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The Church was never in cahoots with the Nazis
By Michael Coren
January 5, 2011
Michael Coren
It has become almost habitual for critics of the Church to allege that Catholics collaborated with or were even responsible for Hitler and the Nazis. It’s a shrill and clumsy accusation, but how it hurts and how it sticks. In his latest book, The Third Reich: A New History, British academic Michael Burleigh establishes himself as one of the finest and surely most interesting historians writing today and, at least in the thinking world, should put the final stake in the body of this cruel myth.
I’m not sure if the author of six books of modern European history is a Catholic, but I doubt it. What I do know for certain is that he writes with a penetrating understanding of the place of the Church in recent history, the persecution of Catholicism under Marxist and fascist dictatorship, and the absurdity of linking Nazism to Catholic Christianity.
“The Nazis despised Christianity for its Judaic roots, effeminacy, otherworldliness and universality. It appeared life-denying to the life-affirming,” writes Burleigh. “Forgiveness was not for resentful haters, nor compassion of much use to people who wanted to stamp the weak into the ground. In a word, Christianity was a soul malady.”
He shows what has been demonstrated for some years now, that the higher the Catholic population in pre-war Germany, the lower the vote for the National Socialists. This is not occasional but iron-clad. In Bavaria but also in every German region with a sizeable Catholic electorate, the Nazis failed to win elections. Yet still we are told that Hitler was a Catholic, that many of his leading supporters were faithful Catholics and that the Church supported Nazism. There is not room in a column to explore complex history, but we have to be able to counter lies with truth.
As with Voltaire’s anti-Semitism, some of the Nazis’ hatred of the Jews was rooted in the fact that Judaism gave us Christ. From the beginnings of Hitlerism in the 1920s, right up until the demise of the regime in 1945, the most organized and courageous attacks on Nazism came from Catholics. They were reacting out of belief, but also out of simple self-defence. From 1933 the Nazis had banned feast days, attempted to remove Christmas and Easter from the calendar, led mass arrests of priests and religious, smeared excrement on church doors and altars, smashed rectory windows, criminalized Catholic youth organizations, depicted priests in Nazi propaganda as sexual deviants, forced the removal of crucifixes from schools and public buildings and murdered millions of Roman Catholics in death camps.
This is not what the Jewish people suffered, and any attempt to equate the experience of the Church with that of the Jews is macabre and misplaced. One was persecution, the other was genocide. But it is also immoral to minimize the pain of Catholics during the Nazi era and to claim that the Church is somehow to blame for fascist lunacy.
Obviously there were people who claimed Catholicism but acted contrary to their supposed faith, as well as people born Catholic who had long since abandoned the Church. There were also Catholics, including some in leading positions, who shared the nationalism, fear of Bolshevism and even anti-Semitism of the Nazis. But there were relatively few.
More common were the Catholic resisters in the military, the civil service, the media and throughout German society. More than individual or organized opposition, however, was the direct clash between Catholic and Nazi teaching. The first victims of Nazi eugenics were not Jews but Polish intellectuals and German and Austrian psychiatric patients.
The primary aim of Nazism was not only to rid the world of the Jewish people but to establish a pagan empire where race-consciousness and the cult of the collective triumphed over God-consciousness and individual salvation. Marriage was to be exploited only as a means for procreating Aryans, adultery was permitted if it led to more “breeding,” the Jewish Messiah was to be despised, papal authority destroyed and the Church replaced by the worship of northern gods.
It might not be the history presented on television and in the popular press, but it’s the genuine article rather than an artificial facsimile. The Nazis obscured the facts, let’s not follow their filthy example.
I’m not sure if the author of six books of modern European history is a Catholic, but I doubt it. What I do know for certain is that he writes with a penetrating understanding of the place of the Church in recent history, the persecution of Catholicism under Marxist and fascist dictatorship, and the absurdity of linking Nazism to Catholic Christianity.
“The Nazis despised Christianity for its Judaic roots, effeminacy, otherworldliness and universality. It appeared life-denying to the life-affirming,” writes Burleigh. “Forgiveness was not for resentful haters, nor compassion of much use to people who wanted to stamp the weak into the ground. In a word, Christianity was a soul malady.”
He shows what has been demonstrated for some years now, that the higher the Catholic population in pre-war Germany, the lower the vote for the National Socialists. This is not occasional but iron-clad. In Bavaria but also in every German region with a sizeable Catholic electorate, the Nazis failed to win elections. Yet still we are told that Hitler was a Catholic, that many of his leading supporters were faithful Catholics and that the Church supported Nazism. There is not room in a column to explore complex history, but we have to be able to counter lies with truth.
As with Voltaire’s anti-Semitism, some of the Nazis’ hatred of the Jews was rooted in the fact that Judaism gave us Christ. From the beginnings of Hitlerism in the 1920s, right up until the demise of the regime in 1945, the most organized and courageous attacks on Nazism came from Catholics. They were reacting out of belief, but also out of simple self-defence. From 1933 the Nazis had banned feast days, attempted to remove Christmas and Easter from the calendar, led mass arrests of priests and religious, smeared excrement on church doors and altars, smashed rectory windows, criminalized Catholic youth organizations, depicted priests in Nazi propaganda as sexual deviants, forced the removal of crucifixes from schools and public buildings and murdered millions of Roman Catholics in death camps.
This is not what the Jewish people suffered, and any attempt to equate the experience of the Church with that of the Jews is macabre and misplaced. One was persecution, the other was genocide. But it is also immoral to minimize the pain of Catholics during the Nazi era and to claim that the Church is somehow to blame for fascist lunacy.
Obviously there were people who claimed Catholicism but acted contrary to their supposed faith, as well as people born Catholic who had long since abandoned the Church. There were also Catholics, including some in leading positions, who shared the nationalism, fear of Bolshevism and even anti-Semitism of the Nazis. But there were relatively few.
More common were the Catholic resisters in the military, the civil service, the media and throughout German society. More than individual or organized opposition, however, was the direct clash between Catholic and Nazi teaching. The first victims of Nazi eugenics were not Jews but Polish intellectuals and German and Austrian psychiatric patients.
The primary aim of Nazism was not only to rid the world of the Jewish people but to establish a pagan empire where race-consciousness and the cult of the collective triumphed over God-consciousness and individual salvation. Marriage was to be exploited only as a means for procreating Aryans, adultery was permitted if it led to more “breeding,” the Jewish Messiah was to be despised, papal authority destroyed and the Church replaced by the worship of northern gods.
It might not be the history presented on television and in the popular press, but it’s the genuine article rather than an artificial facsimile. The Nazis obscured the facts, let’s not follow their filthy example.
Michael Coren