They’re back. The anti- and pro-Goldhagen polemicists are already taking up their positions and firing away at each other. The anti camp is split on Pius XII. American Catholic scholar Michael Novak defends the pontiff against the “transparent tendentiousness” of Goldhagen’s argument, insisting he ignores considerable evidence that the pontiff worked to save Jews. Columnist Andrew Sullivan, who responded to Goldhagen in The New Republic, concedes that “most defenses of [Pius XII] are weak.” But they are unified in their outrage at what they claim is Goldhagen’s frontal assault on the church. “For Goldhagen, the cross and the swastika are interchangeable,” Sullivan writes. “This strikes me as not only offensive, but deeply dangerous.” Adds Novak: “What Goldhagen calls for is nothing less than the extermination of the church as it now is and has been since the beginning.”
Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic’s literary editor, rebuked Sullivan for “slandering the messenger” by calling him anti-Catholic because of his argument. “The suggestion that it is anti-Catholic is a cheap attempt to shut the mind down.” Wieseltier is Jewish, but Jews man both sides of this debate–as was the case with “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” Writing in the conservative National Review, David Klinghoffer accused Goldhagen of “pressing on us a notion of collective, inherited guilt for non-Jews.” Rabbi David Rosen of the American Jewish Committee criticized Goldhagen’s “unconcealed antagonism against the Catholic Church.”
This is just the warm-up. Goldhagen will publish a new book this fall. Its title: “A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church During the Holocaust and Today.” His opponents are probably already reloading so they can immediately unleash their next salvos. Stay tuned. There’s plenty of reckoning still to come.
