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

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375414347 ISBN 13: 9780375414343

Publisher: Knopf, 2002

Synopsis

From the internationally renowned author of the best-selling Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust comes this penetrating moral inquiry into the Catholic Church’s role in the Holocaust that goes beyond anything previously written on the subject.

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 goes much deeper than has been previously understood. The Church’s leaders were fully aware of the persecution. They did not speak out and urge resistance. Instead, they supported many aspects of it. Some clergy even took part in the mass murder.

But Goldhagen goes further. He develops a precise way to assess the Church and its clergy’s culpability, which was more extensive and varied than has been supposed. He then devotes the largest part of the book to proposing a new and fuller understanding of restitution, including moral restitution, and 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 redress the harm it inflicted on Jews and to heal itself.

Brilliantly researched and reasoned, A Moral Reckoning is a pathbreaking book of profound, and far-reaching, importance.

About this title

From the Back Cover

“[A Moral Reckoning] breaks important new ground. . . . Not a word is wasted in a book that can only be read with profit by all” —Spectator

“An impressive bill of indictments. . . . The strength of Mr. Goldhagen’s argument is that it makes strikingly clear the ways in which the Inquisition, the pogroms, and the Holocaust are links in the same dread historical chain.” —The New York Times

“Insisting that it is high time to ‘call a spade a spade,’ [Goldhagen] has written a post-Holocaust moral reckoning with Christianity, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular, that pulls few punches and guarantees a hard-hitting bout over history, ethics and theology. Goldhagen’s book is unlikely to leave its readers indifferent. Its significance, however, depends less on immediate reactions and more on what happens 10, 20 or even 100 years after its appearance. Goldhagen may be helping to create a new Christianity. It will take time to tell.” —Los Angeles Times
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the Author

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, born 1959, grew up in the Boston area. He attended Harvard University where he received a BA in social studies and a masters and doctorate in political science. He subsequently was a political science professor at Harvard for many years, teaching courses on a range of subjects, including European politics, democracy, and genocide. In 1996 he published Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, which led to more prolonged and heated discussion around the world than just about any book in memory. It was an international bestseller that instantly turned Goldhagen into an international public figure, whose views are eagerly sought on both sides of the Atlantic. It won him many accolades, including Germany’s Democracy Prize, given only every three years, for his singular contribution to German democracy. The laudatio at the prize ceremony was delivered by perhaps Europe’s most esteemed and influential intellectual and philosopher, Jürgen Habermas.

Shortly afterwards, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing, and was in the midst of composing a book on genocide in our age (forthcoming with Knopf), when he produced an essay on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust for the New Republic, entitled, “What Would Jesus Have Done?” In writing it, he realized that some of the most crucial questions concerning the Holocaust and our public life more generally had been barely addressed, and certainly not answered properly, so he decided to temporarily put aside the book on genocide and write A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its unfulfilled Duty of Repair. Hugely anticipated here and in Europe (the Los Angeles Times wrote last spring, “Those inclined to handicap this fall’s publishing season already are giving long odds that the year’s most contoversial nonfiction book will be historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s A Moral Reckoning.”), it is a book that the Church and the public will not be able to ignore. It has already induced the leading Cardinal of the German Catholic Church and the Archbishop of Vienna to respond in interviews in their country’s major magazines.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375414347
• ISBN 13: 9780375414343
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384