ZGram - 10/30/2002 - "Goldhagen smites a Pope"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

October 30, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

My readers will remember Daniel "Jonah" Goldhagen who diagnosed all 
Germans with an incurable  Antisemitic Gene in a previous book, 
"Hitler's Willing Executioners".  Here is a particularly odious 
German hater - but in the current crawl-on-your-belly-before-the-Jews 
political climate in the Fatherland, this creature was actually 
feted. 

Now he has done it again - this time by taking on the Catholics, 
which he and his tribe are going to regret, since the way they are 
behaving lately, soon they are going to need every friend. 

Read how the Book and Arts editor of the Weekly Standard is taking a 
strip out of "Jonah":

[START]

The Usefulness of Daniel Goldhagen
His new book attacking Pope Pius XII is filled with factual errors, providing
an opportunity for other anti-Catholic writers to claim the middle ground.

by J. Bottum

10/23/2002

J. Bottum, Books & Arts editor

IF YOU HAVEN'T been able to read all the writing about Pius XII, the Catholic
Church, and the Holocaust, you needn't feel too bad. Not even scholars in the
field have been able to keep up. By my count, there have been at least
fourteen books on the subject in the last three years, with the threat of
more to come.

Some of these run contrary to type. The very liberal Catholic Justus George
Lawler, for instance, constructs a witty and learned defense against Pius's
attackers in his recent "Popes and Politics." But mostly the books keep to
their origins. John Cornwell detests John Paul II and contemporary
Catholicism, so his book "Hitler's Pope" is an unrelenting bash at Pius and
the Church during World War II. Ralph McInerny is a conservative Catholic
philosopher and mystery writer, so his "The Defamation of Pius XII" is a
ceaseless defense. Garry Wills wants major reform in the Church today, so his
"Papal Sin" extends the attack to include the entire history of Catholicism.
James Carroll has extolled fashionable leftist causes since back in the days
when he embarrassed his Air Force general father by preaching against the
Vietnam War to a congregation of military officers, and guess which side
Carroll's book "Constantine's Sword" comes down on?

Into this flood of (mostly Catholic) works for and against Pius XII, there
will shortly splash Daniel Goldhagen's new book, "A Moral Reckoning: The Role
of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair."
David Dalin--who wrote a major essay on the Pius books in the February 26,
2001, issue of The Weekly Standard--will soon review the book in our pages,
but it's worth pointing out beforehand just how useful Goldhagen's book will
be to Pius's detractors.

That's not because the book is right, of course. It is filled with so many
simple errors of fact that it's positively embarrassing to read. These errors
of fact combine to create a set of historical theses about the Nazis and the
Catholic Church so tendentious that not even Pius XII's most determined
belittlers have dared to assert them. And, in Goldhagen's final chapters, the
bad historical theses unite to form a complete anti-Catholicism the likes of
which we haven't seen since the elderly H.G. Wells decided Catholicism was
the root of all evil and wrote a book whose marvelous title shows the true
flavor of curmudgeonly nuttiness: "Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman
Catholic Church (An Author's Frank Convictions about the Meddling Policies of
the Church from its First Tie-up with the Emperor Constantine to its Present
Alliance with the Nazi-Fascist-Shinto Axis)."

But Goldhagen's "Frank Convictions about the Meddling Policies"--I'm sorry; I
mean Goldhagen's "A Moral Reckoning"--will nonetheless prove a useful book,
not despite its errors, but because of them. This is a great opportunity for
those who've written previous books against Pius XII. The reviews of Susan
Zuccotti's "Under His Very Windows," for instance, were quite negative,
accusing her of slanting the evidence to support her prejudged anti-Pius
thesis. But now Goldhagen offers her a chance to claim middle-of-the-road
credentials. "How can you say I'm an extremely prejudiced opponent of Pius?"
Zuccotti can ask. "Daniel Goldhagen is the prejudiced extreme; I'm a
moderate." For Garry Wills, James Carroll, and John Cornwell--all under
considerable attack for their anti-Catholic Catholicism--no gift could be
more timely. A prediction for the coming weeks: All these authors will review
Goldhagen's book, and all of them will trash it--while using it along
precisely the lines I suggest. Poor Danny Goldhagen. He's going to be beat up
one side and down the other; his natural opponents attacking him and his
natural allies joining in.

