Was hitler a catholic?

[Charlemagne_II]

Reservoir

*Another vivid example of why any church should stay out of politics. *

What you will find from the Jews is constant criticism that the Church was not political enough, that it could have campaigned a good deal more vigorously to prevent the persecution of the Jews.

It seems between the Jews and the Protestants, the Church could do nothing right … either too political or not political enough. As a matter of fact, it was the heavily Protestant sections of Germany that voted Hitler into power in 1932. At least the Catholic bishops of Germany were on record as opposing both Hitler and the Nazis.

You would think, of course, that if Hitler was Catholic, there would have been plenty of Catholics in the top command of Germany. The opposite is true. The Nazis uniformly opposed not only the Jews, but also the Catholic Church. Hitler picked a rabid atheist, Martin Bormann, for his #2 in command of the war machine and the instigator of the massacre of the Jews from 1942 on. Bormann was a well known self declared enemy of all things Christian. As his own death approached, Hitler urged Bormann to save himself from the Russian onslaught of Berlin. Berlin stayed with Hitler to the end, but escaped capture and later probably committed suicide along with Hitler’s physician according to one source.

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

Reservoir

*Another vivid example of why any church should stay out of politics. *

What you will find from the Jews is constant criticism that the Church was not political enough, that it could have campaigned a good deal more vigorously to prevent the persecution of the Jews.

It seems between the Jews and the Protestants, the Church could do nothing right …

This is why separation of church and state is a good idea in the USA. Especially for you Catholics, because if there were to be a state religion, it wouldn’t be RC.

 

[Rocinante]

hi charlemagne,

can you provide some examples of quotes where Pope Pius xii comdemned the nazis and their actions?

 

[Betterave]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XII

Hitler’s Pope and The Myth of Hitler’s Pope
Main articles: Hitler’s Pope and The Myth of Hitler’s Pope

The cover of Hitler’s Pope, showing Nuncio Pacelli leaving the residence of President Hindenburg in 1927.In 1999, John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope criticized Pius for not doing enough, or speaking out enough, against the Holocaust. Cornwell argued that Pius’s entire career as the nuncio to Germany, cardinal secretary of state, and pope was characterized by a desire to increase and centralize the power of the Papacy, and that he subordinated opposition to the Nazis to that goal. He further argued that Pius was anti-Semitic and that this stance prevented him from caring about the European Jews.[221]

Cornwell’s work was the first to have access to testimonies from Pius’ beatification process as well as to many documents from Pacelli’s nunciature which had just been opened under the 75-year rule by the Vatican State Secretary archives.[222] Cornwell’s work has received much praise and criticism. Much praise of Cornwell centered around his disputed claim that he was a practising Catholic who had attempted to absolve Pius with his work.[223] While works such as Susan Zuccotti’s Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (2000) and Michael Phayer’s The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (2000) are critical of both Cornwell and Pius XII, Ronald J. Rychlak’s Hitler, the War and the Pope is critical as well but defends Pius XII in light of his access to most recent documents.[224] Cornwell’s scholarship has been criticized. For example, Kenneth L. Woodward stated in his review in Newsweek that “errors of fact and ignorance of context appear on almost every page.”[225] Five years after the publication of Hitler’s Pope, Cornwell stated: “I would now argue, in the light of the debates and evidence following Hitler’s Pope, that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by Germany”.[226][227][228]

In his 2003 book A Moral Reckoning, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen asserts that Pius “chose again and again not to mention the Jews publicly… [In] public statements by Pius XII . . . any mention of the Jews is conspicuously absent.” In a review of Goldhagen’s book, Mark Riebling counters that Pius used the word “Jew” in his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, published on October 20, 1939. “There Pius insisted that all human beings be treated charitably — for, as Paul had written to the Colossians, in God’s eyes “there is neither Gentile nor Jew.” In saying this, the Pope affirmed that Jews were full members of the human community — which is Goldhagen’s own criterion for establishing ‘dissent from the anti-Semitic creed.’”[229]

Most recently, Rabbi David Dalin’s The Myth of Hitler’s Pope argues that critics of Pius are liberal Catholics and ex-Catholics who “exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today” and that Pius XII was actually responsible for saving the lives of many thousands of Jews.[230]

Rabbi Dalin’s book is an easy read and very worthwhile given all of the lies floating around.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Reservoir Dog

*This is why separation of church and state is a good idea in the USA. Especially for you Catholics, because if there were to be a state religion, it wouldn’t be RC. *

Which would it be, if not RC?

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

Reservoir Dog

*This is why separation of church and state is a good idea in the USA. Especially for you Catholics, because if there were to be a state religion, it wouldn’t be RC. *

Which would it be, if not RC?

