Daniel Goldhagen - December 5, 2002
THE ROLE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE HOLOCAUST
Daniel Goldhagen
Scholar, Harvard’s Center for European Studies; Author, A Moral Reckoning
Imagine that 2,000 years ago it was asserted that an entire people, all Christians, killed the Son of God, and that they and their children were deemed guilty and cursed until the end of time. Imagine that the religion and the religious institution that consecrated the specious charge in its sacred text, which it claimed to be the word of God, became the dominant religion of a civilization for most of the next two millennia. Imagine that the accused minority, the Christians – who wanted nothing more than to worship in their own manner – were subjected to anti-Christian prejudice, preaching and incitement, orchestrated by the dominant religious institution of this hostile civilization. Imagine that the people of this civilization believed that Christians were essentially malevolent, seeking to destroy all that is good in their civilization. What would you say about a religious institution that spread such libels?
Imagine that the civilization responded to the fantasized threat of the Christians by instituting severe restrictions that lasted for centuries on the Christians' economic, social and cultural activities, by creating ghettos in which they were physically confined. Imagine that during the anniversary week of the death of the dominant civilization's beloved deity the civilization’s religious institution whipped its people into a frenzy with stories of the suffering and death to which Christians had allegedly subjected their deity. Imagine that entire regions or countries of this civilization expelled Christians, uprooting them from their houses and surroundings and forcing them to go to foreign lands. That periodically members of the dominant civilization, moved by their religious institution's teachings, massacred Christians, sometimes whole Christian communities, and only because the Christians insisted on remaining Christians. What would you say about such a religious institution?
Imagine that with the arrival of modernity the still-dominant religious institution of the civilization continued to spread its age-old prejudices and enmity against this minority, now mixing them with all kinds of new accusations – that they were the bearers of Bolshevism and other dangerous movements. Imagine that in the middle of the 20th century, in the most powerful country of that civilization, a violent, murderous group came to power, which possessed an even more fearsome demonology about Christians and were determined to eliminate them. Imagine that the still-dominant religious institution found this violent group to be worth supporting, albeit with certain misgivings, and that this religious institution signed a treaty legitimizing the violent regime. Imagine that with few exceptions among its clergy, the religious institution supported criminal persecution of the Christians. What would you say about such a religious institution?
Imagine that significant segments of the religious institution became complicit in the mass murder, supporting the deportation of the Christians to their deaths, and even taking part in the killings, occasionally as commanders of concentration camps. Imagine that one of the leaders of this religious institution, on the eve of the mass murder, told his followers, “The descendants of those who hated the Son of God, persecuted him to death, crucified him and persecuted his disciples are guilty of greater sins than their forebears.… Satan aided them in the creation of socialism and communism…. The movement of liberation of the world from the Christians is a movement for the renewal of human dignity.” Imagine that after the defeat of the violent regime the religious institution helped many of the regime’s greatest mass murderers escape justice. What would you say about such a religious institution?
Imagine that for decades after the end of the genocide of the Christians this religious institution, unlike the people in the countries once governed by the violent regime, continues to deny many of the basic facts of the harm it had done to Christians. That in its official teachings it still spreads the view that Christians are not only wayward, but also an impediment to the salvation of all humanity. Imagine that it is half a century after the horror of the annihilation of Christians, yet tens of millions of members of the civilization still cling to the specious belief that today's Christians are guilty and cursed for the death of the Son of God. Would you call this prejudice?
A Question of Complicity
The principal questions about the Holocaust are these: Who did what and why did they do it? I addressed this in Hitler's Willing Executioners. What culpability do they bear, and the principal post-Holocaust question, How should those bearing culpability make amends as best they can with the victims? These are the main themes of my new book, A Moral Reckoning. While my primary empirical focus is the Catholic Church, I am just as much interested in investigating the general themes of judgment and repair, both of which are critical for our public life and politics. The Church serves as an exemplary case to study a general set of principles that can and should be applied to people and institutions complicit in any crimes against any victims at any time. In this sense, my concrete exploration could have been done about Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, the United States or the many other sorry cases that have nothing to do with Jews or the Catholic Church.