STILL, you can't say he doesn't deserve it. For reviewers looking for obvious
errors with which to get their negative reviews ginned up, I offer the
following, just a small sampling of mistakes found in a first skimming of the
book.

(1) Thanks to a court case in Germany, which ordered Goldhagen's publisher to
recall the book, the most notorious error is the caption on page 178, which
identifies a photo as "Cardinal Michael Faulhaber marches between rows of SA
men at a Nazi rally in Munich." Leave aside the fact that the man in the
picture isn't the Bavarian bishop Faulhaber but the papal nuncio Cesare
Orsenigo--also the fact that the city isn't Munich, but Berlin; and the fact
that it isn't a Nazi rally but a May Day parade for labor; and the fact that
the nuncio, as ex-officio dean of the diplomatic corps, was required to
attend dozens of such functions a month; and the fact that the year was 1934,
which was somewhat early for Goldhagen's point. Leaving all that aside, it's
the slander of Faulhaber that is particularly obscene. The Nazis hated
Faulhaber, as he hated them (1934 was one of the years, for instance, in
which they tried to have him assassinated). Even the Encyclopedia Britannica
describes the man as a hero of resistance to Hitler. Couldn't Goldhagen look
anything up?

(2) Goldhagen's apparent lack of scholarly languages consistently leads him
awry. I figure he must know German, but does he have the Italian, French, and
Latin necessary to undertake this work? His complete reliance on
English-language secondary sources suggests that he doesn't. The Italian
"stirpe," "I primi," "schiera," and "gruppo," are all given peculiar spins,
and there isn't a Latin phrase in the book that doesn't have an odd
translation.

(3) Goldhagen writes, "The most notorious camp [in Fascist Croatia] was
Jasenovac, where the Croats killed 200,000 Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies. Forty
thousand of them perished under the unusually cruel reign of 'Brother Satan,'
the Franciscan friar Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic. Pius XII neither
reproached nor punished him or the other priest-executioners during or after
the war." Oops. Since Filipovic-Majstorovic was executed by the Communists in
1945, it would have been somewhat difficult for Pius to have reproached him
after the war. And since he was expelled from the Franciscan order and
defrocked before he went to Jasenovac (becoming a loudly self-proclaimed
nonbeliever along the way), it would have been equally difficult for Pius to
punish him during the war.

(4) Goldhagen calls the American bishops' pastoral letter on the war in
November 1942 an "all but explicit rebuke of the Vatican." Poor Goldhagen.
This is how the strip-quotes in secondary sources lead would-be scholars
astray. The actual letter reads: "We recall the words of Pope Pius XII"; "We
urge the serious study of peace plans of Pope Pius XII"; "In response to the
many appeals of our Holy Father," etc.

(5) The Jewish ghetto in Rome was erected in 1556, not 1555. The Venice
ghetto in 1517, not 1516. Frankfurt in 1462, not 1460. And Vienna in 1626,
not 1570. (Four errors in one sentence is a record, even for "A Moral
Reckoning.")

ENOUGH. Goldhagen took a first swipe at this material in an unbearably long
essay in the New Republic earlier this year, and Ronald Rychlak (author of
"Hitler, the War and the Pope") wrote an almost equally long indictment of
Goldhagen's allegations in the June/July issue of First Things. As near as I
can tell, the only one of the errors Rychlak pointed out that Goldhagen has
corrected is his identification of the Danish king as Christian II instead of
Christian X.

As I say, no one is going to have trouble finding Goldhagen's mistakes. And
that's exactly the problem. By writing such an error-filled, anti-Catholic
diatribe as "A Moral Reckoning," Goldhagen makes what used to be the extreme
of public discourse look like middle ground--the middle ground that, on any
historical question, most of diffident, well-mannered America wants to
inhabit.

J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard.

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(Source: 
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/806rjxpb.asp 
)