Probably Anglican or Episcopalian or some variety, or if the states could enact a state religion, definitely Methodist or Baptist in the south or midwest. RC was the subject of some severe discrimination at times in the US, the “drunken Irish Catholic” stereotype cost Al Smith the election in '28.

 

[Daegus]

*Was he a practicing Catholic? No. *

Is there a source you would give to verify this?

Practicing Catholics don’t murder Jews by throwing them into gas chambers, don’t hate on people because of ethnicity, race, religion, etc and certainly don’t believe in a perfect race (Aryan).

 

[Rocinante]

Practicing Catholics don’t murder Jews by throwing them into gas chambers, don’t hate on people because of ethnicity, race, religion, etc and certainly don’t believe in a perfect race (Aryan).

right. and they don’t molest children and teens and amass collections of child porn while flagellating themselves and praying for jesus to take away their unholy temptations…except of course that they do.

as they say, the church is a hospital for sinners rather than a museum for saints.

 

[Rocinante]

Reservoir Dog

*This is why separation of church and state is a good idea in the USA. Especially for you Catholics, because if there were to be a state religion, it wouldn’t be RC. *

Which would it be, if not RC?

it would be a version of christianity that rejects the authority of the pope.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

(Edited to remove quote of deleted post)

By the time he had become Pope Pius XII, the holocaust was well underway. Within the Church it was a recognized fact that Hitler was impossible to deal with in a rational way, and that public condemnations of his treatment of the Jews would only infuriate him and intensify the cruelty toward the Jews.

During 1942, one of the worst years of the Holocaust, the Dutch Catholic bishops publicly censured the Nazis for their treatment of the Jews. Hitler’s payback was more unfortunate for the Jews than for the bishops. Three hundred Catholic nuns and priests with any Jewish blood were deported to Auschwitz, but 110,000 Jews, or 79% of the Jewish population of Holland, were murdered. Subsequently, Pius XII cautioned the German bishops to speak with restraint against the Nazis, for fear of the greatest possible retaliation against both the Jews and the Church. Pius apparently vowed to follow his own advice, even when silence might have seemed sinful, for fear that Hitler’s insanity was now beyond doubt, and the ferocity of his retaliation would be felt by the very people who were seeking the Church’s protection.

But Pius was very instrumental in helping to save Jews. This was recognized by the conversion of the Chief Rabbi of Rome to Catholicism at the end of the war. Einstein near the war’s end was quoted in an American magazine as praising the efforts of the Catholic Church to stand up against Hitler. When Pius died in 1958, the future prime minister of Israel, Golda Meier, lavished great praise on him. It hardly seems likely that any of these characters would have been so generous in their praise if Pius had done virtually nothing significant.

Could he have done more? Perhaps. The whole world could have done more. Many of the Jews who perished in the death camps perished because the U.S. military would not bomb the railroad tracks that brought to the Jews to the death camps, even though this was strongly urged by influential European and American Jews.

Rocinante

*it would be a version of christianity that rejects the authority of the pope. *

Well, there are six Catholics presently on the Supreme Court. Evidently the recent presidents who appointed them were not worried about the Supreme Court being taken over by the authority of the pope.

P.S. There are no Protestants on the Supreme Court.

Here is an interesting article about what Pius XII’s contemporaries thought about him.

zenit.org/article-1051?l=english

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

…
Could he have done more? Perhaps. The whole world could have done more. Many of the Jews who perished in the death camps perished because the U.S. military would not bomb the railroad tracks that brought to the Jews to the death camps, even though this was strongly urged by influential European and American Jews…

Since we’re dealing with petty slanders, “influential European and American Jews” aren’t qualified to select bombing targets. The decision of the Allies was to end the war as quickly as possible to end human carnage theatre wide, which meant using air resources – which are not, as you seem to believe, unlimited – by selecting targets with that purpose in mind. Bombed railroad tracks can be repaired within hours. Do not blame the USAAF for the murder of Jews, that’s pathetic. It wasn’t the USAAF that was part of the coalition government that brought hitler to power or passed the Enabling Acts.

 

[quotidianum]

More to the point, if Hitler was a Catholic, was he a Catholic in good standing with the Church? Some like to point out that anyone baptized a Catholic is a Catholic until he dies, whether or not he renounces Catholicism. I don’t see the point of debating this. Clearly Hitler was baptized a Catholic. But the real question is whether as an adult he was a practicing Catholic in good standing with the Church.

Or if he was something else, what was he? Pagan? Atheist? Etc.