There can be no question that the Church's record before, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust is horrible. The Church and its clergy had for centuries spread throughout Europe the most damaging and inflammatory anti-Semitic charges against Jews, beholding them a guilt-laden people. They did not seek to alleviate or prevent the Jews' suffering, and, with notable exceptions, their mass murder. The Church has not fully owned up to its crimes and other offenses, either in word or in deed.
These basic facts are incontestable, even though most of the polemics on the Church and the Holocaust dwell almost exclusively on them. Consequently, the questions I believe to be most fundamental are either completely ignored or not addressed. These questions are moral, and they are general questions that produce specific results: By what criteria do we judge? Then, when we apply these criteria, what does that judgment show? What constitutes restitution or repair? Then when we look at the specific harm that needs to be repaired, what program of repair emerges? My specific question for the Catholic Church is: What must an institution of 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? The Church was and is decidedly not Nazism. Nazism had to be destroyed utterly for a remade Germany to emerge. The Church should use Christianity's own good moral principles to rehabilitate itself from within.
The issue of judgment is extremely complicated; I will make only a few clarifying points. First, contrary to the relativists and to the Church's defenders, it is our right, indeed our obligation, to judge those involved in great crimes. We judge people all the time. Should only the clergy and the Church, the self-styled supreme moral institution of the world, be immune from moral judgment for their roles in one of the greatest crimes in human history, as its defenders and apologists suggest? Second, culpability is always individual, never collective; a person incurs culpability only for his or her stances and deeds. Just as I argued in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the notion that such a thing as collective guilt even exists is conceptually and morally indefensible. Third, we need a more complex taxonomy of culpability that complements the conventional legal one of criminal guilt. We need to be able to differentiate among different kinds of culpability. Many clergy, including Pius XII, were guilty of crimes. However, this should not blind us to the other kinds of moral blame they bear for their non-criminal but unjust and injurious deeds. Finally, the individual culpability of the clergy was enormously widespread and various in kind; the institution for which they were officials, and in whose name they authoritatively acted, has the duty to perform an extensive program of repair. This is the issue most in need of discussion in our public life.
Let me begin with a statement of principle: Many sins wrong our neighbor. One must do what is possible in order to repair the harm – for example, return stolen goods, restore the reputation of someone slandered, pay compensation for injuries. Simple justice requires as much. This principle, which is a doctrine of the Catholic Church itself, comes from the Church’s authoritative catechism. If you accept this principle, which the Church obviously does, then it leads inexorably to the four following conclusions: First, repair is a must. It is an unavoidable ironclad moral duty. Second, our task then is to establish what the actual principles of repair or restitution must be. Third, we must then see what concrete steps the Church must take. Fourth, if you or the Church and its representatives do not like every aspect of the principles or their concrete application that my book presents, then it is not permissible to reject the undertaking completely; that is, if you have acknowledged the duty of repair. Instead, you must offer competing principles and applications. This should be the beginning of a long-overdue, serious discussion of moral repair, its principles and implementation.
Turning to the topic of restitution, it must be broadened beyond a discussion of material restitution, property and money. There are two other kinds of restitution that are also critical, if all but wholly unrecognized. The first is political: People and institutions that are complicit in the destruction of the communities and political capacities of other people are duty-bound to work to restore communal life for the victims. The second kind of restitution is a more purely moral kind of restitution or repair. When the perpetrators' moral harm is recognized, the perpetrators must perform moral repair.
