New (and Old) Perspectives on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust

Recently there has been a flurry of publications reviewing the controversy of the Catholic response to the Holocaust. Despite an unchanging documentary record, all of these interventions have produced vastly differing conclusions. This article attempts to account for this range of historiographic perspectives, and uncovers a great diversity of philosophical and methodological approaches to the study of history, and deeper controversies regarding the meaning of the Church and Christianity in the twentieth century. It is therefore argued that the controversy over the Catholic Church and the Holocaust masks a much wider disagreement about the Church, history and, in the final instance, the meaning of the Holocaust for the contemporary world.