Less than two weeks after Cornell (N.Y.) University and Rutgers University Law School in Camden, N.J., released the 1945 document, “The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches,” author Daniel J. Goldhagen wrote a cover story in the Jan. 21 issue of The New Republic enTITLEd “What Would Jesus Have Done?”

In the article, Goldhagen denounces the actions of the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII during and after the Holocaust.

Wrote Goldhagen: “For centuries the Catholic Church, this pan-European institution of world-hegemonic aspirations, the central spiritual, moral, and instructional institution of European civilization, harbored anti-semitism at its core, as an integral part of its doctrine, its theology, and its liturgy.”

Goldhagen concluded his article by referring to the question in its TITLE: “And no matter what a person's response to the question of what Jesus would have done, each answer leads to another unavoidable question: What should be the future of this Church that has not fully faced its antisemitic history and still has anti-semitic elements embedded in its doctrine and theology, and still claims to be the only path to salvation?”

Leading Catholic and Jewish scholars of the Holocaust both agree that Goldhagen's attack has little historical substance.

One problem: The recently released “Nazi Master Plan” document, compiled in 1945 by Jewish expatriate Franz Neumann for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services as preparation for the Nuremberg war crimes trials, comprehensively substantiates earlier documentation of Nazi persecution of the Church.

Jesuit Father Vincent Lapamarda , director of the Holocaust Collection at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., took issue with Goldhagen's argument that the Church would have resisted the slaughter had it been of Christians rather than Jews. “He implies that the Church would not have remained ‘silent’ had the Nazis, as in the case of the Jews, decided to kill millions of Christians,” said Lapamarda. “In fact, if you study what he is saying and what happened at that time, you can … turn the tables on Goldhagen and point out how evenhanded was the way in which the Pope approached the challenge arising from the threat by the Nazis to both Christians and Jews.”

Dr. Eugene Fisher, director for Catholic-Jewish Relations for the U.S. bishops' conference, said that Goldhagen had gone so far in his attack that “[he] is going to be blasted primarily by Jewish scholars.”

Michael Marrus, dean of the School of Graduate Studies and professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto, disputed Goldhagen's analysis in an e-mail sent to Tom Nash of Catholics United for the Faith.

Marrus served on the six-member commission set up in 1999 by the Vatican and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations to study the Vatican's archival material relating to the wartime activities of Pius XI and Pius XII. (The committee suspended its work last summer after Marrus and its two other Jewish members complained the committee was not getting sufficient access to relevant archival material.)

Marrus, who is often critical himself of Catholic policy and Pius XII, wrote that Goldhagen's piece was “an unrelieved, bitter attack on his subject, a sneering disparagement of other analysts for moral equivocation, a dismissal of most contemporary scholarship, and a hunger for the black-and-white, the simplest of historical explanations.”