The first principle of the duty of repair is to acknowledge, even seek to uncover, the full truth about the unjust and injurious deed. Its concrete application means that the Church must stop its cover-up, stop attacking people who tell the truth, open its archives in the Vatican and around Europe and actually commission broad investigations not only of Pius XII's deeds, but also of every national church and its clergy both at the national and regional levels. Moral repair can begin only when the full truth is known and acknowledged. Survivors of the Holocaust and survivors of all genocide and mass slaughters consistently say this. The Church has not done it. Until the full extent of the offenses is known the full extent of the needed repair cannot be known. The Northern Protestant State Church of Germany currently has a traveling exhibition in its region that tells, in the words of the reporting German newspaper, the unvarnished truth about “the unbelievable extent to which the churches of the region have participated in the Holocaust. It declares courageously ‘the majority of the church supported the persecution of the Jews.’” The exhibition, continues the report, “is a venture from which all other churches of the Federal Republic had for more than fifty-five years recoiled in horror.” This includes the Catholic Church.
The second principle of the duty to repair is to work to undo the continuing consequences of the unjust and injurious deeds. It’s not as if the harm stopped with the defeat of Germany in May 1945. The Church must work to reduce the widespread, existing anti-Semitism for which it is still responsible. Tens of millions of Europeans still assert that all Jews living today are guilty or cursed for the death of Jesus. We know this from survey research. The Church should do this by making the teaching – at the elementary, secondary and adult levels – of the falseness and perniciousness of anti-Semitism into a core mission of the Church.
The third principle of the duty of repair is to do everything possible to make sure those bearing this duty will never participate in future crimes and offenses against the victims. The Catholic doctrine of repentance includes a radical reorientation of one's life. This means investigating the unwholesome internal features that led to the crimes and offenses and then to alter them. The Church must change its political structure of authority and its imperial politics of the soul, and its ideational structure that continues to breed suspicion and antipathies to Jews. This means that the Church must confront the anti-Semitism of the Christian Bible, the New Testament, which is not episodic and casual but constitutive of its story and fears. The Christian Bible, in a continuing and withering assault on Jews in hundreds of passages, presents Jews as the ontological enemies of God, to be vipers, to have never heard God, to be children of the Devil, to have plotted to kill the Son of God and his disciples.
This anti-Semitism must no longer be denied because of the convention of immunity that the Church and Christianity have created for themselves and their Bible. If a sacred text disseminated the same thing about Christians or blacks or Americans, claiming to be the word of God, would there not be outrage within the Christian world and the European-North American civilization?
But those of us who are not Catholic or Christian may not mandate what the Church must do regarding its Bible, because alongside the duty of repair that requires the Church to stop spreading anti-Semitism comes a duty to respect people's beliefs about the sacred – in this case the Christian belief that their Bible is the word of God. So while those of us who are not Catholic or Christian may identify the tragic problem of the Christian Bible – that a book that inspires so much goodness continues to spread so much prejudice – the solution to the problem must come from within the Church and from Christians themselves. I'm hoping that we can discuss these universal principles and their application to many other cases: the repair that Germany and Germans have owed to Jews, that the United States and white Americans owe to African Americans, that Serbia and Serbs owe to Kosovars. We could discuss the need for moral reckonings to take a more prominent place in our public life.
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: Why did it take so long, 57 years after the war, for the complete story to emerge?
A: Actually the complete story has not emerged because the Catholic Church, particularly the Vatican, refuses to give scholars access to its archives. The internal workings of the Vatican and also the internal discussions and workings of most national Catholic churches we don't know much about at all. Typically, the discussion of the Church during the Holocaust focuses on the historical deeds and then it basically stops and says, The Church should stop doing these terrible things. It stopped a lot of them, but no serious moral inquiry has taken place until now primarily because the Allies let the Church off the hook in 1945. The Allies said to Germany, You have to reform yourself, you have to come clean. The Church was not treated in the same way. The Church was presented as a victim of Nazism and a cover-up by the Church began even before the end of the war.
Q: Is there a reason you are singling out the Catholic Church in your thesis? What about the Russian Orthodox Church and its role in promoting anti-Semitism, or the Lutheran Church?
