The Catholic Church surely did not set a bright light to the world during WWII. Far too many (mostly Catholic) French acceded to NAZI wishes and helped send their fellow countrymen to the camps. The Catholics of Yugoslavia and Romania gave similarly poor examples of moral rectitude. Poland, that was over 95% Catholic, showed even more blatant anti-semitic hatred. And, of course, German Catholics were hardly instrumental in stopping Hitler (although he did have up to 6,000 priests imprisoned–3,000 died in Dachau and elsewhere–for opposing his regime).
I do not think that the Catholic Church can stand up and take pride in their collective response to Hitler. Aside from isolated instances of courage, I do not believe that the Church as a whole has a very good record in Europe between 1932 and 1945.
The specific issue I object to is the libel of Pius XII perpetrated by one German playwright and repeated endlessly since 1963. When the RCC examined its archives and produced an apology for its shameful performance a couple of years ago, many people dismissed the apology for not condemning Pius XII. The Vatican immediately issued an invitation to set up a second inquiry combining Catholic and Jewish scholars to go over the evidence, again. For several years, no Jewish scholars bothered to accept the offer. The commission finally began its work in October of this year. I suspect that they will find troubling events that arose from the conditions of war. The two specific charges that have been brought against Pius, to date (that his condemnation of the deportations was forced on him by the Allies and that it was a bribe to the Allies to prevent the bombing of Rome) don’t stand up to much scrutiny, but they are repeated constantly.
Condemn him for what? He supported and issued the anti-NAZI encyclical and other statements that Pacelli (prior to being Pius XII) wrote. I’m not sure for what acton he is to be condemned.
Condemn Pius XI for the Concordat? It was a political document that guaranteed the Church the right to practice religion unhindered providing the Church did not participate directly in political matters (such as forming their own political party).
That did not stop Pius XI from issuing Pacelli’s Encyclical (it wasn’t a bull, after all) Mit Brennender Sorge which explicitly condemned the anti-semitism of the NAZIs in 1937 and was read from the pulpits of Catholic churches throughout Germany. As a result, the NAZIs confiscated as many copies of the encyclical as they could and smashed a number of Catholic presses to prevent its being published further.
The fact that the German Catholics put nationalism ahead of their faith can hardly be laid at the feet of either pope.
Personally, I think that Pius XII saving 700,000 Jews was far more heroic than Roosevelt saving millions of them. The reason being that Roosevelt was almost totally isolated from any Nazi retaliation. The worst that could happen would be that he’d lose an election. OTOH, there was the very real chance that Pius XII could get dragged off by the Nazis and murdered for his actions. As for Pius XI, what’s so wrong about liking Germany? As was mentioned above, he condemned the Nazis. And if you automatically equate Germany with Naziism, then you’re the one who should be condemned. Germany has a very rich history and culture, and German scientists can claim many of the key scientific discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries.
BTW: No, I am not German; although I think I’m 1/8 Austrian
“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island
Diceman: on what basis do you make the statement that Roosevelt saved “millions” of Jews?
Your comments about the cultural and scientific contributions of the German people are a point to be emphasized. Much though we would like to think that art, culture, science and education lead to moral behaviour, IT IS NOT SO. If the German/Nazi years teach us nothing else, we learn (sadly and to our dismay) that morality has nothing to do with education or culture or sophistication.
There was a sociological study a few years ago, of the Germans who helped Jews escape (people like Schindler), looking for some common thread – some education, some background, anything. They found only one common thread: a strong moral sense, a strong sense of right and wrong. And there was no correlation with education, with intelligence, or with any other trait or experience.
The fact that the German people gave the world great music and science must forever stand alongside the fact that they unleashed (and endorsed) one of the most murderous Evils that the world has known.
He saved them in the sense of stopping the war. But as I’ve said, the Nazis couldn’t touch him. Winston Churchill was in somewhat more danger. However Pius XII, as well as Polish and French leaders, lived only at Hitler’s whim.
“The fact that the German people gave the world great music and science must forever stand alongside the fact that they unleashed (and endorsed) one of the most murderous Evils that the world has known.”
I would add Stalin and the Armenian extermination, America’s almost constant state of “political conflict” in diverse areas of the world, Rome’s extermination of Celtic culture (the Celtic world used to extend from Portugal to the Danube and the North Sea to Northern Italy). Oh, ad the Crusades have some pretty awful moments too.
Not to dilute the evil of Nazi Germany (they win the efficiency award), but to show how people are “as bad as they can be” everywhere.
I’ll accept Stalin as right up there, among the most murderously Evil dictators.
I have no idea what you mean by << America’s almost constant state of “political conflict” in diverse areas of the world >> …if you mean the Gulf War or Vietnam, I think there is a major difference between war (waged between two countries) and the genocidal exterminations of Hitler and Stalin.
