A Moral Reckoning - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Although A Moral Reckoning was favorably reviewed in The Spectator, Kirkus Reviews, The San Francisco Chronicle, and given a generally favorable overview ahead of an interview in The Atlantic, it was also subject to substantial criticism, even among some of those reviewers who found aspects of the work praiseworthy. The International Social Science Review, which described the book as a "seminal work" and a "valuable introduction to and synthesis of the literature on church and state during the Holocaust", also indicated that the message of the book is "diluted by stylistic problems". New York Times reviewer Geoffrey Wheatcroft praised Goldhagen's assembly of "an impressive body of evidence" but criticized his repetitiveness, his "misinterpreting the record" and his use of it to promote a particular view, which Wheatcroft deems appropriate for an advocate but reprehensible in a historian. Dietrich, whose review lauded Goldhagen for asking "many of the proper seminal questions", mirrored Wheatcroft's concerns about repetitiveness, misunderstandings and polemics, specifically suggesting that "eaders must be sure to also review the footnotes since in many cases he contextually and theologically nuances his book’s claims only there".

John Cornwell, author of Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (1999), praised Daniel Goldhagen’s “excellent job in exposing the propagandistic hagiography of recent defenders of Pius XII, especially their tendency to confuse diplomatic eulogy with historical fact”, but said that Goldhagen errs in identifying a key Vatican figure an anti-Semite, a misrepresentation he thinks “can only provide ammunition for the Pius XII lobby”. The journalist Gritz noted that Goldhagen “does not cushion his criticisms of the Church in diplomatic language”, that “even philosophy professor John K. Roth, who favorably reviewed A Moral Reckoning in The Los Angeles Times, said that the adjectives “unpretentious . . . indecisive . . . moderate . . . patient” do not come to mind when reading Goldhagen. Another book review in The New York Times said that A Moral Reckoning is an “impressive and disturbing bill of indictment against” the Roman Catholic Church, yet its imbalanced perspective results in “turning history into a kind of cudgel”.

In summer of 2002, before its publication, Ronald Rychlak, author of Hitler, the War, and the Pope, decried it as factually incorrect, releasing a lengthy catalog of corrections to Goldhagen's essay "What Would Jesus Have Done?" After the book's publication, Rychlak published a review in the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, again pointing out factual errors, and criticizing the book's tone and conclusions. Following the book's publication, Rabbi Dalin and J. Bottum, later co-authors along with William Doino of The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII, in separate articles for The Weekly Standard denounced it as failing "to meet even the minimum standards of scholarship" and "filled with factual errors". In his review, Paul Collins indicated that the purpose of the book was undermined by poor editing, incoherence and redundancy. Mark Riebling of National Review, who described himself as an admirer of Goldhagen's first book, called A Moral Reckoning "a 352-page exercise in intellectual bad manners" and "a spree of intellectual wilding".

In reply to the charge of historical inaccuracy, Daniel Goldhagen said that the “central contours” of A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (2002) are accurate, because the book’s title and first page communicate its purpose of moral analysis, not historical analysis. He stated that he has invited to no avail European Church representatives to present their own historical account in discussing morality and reparation.

Opponents labelled Goldhagen as a “anti-Catholic”, as promoting an anti-Catholic agenda. Bottum wrote that its “errors of fact combine to create a set of historical theses about the Nazis and the Catholic Church so tendentious that not even Pius XII’s most determined belittlers have dared to assert them. And, in Goldhagen’s final chapters, the bad historical theses unite to form a complete anti-Catholicism the likes of which we haven’t seen since the elderly H.G. Wells decided Catholicism was the root of all evil”. In the Catholic News Service, Eugene J. Fisher, the Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that Goldhagen avoided original research, as “such methodological and factual considerations would definitely get in the way of the demonic portrait of the Church that he seeks to paint”.

In the book The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, Philip Jenkins said that A Moral Reckoning, along with anti-Catholic conspiracy theories and other “anti-Church historical polemic”, belongs to the pseudohistory category of books about anti-Catholic “mythic history”, historical manipulation, and national demonization, such as the Black Legend about Spain, said that publishers publish such books because the sell many copies, not because they mean to “destroy or calumniate Catholicism”. Furthermore, Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights president William A. Donohue, said that Daniel Goldhagen “hasn’t a clue about Catholicism”, that he “separates himself” from other critics of Pope Pius XII “by demanding that the Catholic Church implode: he wants the Church to refigure its teachings, liturgy, and practices to such an extent that no one would recognize a trace of Catholicism in this new construction. That is why Goldhagen is not simply against Pope Pius XII: he is an inveterate anti-Catholic bigot”. Moreover, Rabbi Dalin accused Goldhagen of engaging in a “misuse of the Holocaust to advance . . . anti-Catholic agenda”.