THIS STORY REACHES its climax in Germany, where, in the twentieth century, the last act of Europe’s hatred of Jews was played out. The Catholic Church is faulted for its silence in the face of the Final Solution, even for its tacit sponsorship of the virulent Nazi antisemitism that drove the machinery of genocide. But our inquiry must go deeper, to ask how the Church’s choices led to consequences that put Jews as Jews at risk, and to what further Church choices did those consequences lead, and how did they affect the fate of. . . Jews as Jews?

Thinking of the care with which social scientists distinguish between “strong causality” and “weak causality,” with which philosophers distinguish between “necessary causes” and “sufficient causes,” I have assumed all along in this book that it would be simplistic to argue that Hitler was “caused” by Christianity. There was nothing deterministic in the coming of Nazism, as if it were the inevitable and preordained result of factors beginning with the deicide charge and proceeding through the Crusades, the Inquisition, and finally the intermingling of antimodernism and antisemitism. Without this strain in Europe’s past, Nazism, a fascist movement organized around Jew hatred, would not have occurred, of course, but history is not dominoes in a line, and we have seen repeatedly how this story could have gone another way.

The peculiar evil of Adolf Hitler was not predictable, nor was Christianity his only antecedent. He was as much a creature of the racist, secular, colonizing empire builders who preceded him on the world stage as he was of the religion into which he was born, and which he parodied. But in truth, the racist colonizers, before advancing behind the standards of nations and companies, had marched behind the cross.

When “the Church as such,” as opposed to its “sinful members,” is absolved of any guilt in relation to Nazism, and when what Christian failures there were are reduced to sins of omission, as if the only crime were silence, then the real meaning of this history is being deflected. However modern Nazism was, it planted its roots in the soil of age-old Church attitudes and a nearly unbroken chain of Church-sponsored acts of Jew hatred. However pagan Nazism was, it drew its sustenance from groundwater poisoned by the Church’s most solemnly held ideology – its theology.

In this narrative, we have watched as the ambivalence that followed Augustine was transformed into a murderous paranoia, a fear of Jewish blood invisibly corrupting a host society. That society’s attempt to purge itself of “foreign” but parasitic elements, as happened with the conversos, involves a different – and far more lethal – kind of hatred than hatred of the mere other, which is how Christian anti-Judaism is more often discussed. That this diabolical hatred of Jews ran mostly below the surface of “normal” hatred does not change the fact that it was essential to what Nazism inherited from the Church. That is why attempts to exonerate “the Church as such,” or even to reduce the Church's failure to what it did not do between 1933 and 1945, are so evasive and, finally, immoral.

To imagine that the Catholic Church was craven in the face of the challenge posed by Adolf Hitler, that it failed to oppose him out of cowardice, is to ignore, as we shall see, the brave history of Church resistance in the not too distant past – this Church was not cowardly. Nor does the Church’s anxiety about Bolshevism adequately account for its relatively more benign stance toward Nazism. Not even the other usual explanation, that the Church was too concerned with its own power and prerogatives to risk defending the Jews, is enough to account for what happened. No: Nazism, by tapping into a deep, ever-fresh reservoir of Christian hatred of Jews, was able to make an accomplice of the Catholic Church in history’s worst crime, even though, by then, it was the last thing the Church consciously wanted to be.

By focusing so much of the Jewish-Catholic dialogue on the question of Pius XII, the broader question of a massive Catholic failure is deflected. One example of this surfaces in the work of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose book Hitler’s Willing Executioners caused such a sensation in 1996. He deals extensively with the failure of the Christian churches in Germany. Following the historian Guenter Lewy, he shifts the focus from what the churches did not do – the “silence” – toward their positive role in the Nazis’ genocidal project, that of supplier of crucial records. Goldhagen writes, “The foundational element of the Nuremberg Laws was the regime’s capacity to distinguish and demonstrate the extent of a person’s Jewish ancestry, to know who was a Jew. Enforcement therefore depended upon the use of the genealogical records in the possession of local churches.” Lewy quoted a priest who defined this identification activity as a “service to the people,” but that was in 1934. Once the function – and the result – of this role became clear, did the churches stop performing it? Lewy says no. “The very question of whether the Church should lend its help to the Nazi state in sorting out people of Jewish descent was never debated.” A few heroes among the clergy, including Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, exploited the Church’s function as a racial-certification agent to provide false identity documents to Jews, but the institutional Church never renounced this role. “The cooperation of the Church in this matter continued right through the war years,” Lewy writes, “when the price of being Jewish was no longer dismissal from a government job and loss of livelihood, but deportation and outright physical destruction.” This fact leads Goldhagen to include certain Church officials among the agents of destruction. “What defines a perpetrator?” he asks. “A perpetrator is anyone who knowingly contributed in some intimate way to the mass slaughter of Jews . . . Perpetrators include railroad engineers and administrators who knew that they were knew that their participation in the identification of Jews as non-Christians would lead to the deaths of the Jews.”

Pope Pius XII, without violating his tactic of diplomatic prudence, could have quietly instructed parish priests throughout Europe to destroy baptismal records once their diabolical function became clear. He never did.