The Crusaders and ancient Romans were primitive, pre-technology societies. That they acted barbarously is no surprise. Nazi Germany redefined Evil in the modern age, an educated and enlightened society that should have known better.
And sorry, but I don’t buy the “people are bad everywhere” argument. And, regardless of your disclaimer, I think that the debating technique of naming “other evils” is indeed a trick to dilute the conversation. The conversation is about the Catholic Church and Nazism, and bringing up topics like Stalin or the Crusades does in fact dilute the discussion.
Looking for consistency in nazi ideology is probably futile - Hitler would (ab)use every idea and symbol he could think of, if it would persuade people to follow him. He would adjust his ideas to suit whatever audience he was talking to (actually, I think his ability to move just about any audience was at the core of his evil genius).
And if some of his soldiers felt motivated by fighting against “godless communism”, well, so much the better for him. Don’t forget that German tanks and aircraft wore crosses as their identification.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: Hitler didn’t antagonize the church (or anybody else) if it wasn’t cost-effective.
As for the “cultured people turning barbaric” argument: Isn’t this what makes nazism so bloody scary ? The German people in the 1930’s were so very much like most other nations in the western hemisphere at the time - yet they voted for the corporal.
The thing that keeps me awake at night is: Would I - had I been a citizen in Germany at the time - have had the moral courage to stand up and say “This is all wrong” ? Or would I have followed the crowd ?
Had I grown up as a teenager in The Reich, I probably would have followed along with everybody else. Scary.
A few things I must point out here; and I myself am mostly Irish, but not Catholic; perhaps strange because I am from Indiana (Indianapolis).
I must remind you of the article from the Cincinnati Telegraph-Register I mentioned earlier–from American Catholics (and there are plenty of Germans in and around Cincinnati) who urged the Pope (I don’t know whether they meant Pius XI or XII) to excommunicate Hitler. The Church never did this, not even after Hitler’s death in 1945.
One of the people who attacked Hitler was pianist-comedian Victor Borge, who turned 91 yesterday. Borge Rosenbaum (his real name) made Hitler the target of his satirical comedy, and of course had to flee Denmark in 1940 when the Nazis invaded. In an article in Parade in 1991, spotlighting Borge, he points out that the Danish royal government, the people–and even the Danish Lutheran Church–arranged to have Denmarks’ apprximately 6000 Jewish citizens spirited across The Sound into neutral Sweden. (This probably didn’t make Borge and his comedy popular with dyed-in-the-wool Catholics of the time–if you can rebut this, by all means do so.
The RCC did not excommunicate Hitler for the fairly simple reason that they considered him to have excommunicated himself by his actions by the early 1930’s. In the modern (post-Reformation) church, formal excommunication is generally reserved for people who are attacking the church from within, claiming to be Catholic while preaching/teaching/practicing anti-Catholic doctrine. Even there it is rarely used: witness the kid gloves with which the RCC treated the schismatic bishop LeFebvre and his crowd for the last 30 years. (When LeFebvre’s group violated the last injunctions against them and began ordaining bishops, the RCC simply issued a statement of sadness that the group had chosen to leave the church; there was no formal excommunication.) I’m not claiming some equality of evil between LeFebvre and Hitler; I’m simply pointing out that formal excommunication is extraordinarily rare–and is not used when the person has already and obviously removed himself from communion. (Since excommunication specifically refers to a person’s ability to participate in the Sacraments, excommunicating a dead person is fruitless.)
I have already noted the terrible failings of the Catholic communities of France and Poland, to say nothing of Germany.
As a comparison to the story of Denmark (90% Lutheran), I will point out an event in the Netherlands (40% Catholic, 30% Protestant during WWII). Pius XII is now condemned for not naming the Jews as the people being oppressed by the Nazis. At one point during the war, the Protestant and Catholic bishops of the Netherlands agreed to jointly decry the deportations from their pulpits. Pius XII wrote an address supporting their sermons. At the last minute, the Protestants backed out and chose to not proclaim their statement. The Catholics went ahead and delivered the sermons. Hitler immediately ordered the Gestapo to sweep through every Catholic community, searching the convents and abbies for hidden Jews, then taking any priest or nun who was deemed to have had any Jewish ancestry and deporting them as well. Pius XII destroyed his address, telling his secretary that if the Nazis would deport 20,000 for the sermons in the Netherlands, he would probably deport 200,000 if such an adress came from Rome.
I was shocked to find another situation in World War II, involving the actual anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church. About the time the United States got into the war, the Church had completed a new Bible translation–from the Vulgate, of course–into English–the Confraternity New Testament. This translation caused an uproar when it was found that a footnote, to Revelation 2:9 (or Apocalypse ii. 9, if you prefer) contained an anti-Semitic statement.
The verse read, approximately,
“…those who say they are Jews but are not but are of the synagogue of Satan…”
The footnote read (emphasis in original): "The Jews are the synagogue of Satan. The true synagogue is the Christian Church."
