Peccavi wrote:
I admit I am researching the Polish Church 1939-45. I am inerested in several aspects of the Polish situation and how individuals reacted differently to them.
I am also interested in the Vaticans responses to the pleading of Poish bishops for the Pope to speak out against the destruction of the Polish Church.
Peccavi, are you certain that Polish Bishops had actual contact with the Vatican and that the Vatican actually knew about the persecution of Catholics in Poland?? How they were being treated by the Germans??
Do you have any book sources for this??
The Paul Johnson book I have only says it is possible the Vatican
may have known. At least in Johnson’s book, there is uncertainty whether Pius XII had any actual knowledge of what was going on in Poland.
It is an older book (published 1976), so I’m interested if you can recommend any books that have been published since then that focus on this matter and a quote would be helpful.
The Germans specifically attacked the Catholic Church in Poland because it was the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church had a strong presence in Poland. They destroyed Catholic Churches with the Luftwaffe and arrested and sent Catholic priests to Dachau, Belzec, and Auschwitz.
As Time Inc.'s Pope John Paul II: A Tribute (Life Books, 1999) states: “when religion was tied to a country’s sense of self as strongly as Catholicism was tied to Poland’s, then religion had to go.”
John Paul II writes that thousands of Polish Catholic priests were arrested and deported to concentration camps. In Dauchau alone about 3,000 were interned. Bishop Michal Kozal of Wloclawek was among the Dauchau prisoners and was beatified in Warsaw in 1987 by John Paul II.
This is about the wholesale butchery of Catholics (especially clergy) BY Catholics for racist reasons that appear to have supplanted any sense of Catholic solidarity.
Well, I have to admit I don’t have any degrees in European history, but I don’t think that the German Army soldiers lined the clergy against the wall and executed them.
They may have arrested them; I don’t know if the German soldiers knew that the Catholic priiests were going to Death Camps.
The killing would have been done by a smaller cadre of Death Camp guards.
I did read that the Luftwaffe attacked and specifically targeted Catholic Churches during the invasion of Poland.
But I think you’re correct to say the German soldiers who were Catholic, invaded Poland and killed Polish soldiers in a time of war.
They may have mistreated / killed Polish civilians too. I don’t know. The German Occupation of Poland was pretty harsh.
As far as German Catholics in the German military attacking Polish Catholics during the invasion of Poland, or, for that matter, British Protestants killing German Protestants during WWI,
you may want to read Niall Ferguson’s War Of The Worlds
Prior to the end of the Cold War, America and Europe were much more secular that it is now. There has been a small revival of popular religious thinking and religious ideas since then.
For instance, America I think was much more secular during the 1980s than it is today, even though more the Protestant morality of this country was a little more intact back then.
I don’t think you had the same level of discussion of some of the moral issues today (though it is by no means perfect or even a very involved discussion on the Cable and Network News programs) that you have now.
The Media was very secular back then, it was very limited, and until Ted Turner’s CNN, there were only three major national programs that were each on only for 30 minutes each evening (I think almost all were on at the same time, 6:30PM).
Usually, any discussion of abortion back then was always focused of the extreme radical wing of the Pro-Life movement that used violence against abortionists.
Evangelical Christians were always referred to by the more pejorative term “Fundamentalists.”
States have immense power to control the thinking of their citizens.
In WWI, both the British and German governments censored letters, the Media, etc. and produced enormous amounts of propaganda in films and radio programs and advertising.
The internet gives the average individuals and organizations the ability to express their opinion and to communicate that opinion with others.
I’m wondering how much longer that freedom is going to last.
Unless you reject the part about how antisemitism played in all of this, then language, race or other status didn’t matter, you were screwed, so to speak. Besides I was trying to answer the problem concerning Catholic persecuting Catholic. Being Jewish didn’t win you any points anyway you look at the madness of the NAZIs.
