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Cardinal Pacelli said as much in August 1933 to Ivone Kirkpatrick, the British minister to the Vatican: “The spiritual welfare of 20 million Catholic souls in Germany was at stake, and that was the first and, indeed, only consideration” in agreeing to the concordat. The Holy See “had to choose between an agreement on [Nazi] lines and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich.”I am not anti-Catholic. I am not anti-Scientologist either. The catholic church appeased Hitler. Bishops were required by the pope to swear an oath of loyalty to the Reich.
The signing of the concordat demoralized German Catholics, who had stood with their bishops in opposing National Socialism from the early 1920’s until March 28, 1933. On that date the bishops, relying on Hitler’s solemn pledge to make “the two churches [Catholic and Protestant] the cornerstone of our work of national renewal,” rescinded their bans against membership in the Nazi Party. Pius XI and Pacelli may have operated in the best interests of the church as an institution, but they implicitly diminished the church as an advocate of human rights and justice. The metaphor of the church as a medieval castle or a Gothic cathedral so dominated Catholic thought that it lessened the role of the church as a proponent of universal human values.
In* Pius XII and the Holocaust (2002), José M. Sánchez has p(name removed by moderator)ointed a pope’s “first obligation” according to the ecclesiology of perfect society: “As head of an institutional church, he is charged with protecting that church; according to Catholic theology, the church is the necessary means of providing the sacraments which give the grace needed for salvation.* Without the priests to administer the sacraments and the freedom to receive them, Catholics can be hindered in their search for salvation” (p. 36).**
americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=3131