Critics of Pius XII, like Hochhuth, have accounted for his failure to challenge Hitler more directly by charging him with cowardice, or with Nazi sympathies, but his biographer John Cornwell shows that the former was never the case, and by the late 1930s neither was the latter. Pius XII’s courage and his contempt for Hitler were demonstrated by his active participation, early in his pontificate, in a plot to overthrow the German dictator. From late 1939 through March 1940, Pius XII served as a channel of communication between a group of anti-Hitler German army chiefs, led by General Ludwig Beck, and the British government, represented by Britain’s Vatican minister, Francis d’Arcy Osborne. The Germans indicated their readiness to stage a coup and end the war, but only with assurances from London that the Munich settlement would be honored. For whatever reason, the British failed to pick up on the initiative, but not before the plotters and the pope himself had acted in ways that Hitler, had he learned of them, would have savagely punished. This episode leads Cornwell to a firm conclusion about Pacelli [birth name of Pius XII]: “Pusillanimity and indecisiveness – shortcomings that would be cited to extenuate his subsequent silence and inaction in other matters – were hardly in his nature.”

So what accounts not only for the silence of Pius XII, but for Eugenio Pacelli’s complicity with Hitler in the early years? The early years offer the clue, for it was then that Pacelli’s determination to put the accumulation and defense of papal power above everything else showed itself for what it was. Above the fate of the Jews, certainly, but also above the fate of the Catholic Church elsewhere in Europe. “Was there something in the modern ideology of papal power,” Cornwell asks, “that encouraged the Holy See to acquiesce in the face of Hitler’s evil, rather than oppose it?” The answer to this awful question, it seems increasingly clear, is yes, which makes even more problematic, too, the Vatican’s current wish to make a saint of Pius IX, whose claim to infallibility and whose “Syllabus of Errors” made him the supreme modern ideologue of papal power. It almost goes without saying that Pacelli would have shared the broad antisemitism of his culture, the Christian contempt for Judaism that would not be repudiated until Vatican II. But the pursuit of papal power transporting Jews to their deaths. They include any Church officials who in the modern era had come at the expense of Jews, and that too is part of what led to Europe’s acquiescence before the Final Solution. We just recalled how this played out in the Roman ghetto, but it affected theology as well. When the “Syllabus of Errors” (1864) was defined by a leading Catholic journal as a set of detested “modern ideas . . . of Jewish when European liberal movements in politics and education were denounced as a demonic Jewish conspiracy; when Church organs led the way in branding Jews simultaneously as revolutionaries and financiers; and when all of this is centered in vengeful Catholic policies toward Jews in the Roman ghetto, under the pope’s windows, a far graver issue arises than the silence of one man. The question rather becomes, How did a succession of popes prepare the way for the “silence” of an entire civilization?

“The Pope’s silence,” Father Edward Flannery wrote, “is better seen as the apex of a triangle that rested on the much wider acquiescence of the German episcopacy, his most immediate ‘constituents,’ which, in turn, rested on the still wider apathy or collusion with Nazism of German Catholics – or Christians – themselves so ill prepared for any better response by accustomed antisemitic attitudes so often aided and abetted in the past by the churches themselves. The triangle continues to widen, as we include a Europe and a Western world, impregnated with an indifference, if not an antipathy, to Jews.”

If Pius XII had done what his critics, in hindsight, wish him to have done – excommunication of Hitler, revocation of the concordat, “a flaming protest against the massacre of the Jews,” in Lewy’s phrase – it would have been only a version of what Pius IX did in 1875 against Bismarck, and in 1871 against Garibaldi when he excommunicated all Italians who cooperated with the new Italian state, even if only by voting in its elections. As before, Catholics would have had to choose between a Church-hating government and the Church. But in the 1930s, there is reason to believe, vast numbers of Catholic Germans, and perhaps other Catholic Europeans as well – those who had celebrated the Reichskonkordat, and those who had baited the Dreyfusards – would have preferred Hitler to Pius XII. “Shall I bring them into conflicts of conscience?” Pius asked, referring to Catholic Germans, in explaining why he could not protest the extermination of Jews. Because of the “dark symbiosis” of ancient Christian Jew-hatred and modern racism, Hitler’s anti-Jewish program, even at its extreme, was simply not that offensive to the broad population of Catholics. As the scholar of antisemitism Léon Poliakov put it, “The Vatican’s silence only reflected the deep feeling of the Catholic masses of Europe.” And in fact, the Vatican’s preference for its own power, as it pursued its vision of an absolute papacy, was only a version of the choice countless Europeans made to pursue their own welfare without regard for those outside the circle of their concern – the Jews.

That choice had been nearly two thousand years in the making. It is the last consequence of the long story this book has told, from the Seamless Robe of Christ to the cross of Constantine to La Croix to Kreuz und Adler, to the cross at Auschwitz. This story is itself the source of the pope’s silence, and the meaning of it. This is the moral failure of Catholicism, and of the civilization of which it is so centrally a part. The pope’s silence is better seen, that is, not as the indictment but as the evidence.