page_title: A Moral Reckoning
section_title: Critical reception
hierarchical_section_title: A Moral Reckoning / Critical reception
caption_attribution_description: Title: Papst Pius XI.&#160; Extra information: Porträt von Papst Pius XI.&#160; People in the image: Pius XI.: Papst, # Additional information: * Ritratto di papa Pio XI, 1922. For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Factual corrections and alternative descriptions are encouraged separately from the original description. Additionally errors can be reported at this page to inform the Bundesarchiv. Alemannisch&#160;| Boarisch&#160;| беларуская&#160;| беларуская (тарашкевіца)‎‎&#160;| català&#160;| čeština&#160;| Deutsch&#160;| English&#160;| Esperanto&#160;| español&#160;| français&#160;| हिन्दी&#160;| hrvatski&#160;| italiano&#160;| 한국어&#160;| magyar&#160;| македонски&#160;| Plattdüütsch&#160;| polski&#160;| português&#160;| română&#160;| русский&#160;| slovenčina&#160;| slovenščina&#160;| suomi&#160;| svenska&#160;| українська&#160;| 中文（简体）‎&#160;| 中文（繁體）‎&#160;| +/− Original historic description:
context_page_description: A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair is a 2003 book by the political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, previously the author of Hitler's Willing Executioners. Goldhagen examines the Roman Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust and offers a review of scholarship in English addressing what he argues is antisemitism throughout the history of the Church, which he claims contributed substantially to the persecution of the Jews during World War II.
  Goldhagen recommends several significant steps that might be taken by the Church to make reparation for its alleged role. A Moral Reckoning received mixed reviews and was the subject of considerable controversy regarding allegations of inaccuracies and anti-Catholic bias.
context_section_description: Although A Moral Reckoning was favorably reviewed in The Spectator, Kirkus Reviews, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and given a generally favorable overview ahead of an interview in The Atlantic, it was also subject to substantial criticism, even among some of those reviewers who found aspects of the work praiseworthy. The International Social Science Review, which described the book as a "seminal work" and a "valuable introduction to and synthesis of the literature on church and state during the Holocaust", also indicated that the message of the book is "diluted by stylistic problems". The New York Times reviewer Geoffrey Wheatcroft praised Goldhagen's assembly of "an impressive body of evidence" but criticized his repetitiveness, his "misinterpreting the record" and his use of it to promote a particular view, which Wheatcroft deems appropriate for an advocate but reprehensible in a historian. Dietrich, whose review lauded Goldhagen for asking "many of the proper seminal questions", mirrored Wheatcroft's concerns about repetitiveness, misunderstandings and polemics, specifically stating: "The careful reader must closely read the footnotes since in many cases he contextually and theologically nuances his book's claims only there."
  John Cornwell, author of Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (1999), praised Daniel Goldhagen's "excellent job in exposing the propagandistic hagiography of recent defenders of Pius XII, especially their tendency to confuse diplomatic eulogy with historical fact", but said that Goldhagen errs in identifying a key Vatican figure as an antisemite, a misrepresentation he thinks "can only provide ammunition for the Pius XII lobby". The journalist Gritz noted that "[Goldhagen] does not cushion his criticisms of the Church in diplomatic language", and that "even philosophy professor John K. Roth, who favorably reviewed A Moral Reckoning in the Los Angeles Times, said that the adjectives "unpretentious ... indecisive ... moderate ... patient" do not come to mind when reading Goldhagen. Another book review in The New York Times said that A Moral Reckoning is an "impressive and disturbing bill of indictment against" the Roman Catholic Church, yet its imbalanced perspective results in "turning history into a kind of cudgel".
  In summer of 2002, before its publication, Ronald Rychlak, author of Hitler, the War, and the Pope, decried it as factually incorrect, releasing a lengthy catalog of corrections to Goldhagen's essay "What Would Jesus Have Done?" After the book's publication, Rychlak published a review in the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, again pointing out factual errors and criticizing the book's tone and conclusions. Following the book's publication, Rabbi Dalin and Joseph Bottum, later co-authors along with William Doino of The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII, in separate articles for The Weekly Standard denounced it as failing "to meet even the minimum standards of scholarship" and "filled with factual errors". In his review, Paul Collins indicated that the purpose of the book was undermined by poor editing, incoherence and redundancy. Mark Riebling of National Review, who described himself as an admirer of Goldhagen's first book, called A Moral Reckoning "a 352-page exercise in intellectual bad manners" and "a spree of intellectual wilding".
  In reply to the charge of historical inaccuracy, Daniel Goldhagen said that the "central contours" of A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (2002) are accurate, because the book's title and first page communicate its purpose of moral analysis, not historical analysis. He stated that he has invited to no avail European Church representatives to present their own historical account in discussing morality and reparation.
  Opponents labelled Goldhagen as a "anti-Catholic", as promoting an anti-Catholic agenda. Bottum wrote that its "errors of fact combine to create a set of historical theses about the Nazis and the Catholic Church so tendentious th
caption: Pope Pius XI
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "581", "Image ImageLength": "800", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "1", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "4", "Image XResolution": "50", "Image YResolution": "50", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2017:05:30 10:32:48", "Image Artist": "o.Ang.", "Image ExifOffset": "252", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "402", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4146", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "533", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "670"}