This, of course, is the direct opposite of the meaning of the verse!! The U. S. Army vehemently protested this, and succeeded in getting this edition suppressed. One Catholic authority countered with “…the footnote adds nothing to the meaning of the verse. But let outsiders keep their hands off our sacred books!” If the footnote adds nothing to the meaning of 2:9, why insert it?
Jesus Christ, who is quoted in this part of Revelation, had many choice things to say to the Jewish establishment of his time, but he never accused them of being “the synagogue of Satan”! Indeed, he was Jewish himself.
dougie_monty, I’ve got to ask: where are you going with this stuff?
I can’t think of anyone who has claimed that the Catholic Church is without blame for a great many anti-Jewish crimes. On the other hand, you keep popping up with little snippets (sometimes factual, other times less so), expressing your shock and outrage.
OK.
What are you proposing? In the context of this thread, are you suggesting that Hitler was carrying out orders from Rome? Are you suggesting that the only people who aided Hitler in his crimes were Catholic? I have no interest in going out and documenting every non-Catholic persecution of Jews or support of Hitler. The sins of commission and of omission regarding the Catholic laity and too many Catholic priests and bishops during the Holocaust are pretty well understood. So where are you going?
BTW, I’d be curious to see a citation for your story of the Revelation footnote. I won’t even deny that it could have happened. (I will note that the Confraternity edition was published with a certain amount of controversy even within the U.S. church, that the U.S. church is not the entire church, and that it is not clear whether the footnote was part of the official publication of that bible or was added in a specific edition. The unnamed “Catholic authority” is also a bit suspect to me. Who was the authority? The bishop who authorized the Nihil Obstat? Or some self-righteous editor at the publishing house?) I could quite easily see something like this happening. Fr. Coughlin was a horribly notorious anti-semite. On the other hand, it was the RCC that ordered him to stop broadcasting his venomous radio show. When you say that it took protests by the Army to get it suppressed, do you mean that George Marshall had to appeal to Rome over the protests of the National Council of Catholic Bishops? Or do you mean that some mid-level bureaucrat in the army had a private feud with one publishing house or one bishop until it came to the attention of some higher Catholic authority who immediately ordered that edition quashed? I’ve never heard the story, so I don’t know either way. I just find these snippets to be a bit odd.
Condemning the Catholic church for its actions during WW2 is the silliest thing i can think of. The Crusades…? The Inquisitioin…? The 30yr War…? Hittler was a social climber compared to the Catholic church. Terribly Nouveau. The Church was the real 1,00 yr reich.
Granted it’s a tenuous link, but I’ve attempted to show a connection between Hitler (whose anti-Semitism is not questioned by any rational being) and the Catholic Church of his time. You may wish to look, in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, for incidences of its persecution of Jews, not only in 20th Century Europe, but in previous centuries and even in the New World: a specific, and damning, example, existed in Lima, Peru, within about 100 years after Europeans first settled there.
I shudder at the idea of living, or even just being, in Quebec, St. Pierre and Miquelon, Haiti, French Guiana, or any other territory in the Western Hemisphere administered or primarily influenced by France–that is, after the Germans overran France in 1940. If any Dopers have experiences from those places to the contrary, by all means tell me so.)
It is my understanding that the issue of the Confraternity New Testament I mentioned had been specifically issued to Catholics in the U. S. military in Europe–that would put it in General Marshall’s bailiwick, and he would rightfully raise a howl over such an item inserted into a Bible edition, for the implicit purpose of inspiring anti-Semitism under the ostensible protection of the First Amendment.
My source came from the early 1970s, and I regret to say I cannot produce the names you ask for.
One thing from the Mailbag item that might be relevant here:
In other words, Hitler had the support of many Christians – Catholics among them. It didn’t take much to push these folks into supporting the mass murder of Jews. The feeling of anti-semitism was already there; Hitler gave it a push.
dougie_monty, David B: there’s a hole in your logic, and it’s big enough to drive a Panzer tank through. A lot of good Cathoics ended up in the concentration camps, including many priests and nuns. Others were simply murdered by the Gestapo. If Hitler was so Catholic, why did he order this?
Do you believe everything our politicians tell us? Officially, he was a Christian, but Hitler’s actions and personal conversations told the real story: he didn’t practice Christianity as an adult. In fact, he was heavily into the occult and was said to have had an extreme interest in the old germanic and norse gods (Woden, Thor, et all). The Thule Society, a group Hitler was a member of, were practicing neo-pagans. Of course, admitting that to the mostly Lutheran and Catholic Germans would be political suicide, so when giving a public speech --WHOOSH!-- he magically became a good little Catholic again. But it’s more likely he prayed to Woden.
–It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
If any Dopers have experiences from those places to the contrary, by all means tell me so.)