A MORAL RECKONING: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Knopf, 362 pp.

Forty years have passed since the appearance of Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy -- a long and rather talky play exploring how much Pope Pius XII knew concerning the Nazi genocide against the Jews (quite a bit) and what he did in response (not very much). Originally published in Germany, it was quickly translated into various languages, setting off a storm of international controversy. Indeed, there was even a collection of essays called The Storm Over 'The Deputy,' in which intellectuals debated questions of historical accuracy and moral responsibility. The argument spilled over into the streets. Quite literally. In a few European cities where the play was staged, there were riots outside theaters.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen makes only a passing reference to Hochhuth in his new book. Yet he strives, page after page, to evoke the same passionate attention to history - to the almost unimaginable enormity of the Catholic church's moral collapse in the face of evil - that The Deputy once generated. A Moral Reckoning is a very determined effort to make lightning strike the same place twice.

Or, rather, three times. The furor over Hochhuth's play was mild compared to the one, a few years ago, over Hitler's Willing Executioners, in which Goldhagen argued that no coercion was required to persuade Germans to kill their Jewish neighbors. The Nazis were the culmination of what Goldhagen called the "eliminationist" current in German culture: the deeply embedded desire that society be purged of the Jews through one means or another, whether by conversion, expulsion or extermination.

Without the enthusiastic support of ordinary citizens born of this eliminationist mentality, argued Goldhagen, the complex system of industrialized mass murder could never have functioned. In the ensuing uproar, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas (perhaps the book's most distinguished defender) said that Goldhagen had specified the most radical element of evil in the Third Reich. Namely, that people did what they did, not because they were forced to, but because they saw it as a means to a greater good.

In A Moral Reckoning, Goldhagen extends his thesis to a new sector -- seeing the Catholic church throughout the 1930s and '40s as fatally compromised by anti-Semitism that left it, as an institution, complicit with genocide. While acknowledging that faithful Catholics did oppose the regime, sometimes making heroic efforts to protect Jews, Goldhagen argues that they did so without the sanction of the church itself. The papal speeches and Vatican pronouncements sometimes quoted as brave condemnations of the Nazis never quite manage to mention the persecution of the Jews; the priests and bishops who gave racial murder their blessing were never excommunicated.

In the decades since Hochhuth dramatized the matter (providing almost a hundred pages of documentation in an afterword), historians and theologians have piled up a sizable body of research and commentary regarding the church's policies, actions and failures throughout this period. It would be difficult to add anything new to this mass of work. And in fact, Goldhagen doesn't.

He simply copies information from other scholars - not always accurately, as a number of them have complained. (The first printing of the German edition had to be recalled. In the caption to a photo, Goldhagen said it showed Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich attending a Nazi rally -- only the person shown wasn't Faulhaber, nor was it a Nazi rally.) A Moral Reckoning is not a work of research but of polemic, driven by fury at the Vatican statement We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah (1998), a document that Goldhagen (among others) regards as self-criticism in the interest of self-exoneration.

Goldhagen's writing is bloated with rhetorical questions and almost unimaginably redundant. It resembles some interminable letter-to-the-editor by a man too outraged to develop an argument, only to exhaust it, and the reader,  by repetition of his points.

And I say this as someone who agrees with many of those points. The various alibis given over the years -- that the Vatican didn't know what was happening, for example, or that its seeming public silence about the fate of the Jews was a front to cover behind-the-scenes actions on their behalf -- collapse under the weight of historical evidence. The fact that Pope Pius XII may yet be elevated to sainthood is enough to make an atheist want to convert, just to be able to leave the Church in disgust.

The real problem with A Moral Reckoning is not its occasional factual errors, nor its stridency-fostered stylistic mediocrity. Rather, it derives from the expectation that the Church, to meet its "unfulfilled duty of repair" (as the subtitle has it), must denounce not simply its history of virulent anti-Semitism - enormous as that is -- but what Goldhagen interprets as an "eliminationist" streak at the very core of the faith. For Goldhagen, Christianity is tainted almost from its inception.

Now, the role of religious beliefs, of whatever sort, in inciting and rationalizing mass slaughter is, by now, well-established. But if certain disobliging passages about the Jews in the Christian scriptures are, in essence, anti-Semitic -- as Goldhagen would have it -- then so are Moses and the prophets, in equal measure. Nobody denounces the Hebrew people quite like Jehovah in one of his irritable moods; and that temper simply carried over to the authors of the New Testament (the founding documents, that is, of a Jewish messianic sect).

If Goldhagen wants to trace "eliminationism" back to its theological roots, he might want to study the Book of Joshua. That blood-drenched chronicle of how Canaan was delivered to God's people is among the earliest documents of the evil carried out by people who felt no ambivalence about the righteousness of genocide. ("And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.")

The response of the Catholic church to the Nazis was abject. So Goldhagen's new book shows, like better ones before it. But then again, all of human history, as Byron said, is the devil's scripture.