A Moral Reckoning

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 was much deeper than has been understood. The Church's leaders were fully aware of the persecutions. They did not speak out and urge resistance. Instead, they supported many aspects of the persecution. Some clergy even took part in the mass murder. But Goldhagen goes further. He develops a new, precise way for assessing the Church and its clergy's culpability, which was more extensive and varied than has been supposed. He then shows that the Church has, even according to its own doctrine, an unacknowledged duty of repair. He explores it, analyzes the Church's tactics of evasion, and delineates all that the Church must do to repair the harm it inflicted on Jews, and to heal itself. Brilliantly researched and reasoned, A Moral Reckoning is a path-breaking book of profound, and potentially explosive, importance. - Publisher.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.