A Moral Reckoning - Overview

Overview

In the New York Times, book reviewer Geoffrey Wheatcroft said that A Moral Reckoning (2003) presents an indictment of the Roman Catholic Church comparable to Goldhagen’s indictment of Germany in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), saying that “both as an international institution under the leadership of Pope Pius XII (1939–58), and at national levels in many European countries, the Church was deeply implicated in the appalling genocide. . . . Just as Germans had been carefully taught to hate the Jews, to the point that they could readily torment and kill them, so had Catholics”; that author Goldhagen “sees a deep vein of Jew-hatred ingrained within Catholic tradition; and he does not think that there was any difference of kind, between that old religious Jew-hatred and the murderous racial anti-Semitism of the twentieth century”.

In a 2003, in The Atlantic magazine, interviewer Jennie Rothenberg Gritz quoted Goldhagen saying that “moral issues” are the “principal substance” of A Moral Reckoning, that his concern was a “consideration of culpability and repair”. In a letter to the editor of The New York Times, Goldhagen said that “the book’s real content” is in “setting forth general principles for moral repair from which I derive concrete proposals for the Church”. Donald Dietrich, author of God and Humanity in Auschwitz: Jewish-Christian Relations and Sanctioned Murder, and a Boston College professor of Theology specializing in Holocaust studies, said that Goldhagen “asks the Catholic Church a question: ‘What must a religion of love and goodness do to confront its history of hatred and harm, to make amends with its victims, and to right itself so that it is no longer the source of hatred and harm that, whatever its past, it would no longer endorse?’ He has attempted to analyze the moral culpability of Catholics and their leaders, to judge the actors, and to discern how today’s Catholics can make material, political and moral restitution”.

Goldhagen's book suggests that the Church owes financial reparation and support to Jews and the State of Israel and should change its doctrine and the accepted Biblical canon to excise statements he labels as anti-Semitic and to indicate that "The Jews' way to God is as legitimate as the Christian way". Failing this, the author proposes disclaimers in every Christian Bible to annotate anti-Semitic passages and acknowledge them as having led to injury against Jews.