I’ve studied Hitler and National Socialism extensively. He was baptized Catholic, like most Austrians at the time, but he was not Catholic by the time he died.

The statement that one “anyone baptized a Catholic is a Catholic until he dies, whether or not he renounces Catholicism” is not correct. Baptism imparts in indelible mark on the soul by erasing original sin and bestowing the gift of faith. This is why even those baptized as “Protestants” are actually Catholics, assumed they are baptized by the words our Lord mandated, until they reject the Church’s teaching (which, granted, usually happens by teenage-hood for most Protestants. Catholics, and Protestants or any other sacramentally baptized person, fall out of the Faith, that is out of the Mystical Body of the Church, once they obstinately reject a single Catholic dogma. The term “Catholic” only applies to those inside the Church, not those outside.

There is no doubt that Hitler rejected Catholicism at by the time he entered adulthood: he was a fan of Madame Blavatsky and an adherent to the Theosophical movement, amongst other things. These are basically satanic groups: google search it, and you’ll see what I mean. It is really actually very bizarre stuff: I studied the NSDAP and Hilter’s occult beliefs in college and wrote extensively about the NSDAP as a cult/“religious” movement as opposed to the political/social movement perspective in which it is usually portrayed. Hitler was obsessed with Aryan mythology, including the stories of Lemuria and Atlantis, and was at absolutely best a gnostic. But he wasn’t even that, because he was into all kinds of Theosophical magic and esoterism that is not even remotely Christian, nonetheless Catholic. This is why symbols, like the swastika and especially Runic symbols, were so important to the NSDAP and Hilter, because they literally thought that the symbols had magically powers that imbued them with certain abilities. It is really amazing when you research how much occultism was present in the NSDAP, but given how evil that “movement” was, it is not surprising. By the way, another big fan of Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society was a fellow by the name of Aliester Crowley, the avowed satanist who called himself “the creature” and “the evilest man on earth.”

Hitler was also (obviously) a eugenicist, which was thoroughly condemned by Catholic teaching and the Church, and he agreed with the likes of Margaret Sanger (to whom he gave much recognition, fanfare, and press). So no, he certainly was absolutely not a Catholic in adulthood, and was obviously not guided by any Catholic teachings.

If you would like more specific information on this, send me a message and I will supply you will more information than you’ll ever need. I do not want to post it all here, because there is too much, and also I do not want to post information supporting his occult beliefs. But if you want it, I still have all of my original research and will happily supply it…but after Mass tomorrow. I’m off to bed now.

 

[chosen_people]

Reservoir

*Another vivid example of why any church should stay out of politics. *

What you will find from the Jews is constant criticism that the Church was not political enough, that it could have campaigned a good deal more vigorously to prevent the persecution of the Jews.

It seems between the Jews and the Protestants, the Church could do nothing right … either too political or not political enough. As a matter of fact, it was the heavily Protestant sections of Germany that voted Hitler into power in 1932. At least the Catholic bishops of Germany were on record as opposing both Hitler and the Nazis.
You would think, of course, that if Hitler was Catholic, there would have been plenty of Catholics in the top command of Germany. The opposite is true. The Nazis uniformly opposed not only the Jews, but also the Catholic Church. Hitler picked a rabid atheist, Martin Bormann, for his #2 in command of the war machine and the instigator of the massacre of the Jews from 1942 on. Bormann was a well known self declared enemy of all things Christian. As his own death approached, Hitler urged Bormann to save himself from the Russian onslaught of Berlin. Berlin stayed with Hitler to the end, but escaped capture and later probably committed suicide along with Hitler’s physician according to one source.

How would you rectify the statement in red with the critical swing vote of the Zentrum party for the Hitler enabling act?

 

[AntiTheist]

I’m surprised a residential atheist hasn’t popped in yet with his whole “philosophy” on the question.

The question is kind of a boring one. For me, it makes no difference what Hitler believed or didn’t believe.

I have no way of knowing what his actual spiritual beliefs might have been. All I have to go on is what he said. He claimed to have been a Catholic, and he claimed to be doing what he did in the name of his god. His soldier wore belt buckles that read “Gott Mit Uns” (“God With Us”).

Was he “really” a Catholic? Or was he “really” a closet atheist? Or was he really a pagan? Or a closet Satanist? Or a closet Zoroastrian?

It doesn’t matter. Hitler’s actions were motivated by his belief in a kind of crackpot racism.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Reservoir Dog

*Since we’re dealing with petty slanders, “influential European and American Jews” aren’t qualified to select bombing targets. *

Talk about petty slanders. You mean the Jews had no right to ask the USAAF to interfere with the genocide? What planet do you come from and what morality do they practice there? Pope Pius XII asked FDR and the USAAF not to bomb civilian targets in Rome. Was that also improper for the Pope to ask?

