CatholicPatriot:
Hello, I’m new here and joined in absolute need of a Catholic rebuttle to a webpage I came across.
I ask you not to visit this website if you are not ready for a shock
nobeliefs.com/nazis.htm
Meh, I’ve been a Catholic for just a few months now and I have no doubt that I’m where God wants me to be,( Baptized in the Roman Church but seperated from God when my mother married a Methodist who enrolled me in a Baptist school but came back when Pope John Paul II died ) but, quite unreadily, I stumbled across the webpage posted above. Well, my questions are
- If the Church supported the Nazis, did God? ( NO!, I am not a racist. I’m not even white and I utterly hate racism.)
- Were/are some Catholic leaders Nazis?
3.Did the Church support Nazis in the 1st place?
I hope I can read some answers that’ll put my soul to rest.
The Church in Germany was not unsupportive of the Party after 1940: Cardinal Bertram sat in the Reichstag as as a Party member. This was after the bishops had withdrawn the excommunication formerly in place for any Catholic voting for the Party: such a ban could hardly remain, given the Concordat of 1934.
Some prominent Party members were Catholics at least in cultural origin: Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich. Von Papen was a practising Catholic. Others, such as Bormann, were Lutherans - again, in cultural origin. As for people like Julius Streicher, Hans Frank, and other second-rankers and members of the entourages of various more prominent Nazis, I don’t know
It’s essential to realise that whereas we might tend to look back at the war and see it as intimately connected with the attempt to exterminate the whole of European Jewry, this was not how matters looked in 1940: the German Catholic bishops were far more more concerned with the well- being and survival of the Catholic Church, than with the sufferings of the Jews - for whom, in any case, they had little sympathy, as the Jews were popularly associated with Communism, and of course, “Deicide”. A contemporary account of the “Persecution of the [RC] Church in the Third Reich”, which ends in 1940, says not a word about the Kristallnacht or the other miseries suffered by the Jews: only about Catholic troubles.
And whereas Communism had been condemned in 1937 by Pius XI as a “satanic plague”, Nazism, for all its less pleasant activities, had won great popularity in Germany: it was nationalist, anti-Jewish, anti-Communist, authoritarian, placed great emphasis on discipline and order, and promised national renewal after the humiliation (due, naturally, to Jewish treachery - Hitler’s fantasy of a “stab in the back”) of the peace settlement that followed WW1. Hitler was regarded as a national saviour, almost as a Christ-figure - nothing less. And in 1940, the Nazi Messiah did very well militarily: France, Belgium, Holland, all collapsed: partly because of treason, as in Belgium.
Hitler was only one of many Fascist leaders - Salazar, Franco, Mussolini, & their fellow-Fascists in Brazil, Croatia, Romania, the UK, the USA, weren’t all pariahs: that came later. But he was arguably the most charismatic - some how. The Papacy was not unfriendly to Fascism (unless it disagreed with the CC) - Pius XI was conspicuous in not condemning the rape of Ethiopia by Mussolini; and Mussolini was on excellent terms with Archbishop Schuster of Milan (who was beatified a few years ago).
As for Hitler’s anti-Semitism: lots of people hated or suspected or despised Jews - so his measures against them did not always meet with international condemnation. The
Civilta Cattolica (the semi-official organ of the Holy See) was more anti-Semitic than Pius XI ever was: see Pinchas Lapide,
The Last Three Popes and the Jews, for details. Hitler had plenty of sympathisers, fellow-travellers, & dupes - and many of them were Catholic. Even in Germany.
There is no danger that the activities of Pius XII will go unmentioned - but, not all Catholic ecclesiastics were quite so generous as he was: it would be lying propaganda to suggest that the CC’s record was lily-white - it was not. Lapide, who speaks so favourably of him, is less complimentary about the anti-Semitism of the CC before the war. Lily-white histories are not possible in a world inhabited by sinners. ##