A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 362 pp. $25.00 Daniel Goldhagen raises a fundamental moral challenge in this volume which no sensitive person, especially a Catholic, can ignore. Why did the Catholic Church not respond to Hitler's genocidal attack on the Jews of Europe with greater protest and compassion? He rightly argues that Christianity has presented itself as a religion of love. But any manifestation of this tradition of love and concern appeared to vanish during the Holocaust era, especially with regard to the Jews. Regrettably, Goldhagen responds to this challenge with an analysis that is extremely weak in its use of primary and secondary sources and which is resplendent with totally exaggerated argumentation on almost every page. In short, this is one of the worst of the several books on the Holocaust to appear in recent years. Goldhagen's previous major work, Hitler's Willing Executioners, came in for significant scholarly criticism (and deservedly so), but it at least was based on a comprehensive analysis of sources. In A Moral Reckoning Goldhagen shows a disregard (whether deliberate or uninformed) of important primary and secondary sources. In the first place, while criticizing the failure of the. Vatican to open fully its World War II archives, something a number of Catholic scholars and bishops have urged and which in fact is beginning to occur, he fails to engage in any significant way the eleven volumes of documents released by the Vatican during the pontificate of Paul VI. Nor does he refer to the analyses of this documentation by the Jesuit archivists who assembled this material. One can surely critique the interpretations of this material by the likes of Robert Graham, S.J. and Pierre Blet, S.J. But one cannot totally ignore this documentary evidence and their analyses (Blet's in particular) as Goldhagen does. One may find serious flaws in the way Graham and Blet have handled the evidence, as I personally have, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand. Goldhagen also neglects other important material, relying instead on certain secondary sources which are more popular in tone and which have been shown deficient in many areas on the scholarly level. One such example is James Carroll's Constantine's Sword. On the primary source level, there are the important reflections of the late Gehart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress. Riegner was a central player in the international effort to save Jews, working out of his Geneva office. While Riegner's complete memoirs may not yet have been published when Goldhagen was at work on this volume, preliminary shorter versions have been out in published form for at least a decade. Riegner does not hesitate to criticize Vatican policies during the Nazi era. But he nuances his critique with examples of positive interventions (especially in Hungary) by Pins XII whom Goldhagen flays in a totally unbalanced way in this volume. As for secondary material, little is made by Goldhagen of the perceptive writings of Canadian historian Michael Marrus on Pins XII and the Vatican during the Nazi period. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".