IF YOU HAVEN’T been able to read all the writing about Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust, you needn’t feel too bad. Not even scholars in the field have been able to keep up. By my count, there have been at least fourteen books on the subject in the last three years, with the threat of more to come.
Some of these run contrary to type. The very liberal Catholic Justus George Lawler, for instance, constructs a witty and learned defense against Pius’s attackers in his recent “Popes and Politics.” But mostly the books keep to their origins. John Cornwell detests John Paul II and contemporary Catholicism, so his book “Hitler’s Pope” is an unrelenting bash at Pius and the Church during World War II. Ralph McInerny is a conservative Catholic philosopher and mystery writer, so his “The Defamation of Pius XII” is a ceaseless defense. Garry Wills wants major reform in the Church today, so his “Papal Sin” extends the attack to include the entire history of Catholicism. James Carroll has extolled fashionable leftist causes since back in the days when he embarrassed his Air Force general father by preaching against the Vietnam War to a congregation of military officers, and guess which side Carroll’s book “Constantine’s Sword” comes down on?
Into this flood of (mostly Catholic) works for and against Pius XII, there will shortly splash Daniel Goldhagen’s new book, “A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair.” David Dalin–who wrote a major essay on the Pius books in the February 26, 2001, issue of The Weekly Standard–will soon review the book in our pages, but it’s worth pointing out beforehand just how useful Goldhagen’s book will be to Pius’s detractors.
That’s not because the book is right, of course. It is filled with so many simple errors of fact that it’s positively embarrassing to read. These 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 and wrote a book whose marvelous title shows the true flavor of curmudgeonly nuttiness: “Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church (An Author’s Frank Convictions about the Meddling Policies of the Church from its First Tie-up with the Emperor Constantine to its Present Alliance with the Nazi-Fascist-Shinto Axis).”
But Goldhagen’s “Frank Convictions about the Meddling Policies”–I’m sorry; I mean Goldhagen’s “A Moral Reckoning”–will nonetheless prove a useful book, not despite its errors, but because of them. This is a great opportunity for those who’ve written previous books against Pius XII. The reviews of Susan Zuccotti’s “Under His Very Windows,” for instance, were quite negative, accusing her of slanting the evidence to support her prejudged anti-Pius thesis. But now Goldhagen offers her a chance to claim middle-of-the-road credentials. “How can you say I’m an extremely prejudiced opponent of Pius?” Zuccotti can ask. “Daniel Goldhagen is the prejudiced extreme; I’m a moderate.” For Garry Wills, James Carroll, and John Cornwell–all under considerable attack for their anti-Catholic Catholicism–no gift could be more timely. A prediction for the coming weeks: All these authors will review Goldhagen’s book, and all of them will trash it–while using it along precisely the lines I suggest. Poor Danny Goldhagen. He’s going to be beat up one side and down the other; his natural opponents attacking him and his natural allies joining in.
STILL, you can’t say he doesn’t deserve it. For reviewers looking for obvious errors with which to get their negative reviews ginned up, I offer the following, just a small sampling of mistakes found in a first skimming of the book.
(1) Thanks to a court case in Germany, which ordered Goldhagen’s publisher to recall the book, the most notorious error is the caption on page 178, which identifies a photo as “Cardinal Michael Faulhaber marches between rows of SA men at a Nazi rally in Munich.” Leave aside the fact that the man in the picture isn’t the Bavarian bishop Faulhaber but the papal nuncio Cesare Orsenigo–also the fact that the city isn’t Munich, but Berlin; and the fact that it isn’t a Nazi rally but a May Day parade for labor; and the fact that the nuncio, as ex-officio dean of the diplomatic corps, was required to attend dozens of such functions a month; and the fact that the year was 1934, which was somewhat early for Goldhagen’s point. Leaving all that aside, it’s the slander of Faulhaber that is particularly obscene. The Nazis hated Faulhaber, as he hated them (1934 was one of the years, for instance, in which they tried to have him assassinated). Even the Encyclopedia Britannica describes the man as a hero of resistance to Hitler. Couldn’t Goldhagen look anything up?
(2) Goldhagen’s apparent lack of scholarly languages consistently leads him awry. I figure he must know German, but does he have the Italian, French, and Latin necessary to undertake this work? His complete reliance on English-language secondary sources suggests that he doesn’t. The Italian “stirpe,” “I primi,” “schiera,” and “gruppo,” are all given peculiar spins, and there isn’t a Latin phrase in the book that doesn’t have an odd translation.
(3) Goldhagen writes, “The most notorious camp [in Fascist Croatia] was Jasenovac, where the Croats killed 200,000 Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies. Forty thousand of them perished under the unusually cruel reign of ‘Brother Satan,’ the Franciscan friar Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic. Pius XII neither reproached nor punished him or the other priest-executioners during or after the war.” Oops. Since Filipovic-Majstorovic was executed by the Communists in 1945, it would have been somewhat difficult for Pius to have reproached him after the war. And since he was expelled from the Franciscan order and defrocked before he went to Jasenovac (becoming a loudly self-proclaimed nonbeliever along the way), it would have been equally difficult for Pius to punish him during the war.
(4) Goldhagen calls the American bishops’ pastoral letter on the war in November 1942 an “all but explicit rebuke of the Vatican.” Poor Goldhagen. This is how the strip-quotes in secondary sources lead would-be scholars astray. The actual letter reads: “We recall the words of Pope Pius XII”; “We urge the serious study of peace plans of Pope Pius XII”; “In response to the many appeals of our Holy Father,” etc.
(5) The Jewish ghetto in Rome was erected in 1556, not 1555. The Venice ghetto in 1517, not 1516. Frankfurt in 1462, not 1460. And Vienna in 1626, not 1570. (Four errors in one sentence is a record, even for “A Moral Reckoning.”)
ENOUGH. Goldhagen took a first swipe at this material in an unbearably long essay in the New Republic earlier this year, and Ronald Rychlak (author of “Hitler, the War and the Pope”) wrote an almost equally long indictment of Goldhagen’s allegations in the June/July issue of First Things. As near as I can tell, the only one of the errors Rychlak pointed out that Goldhagen has corrected is his identification of the Danish king as Christian II instead of Christian X.
As I say, no one is going to have trouble finding Goldhagen’s mistakes. And that’s exactly the problem. By writing such an error-filled, anti-Catholic diatribe as “A Moral Reckoning,” Goldhagen makes what used to be the extreme of public discourse look like middle ground–the middle ground that, on any historical question, most of diffident, well-mannered America wants to inhabit.
J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard.