 

[Charlemagne_II]

chosen people

*How would you rectify the statement in red with the critical swing vote of the Zentrum party for the Hitler enabling act? *

This is a mighty complex question and involves not only plenty of arm twisting by the Nazis, but also the sense that Hitler’s dictatorship was now inevitable with the withdrawal of Hindeburg from active political life. Hitler made all kinds of promises that the churches would all be safe from persecution … every one of these promises he began to break as soon as Hindenburg was dead. The Enabling Acts therefore enabled nothing good and much that was bad, including the collapse of parliamentary government and the rule of law. They were realized soon afterward to be a colossal swindle so for as the Church was concerned. However, all of this bowing and scraping to Hitler by the Center Party (along with every other party) was long before the full enormity of what they had bowed and scraped to was realized.

The Catholic bishops, along with the Center Party, capitulated because they not only feared for the Church, but for their own lives. Yes, some of them were rank cowards for doing so, but entirely human. The Jews were getting out of Germany as fast as they could, since they also were resigned to the inevitable dictatorship of Hitler. Do I call them cowards? No. But they did not stay, organize, and fight. So I hardly think you can lay the holocaust at the feet of the bishops when all they were doing was to try and save the Church from the horrors that were already being planned for Jews and would be in full force by 1938.

 

[Holly3278]

I would think that it’d be obvious that he was not in good standing with the Church. He was a genocidal maniac.

 

[inocente]

Or if he was something else, what was he? Pagan? Atheist? Etc.

In 1934 he said “There may have been a time when even parties founded on the ecclesiastical basis were a necessity. At that time Liberalism was opposed to the Church, while Marxism was anti-religious. But that time is past. National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the ground of a real Christianity. The Church’s interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against the Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for the consciousness of a community in our national life, for the conquest of hatred and disunion between the classes, for the conquest of civil war and unrest, of strife and discord. These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles.”

But later Speer has him saying “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”

Then again in 1941 Engel has him saying “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.”

Rather than not being able to make up his mind he may have always been a theist, but thought of modern Christianity as being corrupt compared to his own warped ideas of Jesus and so invented his own weird religion in his insanity.

Citations: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_religious_views

 

[Charlemagne_II]

inocente
*
Rather than not being able to make up his mind he may have always been a theist, but thought of modern Christianity as being corrupt compared to his own warped ideas of Jesus and so invented his own weird religion in his insanity.*

I think of him more as an atheist. After World War I he severed his connection with the Catholic Church.He became an admirer of that other German atheist, the “God is dead” philosopher Nietszche, and honored Nietzsche by attending the dedication of the Nietzsche Archives and having himself photographed admiring a bust of Nietzsche. Also, he picked for his #2 man Martin Bormann, a self declared atheist who despised all things Christian and was above all the other henchman the one most responsible for the annihilation of the Jews.

The contradictions to be found in Hitler’s remarks reflect that he was a liar who said the “right” things to the right people at the right time. Obviously, it would not have been politically expedient to publicly pronounce himself an atheist in a Christian country, but it was politically expedient to reassure Germans that he was a Christian. After all, he was demanding the absolute allegiance of the Christians, and that would have been difficult without concealing from them his moral world view which was about as anti-Judeo-Christian as any moral view the world has ever known.

Also, Hitler had come to identify himself as a messianic figure, and the pagan trappings of a religious cult (adoption of the swastika, for example, and the nightly torch-lit gatherings and vast assemblies of marchers) suited him just fine.

Whether one insists on calling him a Christian, a pagan, or an atheist, he was above all else a lunatic. Evidence for that was put together by psychiatrist Walter C. Langer who wrote a secret wartime report for the U.S. government on the personality of Hitler, later published as The Mind of Hitler (available at amazon.com)

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

Reservoir Dog

*Since we’re dealing with petty slanders, “influential European and American Jews” aren’t qualified to select bombing targets. *

Talk about petty slanders. You mean the Jews had no right to ask the USAAF to interfere with the genocide? What planet do you come from and what morality do they practice there? Pope Pius XII asked FDR and the USAAF not to bomb civilian targets in Rome. Was that also improper for the Pope to ask?

No ad hominems, please.

The USA being a free country, they have a right to ask anything. The USAAF did what was best to end the war as quickly as possible which would stop the concentration camp murders and fighting everywhere else. Bomb target choices was their job, not the religious community’s.

Why would you want to prolong the holocaust by not ending the war as quickly as possible? I could pose this in the same insulting manner you used, but I’m not.