A: I chose the Church because I started to write a review on many books that were coming out about the Catholic Church and I started thinking about these issues. I could have written the book using many other churches from this period, or I could have looked at other historical crimes and even contemporary crimes. Other churches need moral reckonings to be done, as do other countries and individuals and institutions, and I hope that people will take the principles and apply them to our contemporary society. I don't mean to suggest that the questioner was suggesting this, but what people in the Church often do, or people who don't like the moral light to be shined upon them do, is say, "Why are you pointing the finger at us? Why don't you point the finger at them?" This is typically a tactic to try and divert attention from the real issues and from the responsibility of the Church. You cannot absolve yourself of culpability for your deeds or for the deeds of those in your institution by pointing fingers at others. No one is picking on the Church; we are simply shining the light of moral scrutiny upon it. A full moral reckoning praises those who acted well and lays blame on those who acted badly. It's a fair and neutral attempt to try and understand what happened. The sad fact is that the bad actions and the culpability for them were so much more widespread than the good actions of people in the Church at the time. This is something that the Church consistently denies and doesn't want anyone to talk about.
Q: How do you account for the support your two books have received in Germany? Why do think Austria, Poland, France and other European countries have been less willing to acknowledge their historical responsibility?
A: Germany has had to deal with these issues from 1945 on. It was coming clean about the past, not always fully, certainly, and not always happily or willingly, but that was a reentry ticket into the community of nations for the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany, initially after the war. Many Germans - particularly those born after the war, those under age 40 or 50 - have come to realize that they don't bring shame upon their country by telling the truth about the past. This is something that few people and few institutions understand: You don't bring shame upon yourself by saying, "Yes, our countrymen did terrible, horrible things - committed crimes now over 50 years ago." You show that you don't share their views, you don't support their deeds, that you are different. This is something the Church does not understand. It thinks that by telling the truth about the past it will bring shame upon itself today, when it's exactly the opposite. By continuing to obfuscate the past, attacking people who tell the truth, telling historical falsehoods, the Church subjects itself to continuing scrutiny. Germany, for all its failings in coming to terms with the past, is really a model for how the Church and how countries, including our own, should look at the horrific or inglorious parts of their pasts. Not that all pasts are the same; they are not. But we should all be more forthcoming and honest and direct and open about it. This is how we move forward; this is how we really show that we are no longer complicit morally, intellectually in any way in those deeds.
Q: Given what has happened in our culture and in this country, does it follow that America must pay reparations to African Americans for our role in slavery?
A: If you accept the principles I put forward, those responsible for moral crimes done against a people, which in this case would be the American government, need to perform the restitution. Apply the principles and see where they lead. It's a very complicated subject, of course. The United States as a country, the Southern states in particular, and many whites, did a great deal of harm to African Americans for a long time after slavery. The Jim Crow of the American South, segregation, all of the disabilities to which African Americans, who were no longer slaves, were subjected - are also great harms, and this continued into the 1960s. This is somehow left out of our view. So when people say, "Oh, it's so long ago that slavery occurred, why do we keep talking about it?" we should still talk about it, but it's not just slavery. The harms are quite recent historically and they have not been addressed. There are substantial duties of repair owed and they have been but barely fulfilled.
Q: Do you support a legalistic approach to moral reckoning, such as indictment and trial for war criminals and reparations for the harmed?
A: It seems obvious that those who commit crimes should be brought to trial; this is a well-established principle of international law. But I'm arguing that this is not enough, because only a few people can ever be tried when you're talking about mass murder on the scale of the Holocaust. There are other ways in which they must perform duties of repair once the harm is recognized, not just for criminal actions. Spreading anti-Semitism is a terrible harm; you're creating a culture of hatred in which people must live, in which they suffer every day. There should be a due, a repair, for that harm. It is not a criminal act to spread prejudice in this country, but in Germany it is a criminal harm. If a priest in Germany were to say the sort of things that I quoted in the allegory - it was actually the bishop of Sarajevo that said it in 1941 - he would be brought up on charges of inciting race hatred and would have to be prosecuted. Let's expand our notion away from just the criminal and legal way in which we look at these things to think more seriously about moral judgment, moral culpability and moral repair, because that is really where the most good can come from in trying to repair harms.
Q: How do you characterize comments by the current pope?
