You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at Jkfitz42@cs.com. This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.
Some go so far as to allege that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was a reflection of attitudes toward Jews inculcated in Central Europe by the Church in its effort to halt the advance of secular humanism.
It is hard to tell if those who try to sell these notions are sincere, or willing to spread lies and half-truths in their effort to weaken the Church. The latter is possible. We must not forget that there are those who wish us ill. Voltaire once said — I paraphrase — that justice will come to the world only when the last aristocrat is strangled with the intestines of the last priest. Those motivated by such hate do not worry about giving the adversary an even break.
These critics of the Church argue that Catholic leaders viewed Hitler much as they did Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal, and the way Cardinal Stepinac viewed the rightwing leaders in the former Yugoslavia — as the only alternative to a Communist takeover modeled on the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. This perspective is what has led to the numerous books and movie representations of Church leaders working in tandem with Nazi leaders. John Cornwell’s much-debated Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII is just the latest of these efforts to smear the Church and the Vatican.
Well, these critics of the Church are going to have a hard time from now on — if the truth matters to them, at any rate. The New York Times reported on January 13th on recently released documents from the Nuremberg trials, documents that were not part of the public record of the trial itself. This supporting evidence — summaries, notes and memos — collected by Nuremberg investigators was compiled by the O.S.S. (the predecessor of the C.I.A.), under the supervision of Gen. William J. Donovan. A 108-page outline can be found at www.camlaw.rutgers.edu. It is entitled “The Persecution of the Christian Churches.”
The Times summarized the outline in the article entitled “How Hitler’s Forces Planned to Destroy German Christianity.” And guess what? We now know that it was clear to the investigators at Nuremberg that there was no collaboration between the Nazis and the Church. Quite the contrary: “the Nazis realized that the churches in overwhelmingly Christian Germany needed to be neutralized before they would get anywhere.” Moreover, Hitler understood that the Church’s teachings “could not be reconciled with the principle of racism, with a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or with a domestic policy involving the complete subservience of Church to State.”
Hence, “the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement.” The Catholic Church was a special focus of the Nazis because in “1937, Pope Pius XI denounced Nazi treachery in an encyclical that accused Hitler of a war of extermination against the church.” In reaction, “Nazi street mobs, often in the company of the Gestapo, routinely stormed offices in Protestant and Catholic churches.” The “Nazis made no secret of what lay in store for Christian clergymen who expressed dissent.”
“In Munich, Nazi street gangs and a Gestapo squad attacked the residence of the Roman Catholic cardinal. A hail of stones was directed against the windows.” The pressure had an effect. “After 1937, German Catholic bishops gave up all attempts to print their pastoral letters publicly and instead had them merely read from the pulpits. Then the letters themselves were confiscated. In many churches, the confiscation took place during Mass by the police snatching the letter out of the hands of the priests as they were in the act of reading it.”
The goal of the Nazis? A “slow and cautious policy of gradual encroachment to eliminate Christianity in Germany,” say the Nuremberg investigators in the newly available documents, a policy that “apparently came out of discussions among an inner circle comprised of Hitler himself, other top Nazi leaders including the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and a collection of party enforcers and veteran beer-hall agitators.”
So much for this crazy idea of Hitler and Church leaders operating in some clandestine alliance. It never happened.
The record of lies or errors in judgment made by leftists in the media and the academy over the past 50 years is staggering. They told us that the Bolsheviks were the future that worked, that Stalin would be a collaborator in the liberation of Europe from totalitarianism, that Mao and Fidel were popular agrarian reformers, that Joseph McCarthy lied about Communist sympathizers in our government, that the Viet Cong were South Vietnamese reformers with no ties to the Communist government in North Vietnam; that the Sandinistas would win any free election held in Nicaragua.
All baloney. We can now add the story about the sympathy between Nazism and the Church to the list.
