Did the Roman Catholic Church’s cen­turies- long dehu­man­iz­ing of Jews cause the Holo­caust? Cer­tain­ly not, says retired Judge Antho­ny J. Sci­oli­no. But the Church’s his­to­ry of scape­goat­ing, demo­niz­ing, per­se­cut­ing, and denounc­ing Jews sure­ly pre­pared the polit­i­cal land­scape of Europe for the seeds of hatred that Adolf Hitler brought to fruition in the sys­tem­at­ic slaugh­ter of six mil­lion Jews.

In The Holo­caust, the Church and the Law of Unin­tend­ed Con­se­quences: How Chris­t­ian Anti-Judaism Spawned Nazi Anti-Semi­tism, Judge Sci­oli­no says the Nazi war machine faced lit­tle direct resis­tance from either the Vat­i­can or the Catholics of Europe because Jews had been dis­missed as ​“Christ killers” and as sub­hu­man beings for cen­turies. It was, he writes, a clas­sic case of the Law of Unin­tend­ed Consequences.

Sci­oli­no, an ordained dea­con in the Roman Catholic Church with a grad­u­ate degree in the­ol­o­gy, approach­es the 20th cen­tu­ry’s great­est crime with a judge’s skill at eval­u­at­ing evi­dence. He has mar­shaled an impres­sive array of schol­ar­ly research and pri­ma­ry sources to con­nect insti­tu­tion­al­ized hos­til­i­ty to the Jew­ish peo­ple with the ​“unin­tend­ed con­se­quence” the world knows as the Holocaust.