A: Pope John Paul II is an interesting historical figure and is to be praised in many ways. He feels the sorrow for the crimes of the past, for the Holocaust, for the suffering of Jews in a way that many German politicians or leaders of the Catholic Church who mouthed the appropriate things certainly don't do. The problem is that he stops with these vague words of remorse and with some symbolic acts. He has never apologized for the Church's role. He and his church have not instituted the appropriate educational measures necessary to fight the continuing harm, and they certainly have not addressed fully or adequately the problems of the New Testament and of other aspects of Catholic doctrine, liturgy and teaching that spread anti-Semitism. The Church has taken some forward measures. With Vatican II they lifted the curse. The Church wants us all to be so thankful that they lifted a curse that they laid for two thousand years upon a people, that they no longer are going to continue to do this terrible harm. And we should be terribly thankful for the other measures that the Church has taken to try to create better relations with Jews. But they stop when the Church's duties run up against its doctrine or its political interests. Let me highlight the problem in talking to representatives of the Church about these issues. The pope in 1986 went to a synagogue in Rome - the first pope who had ever gone to a synagogue. He called the Jews "our elder brothers in faith" and gave a nice talk, and it was a very important symbolic act. Now the Church wants everyone to say, Look how great this pope is - instead of saying, Why did it take so long? Historically it was very important, but morally it's not a very big step. The Church wants everything to be defined according to its own idiosyncratic ways of seeing itself, as incapable of doing harm, as being unfailingly holy, as being authoritative in virtually all matters, and it wants the rest of us to adhere to this. When we say, No, we want to evaluate the Church's deeds both historically and after the war - morally and in other ways according to conventional standards of evaluation, normal linguistic usage and normal concepts - the Church begins to look very different from how it presents itself.
Q: What have been the principal objections to your work that have been raised by the Church representatives?
A: I was on a book tour in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium before I came here, where we had many public debates with representatives of the Church. In virtually every debate they argued about this or that detail of the historical record, but they never took on the central issues. I said to them, If you don't like my account of the historical record, and nobody can doubt the basic contours because they're so well established, then give me your account of the historical record. If you don't like my account of the culpability, then tell me your account of the culpability. Since you can't deny that there is a duty of repair - the Catholic Church's own doctrine says there's a duty of repair - tell me what principles you would use to carry it out. Never once did I get an answer. Only one person really answered any of these questions, and that was the bishop of Hamburg. He said, The principles are all correct - tell the truth, fight the continuing effects of the harm and transform yourself so you are no longer the source of such harm again. He then went on to say the Church has done all of this, which is demonstrably not true. He, too, was a combatant in this debate, but he at least affirmed the principles. I hope and expect that a time will come when there will be more forthcoming discussion when the emotions, which the book has provoked, die down. I have gone against taboos, I have exploded myths, I've put issues on the table that people don't want to discuss and their reactions have been vehement. As with Hitler's Willing Executioners, when things died down one found that the book transformed the way people ask questions about the Nazi past and the German people's participation in it. It led to new research programs in the field. Once tempers die down, this book will leave a mark as well. Even if people don't answer all the questions exactly the way I do, the questions are now on the table.
Q: One of our most popular presidents, FDR, apparently chose to ignore what was happening to Jews in Germany and surrounding countries during the war. What justification can be made for this?
A: There is no justification for it. We must all be subjected to proper moral scrutiny using universal principles. Roosevelt, and the Allies in general, need to have a moral reckoning done. But even if Roosevelt didn't do many things he should have done to help Jews during the war, he - unlike the Church in Germany, Slovakia, Croatia and France and many other countries - did not support, legitimize or take active part in the persecution, as many in the Church did. So the moral reckoning would yield different findings and conclusions in this case. In mass murder after mass murder, genocide after genocide, those who are not direct participants, those in bystander countries, have typically not raised their hands or their voices to help those being slaughtered. Nation-states and their leaders are typically egoistic, they care only about their self-understood interest and they are not moral actors. We need to have serious moral discussion, not the sound bites of talk shows, in our public life because we need to pressure our leaders to become more moral in their actions.
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