Taking On Catholic Guilt.(Daniel Jonah Goldhagen)(Brief Article)

He's back. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the author of the 1996 best seller "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," which ignited a furious debate among Holocaust scholars, is now tackling an even larger theme: the entire question of Roman Catholic guilt. In a 27,000-word essay published recently in The New Republic called "What Would Jesus Have Done?"--ostensibly a review of several books about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust--he unleashes an avalanche of highly emotional, fully loaded rhetorical questions that point to two conclusions: that Pius XII was "a Nazi collaborator" comparable to Petain and Laval in Vichy; and that the church's claim to moral authority, from its earliest days to the present, is discredited by its virulent anti-Semitism.

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 ...