BEWARE THE UNTEACHABLE

Daniel Goldhagen

One of the reasons that participation on a message board like Steve Ray's can be very frustrating is that some of the participants are simply unteachable. An anti-Catholic fundamentalist Protestant may spout some slanderous error about Catholic faith, or practice, or history. He is then corrected. And corrected. And corrected. He may go on to some other topic. And another. And yet another. Eventually, though, he will make his way back to the issue on which he had been repeatedly corrected, as if the episode had never occurred at all.

The Weekly Standard published the other day a review of an upcoming book by Daniel Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. The reviewer spends some time pointing out the numerous factual errors in the book. And he notes that Goldhagen has already been corrected about most of them, to no avail:

.... 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.

(Thanks Dale.)