, in his determined attempt to extend their thesis into over-the-top railings against the sheer existence of Catholicism...

...In fact, there is a whole body of evidence that proves Pius did...

...In the Sunday Times, the British historian Michael Burleigh held his nose long enough to brand the book "vile" and "a strip cartoon view of European history...

...the Venice ghetto in 1517, not 1516...

...the Frankfurt ghetto in 1462, not 1460...

...Rather, A Moral Reckoning—like Paul Blanshard's 1949 diatribe American Freedom and Catholic Power—is carving a permanent niche for itself out on the far edges of American culture...

...And in 2000, the pope made his historic visit to Israel—one of the great legacies of his pontificate, which has done much to further Catholic-Jewish reconciliation...

...BY DAVID G. DALIN In its January 21, 2002, issue, the N^^ Republic devoted twenty-four pages to Daniel Jonah Goldha-gen's "What Would Jesus Have Done...

...Indeed, he adds, both Pius XII and the future Paul VI actively supported Hudal in his criminal assistance to fleeing Nazi war criminals...

...Far from assisting Nazi war criminals in their escape, Pius XII authorized the American Jesuit Edmund Walsh to submit to the War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg a dossier documenting Nazi war crimes and atrocities...

...But that a mainstream publisher like Knopf would print the thing is an intellectual and publishing scandal...

...The definition of Jews as Christ-killers, claims Goldhagen, goes back to the origins of Christianity...

...On the contrary: John Paul II has frequently repented and apologized publicly...

...But the book hasn't quite disappeared with the same speed with which, say, H.G...

...It's an invitation he shouldn't have issued...

...Goldhagen is apparently unaware (or, more probably, doesn't care) that many distinguished scholars have declared Zuccotti's book "not history but guesswork," as the historian Owen Chadwick put it...

...Goldhagen's book conspicuously lacks any discussion of Castel Gandolfo, which enjoys a unique place in the annals of Jewish rescue (and Catholic rescuers) during the Holocaust: In no other site in all of Nazi-occupied Europe were as many Jews saved and sheltered for as long a period...

...In fact, Hudal's memoirs bitterly attack the Vatican for steadfastly refusing an alliance with Nazi Germany to combat "godless Bolshevism...

...The huge outpouring of books in recent years attacking the wartime pontiff Pius XII—from John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope to Garry Wills's Papal Sin—^were bad enough (and Goldhagen, who seems in A Moral Reckoning never to have consulted anything except secondary sources, relies heavily upon them...

...Though Gold-hagen begrudgingly acknowledges John Paul II's extraordinary efforts to bring Catholics and Jews closer together, he immediately takes this praise back and ultimately contradicts himself entirely by accusing John Paul II of tolerating "anti-Semitic libels and hatreds" during his visit to Syria in the spring of 2001...

...Hudal also was never a "close friend" of Pius XII or Montini...

...He also misrepresents the thought of those early Church leaders who advocated a tolerant attitude toward the Jews...

...No accusation is too preposterous for Goldhagen to accept...

...He claims that Pius XII neither reproached nor punished Franciscan friar Miroslav Filopovic-Majstorovic, when, actually, the so-called "Brother Satan" was tried, defrocked, and expelled from the Franciscan order before the war ended (and was killed by the Communists shortly after...

...Goldhagen's centerpiece is the outrageous allegation that Pius XII "did not lift a finger to forfend the deportations of the Jews of Rome" or of other parts of Italy "by instructing his priests and nuns to give the hunted Jewish men, women and children sanctuary...

...Goldhagen's virulent A Moral Reckoning focuses on Pius XII as the symbol of Catholic evil and repeats almost every accusation, including the most discredited ones, that has ever been leveled against him...

...Augustine's views of Jews and Judaism is especially appalling...

...Wells's 1943 Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church fell down the memory hole...

...Though Goldhagen gained international celebrity, his book's simplistic argument was widely criticized by serious scholars and historians...

...So, for instance, the establishment of the Jewish ghetto in Rome, one of the tragic milestones in the history of Catholic-Jewish relations, took place in 1556, not in 1555...

...As the Jewish scholar Michael Berenbaum has noted, Goldhagen "omits all mention of the countervailing traditions of tolerance" within Roman Catholic thought, past and present...

...At Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner said, "the pope himself intervened personally in support of the Jews of Rome...

...Hitler's Willing Executioners sold very well and was widely praised in its early reviews...

...The Nazi exterminations could occur because the vast majority of Germans were already predisposed to kill Jews...

...It's dishonest and misleading as well...

...In October, a German court prevented publication of A Moral Reckoning until the slander against Faulhaber was corrected...

...He identifies Christianity itself as the source of anti-Semitism and declares, "the main responsibility for producing the all-time leading Western hatred lies with Christianity...

...A Moral Reckoning, however, has flopped badly, despite a large publicity effort by which the publisher Knopf tried to recoup its advance...

...Indeed, Goldhagen invites the reader to "acknowledge the incontrovertible facts and plain truths contained in this book...

...The recently released memoirs of Adolf Eichmann also contain new evidence disproving Goldhagen's claim...

...But when Goldha-gen extends that attack to the demand that the Catholic Church, as we know it, be abolished as a disgrace and a danger to us all, he establishes a new marker for just how bad it can get—and the maddened anti-Catholics have responded by taking him to their breast, for his diatribe is more vicious and extreme than that of any other recent papal critic...

...Similarly, Goldhagen's unsubstantiated claim that "there is no difference in kind between the Church's 'anti-Judaism' and its off-shoot European anti-Semitism" is as unsubtle a statement as someone who claims to be a historian could possibly make...

...The Holy See's 1933 concordat with Germany has long been a key instrument for critics of Pius XII, and indeed there are grounds on which to criticize it...

...More prepared this time, reviewers have also been considerably less kind to Goldha-gen, and the reviews have generally run from lukewarm to outraged...

...Where Blanshard was a much-reprinted staple for the old anti-Catholic Evangelical world, Goldhagen seems to be turning into a staple for leftists whose hatred of Catholicism derives from the Church's opposition to abortion and the rest of the libera-tionist agenda...

...That the book has found its readership out in the fever swamps of anti-Catholicism isn't surprising...

...In 1998, the Church issued We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, an official document on the Holocaust...

...Indeed, the point of all the Holocaust material in A Moral Reckoning seems to be the concluding pages' attack on John Paul II and the Catholic Church today...

...Goldhagen's efforts to portray Pacel-li as a man whose whole life was fueled by anti-Semitism are made possible only by his ignoring all evidence to the contrary...

...Insisting that there was no theological justification for discrimination, he apologized to the Roman Jews in attendance (many of whom were Holocaust survivors), declaring that the Church condemns anti-Semitism "by anyone—I repeat: by anyone...

...In A Moral Reckoning, Goldhagen's argument is, once again, simplistic...

...While it's true that Hitler initially thought he would be able to use the concordat to harness the Church, he soon came to regret it—as his frenzied diatribes in his Table Talk reveal— precisely because it was being cited by Catholics as a legal basis on which to resist Nazism...

...The memoirs confirm that Vatican protests played a crucial part in obstructing Nazi intentions for Roman Jews...

...Guido Mendes, a prominent Italian physician and Pacelli's lifelong Jewish friend, is never mentioned by Goldhagen...

...one of the most virulent attacks against the Roman Catholic Church ever printed in a major American publication...

...evidence—Goldhagen goes on to attribute anti-Semitism to the entire Catholic Church and its leadership, even the present-day Church under John Paul II...

...Augustine "is little more than a crude and contemptuous canard...