A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair Book

From the internationally renowned author of the best-selling Hitlerâ??s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust comes this penetrating moral inquiry into the Catholic Churchâ??s role in the Holocaust that goes beyond anything previously written on the subject.Daniel Jonah Goldhagen cuts through the historical and moral fog to lay out the full extent of the Catholic Churchâ??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 Churchâ??s and the Popeâ??s complicity in the persecution of the Jews goes much deeper than has been previously understood. The Churchâ??s leaders were fully aware of the persecution. They did not speak out and urge resistance. Instead, they supported many aspects of it. Some clergy even took part in the mass murder.But Goldhagen goes further. He develops a precise way to assess the Church and its clergyâ??s culpability, which was more extensive and varied than has been supposed. He then devotes the largest part of the book to proposing a new and fuller understanding of restitution, including moral restitution, and shows that the Church has, even according to its own doctrine, an unacknowledged duty of repair. He explores this duty, analyzes the Churchâ??s tactics of evasion, and delineates all that the Church must do to redress the harm it inflicted on Jews and to heal itself.Brilliantly researched and reasoned, A Moral Reckoning is a pathbreaking book of profound, and far-reaching, importance.Read More