Luke Timothy Johnson is a bright light in the current crop of Catholic intellectuals. He's the author of a couple of good, brief useful books that function as helpful answers to the highly self-impressed and risible
Jesus Seminar:
The Real Jesus and
Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel.(As well as many other works on the New Testament).
In the current issue of Commonweal, Johnson offers some thoughts on the current state of Catholicism and the Holocaust discussions, prompted, of course, by Goldhagen's screed in The New Republic. He calls for calm, honest scholarship, and whatever degree of objectivity that can be achieved in regard to such a painful era of history. And he calls for this with some rather direct words to all the most recent participants in the discussions, from Goldhagen to Andrew Sullivan, James Carroll and Leon Wieseltier. And the Pope. And Cardinal Ratzinger:
Letter to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: Be quiet for a while. Your recent statements (Dominus Iesus, for example) have only made things worse, as Wieseltier's response makes clear. Don't make any more proclamations...Certainly Jews don't need a Vatican functionary explaining their place in God's plan...
Letter to James Carroll and Andrew Sullivan and Leon Wieseltier: Gentlemen, get over yourselves. James, get over your mother, get over your father, get over Vietnam, get over the way everyone kept the truth from you for so long. This is not about you. Andrew and Leon, get over the bad things people said to you when you were kids. This is not about you, either....
Letter to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Try to tone it down. Making yourself responsible for a "historical moral reckoning" leads to shrillness. You've taken on too big a task for an ordinary mortal, or any collection of mortals. As I remember, both our traditions insist that God is judge....
Another thing: don't lean too heavily on James Carroll. He's not much of a historian, and he is even less of a theologian.
Heh.
Commonweal trucks in that wicked thing called "frames", so it's a trick to get to this piece. Go to the Commonweal site and click on the cover of the current issue. You'll see it.
Correction: Thanks to Eve Tushnet for giving me (and you) a more direct link: here.