A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Alfred A. Knopf. 352 pages. $25.

Over the last several years, there has been a run of books examining the conduct of the Roman Catholic Church during the Holocaust, much of it focusing on the apparent silence of Pope Pius XII in the face of genocide.

Many of these works have added valuable insight and historical documentation to what critics hold is a sad chapter in the church's history. Unfortunately, A Moral Reckoning does neither.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a professor of European Studies at Harvard University, writes this volume as a follow-up to his 1996 work, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, in which he argued that contrary to previous portrayals of a German populace that cooperated with the Nazi genocide only under coercion, the average German actively supported and often gleefully carried out the killing.

In this latest volume, Goldhagen turns to the role of the Catholic Church in laying the groundwork for the Holocaust through centuries of preaching anti-Semitism, and then once the killing started, its failure to act or speak out against the genocide. He sets out in three sections of the book to dispassionately analyze what the church did and did not do during the Holocaust, to what extent it is culpable and what it needs to do to redeem itself.

The first section, in which he lays out his historical case, is the weakest. There is nothing new here. Goldhagen relies instead on the work of others, most notably the more recent work that has been published, including John Cornwell's controversial Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, Susan Zuccotti's Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy, and James Carroll's Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews. He appears not to have consulted the 12-volume official publication of a selection of documents related to the church's activities during World War II, which is in French, and relied instead on Pierre Blet's one-volume summary in English, Pius XII and the Second World War.

Goldhagen too easily states as fact that Pius XII was an anti-Semite, with most of his evidence based on Cornwell's citation from a letter when the pontiff was a papal diplomat in Germany before the war and referred to a Communist insurrectionist as a Jew who was "Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly."

Goldhagen's argument also suffers from overstatement. His contention that the church has much to answer has merit, and his critique of the Vatican's contention -- that it historically harbored a religious "anti-Judaism," but is innocent of anti-Semitism, which it holds is pagan in origin -- is on target.

But his efforts are marred by statements like the Catholic Church "harbored antisemitism at its core, as an integral part of its doctrine, its theology and its liturgy." If anti-Semitism is at the core of the Catholic Church, it is beyond redemption.

Goldhagen does hold, however, that the Catholic Church can and must be redeemed, and he lays out several steps to accomplish this. First, it must renounce papal infallibility, a major obstacle to seeking the truth and admitting error. It must repudiate its supercessionism that in any way assumes Christianity has supplanted Judaism. It must embrace true religious pluralism, acknowledging that salvation is not limited to the Catholic Church. And it must purge its Scripture of its numerous anti-Semitic references.

Goldhagen's demands are so radical that they are unlikely to foster much serious discussion within the church. But his voice adds to a chorus demanding greater accountability.

John Rivera has been the religion reporter for The Sun since April 1997. He covered Pope John Paul II during his visit to Baltimore in 1995 and on his trip to Cuba. He earned a master's degree in theology at Washington Theological Union.