集美麻豆

The Catholic Context: The Churches' Response to Nazism
Donald Dietrich Boston College
Delivered during a panel discussion entitled "Bonhoeffer's Context: The Churches' Responses to Nazism" during the conference Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Our Times: Jewish and Christian Perspectives, cosponsored by the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hebrew College, and Andover-Newton Theological School, September 17, 2006.
		(L to R:) Matthew Hockenos, Marc Krell, Donald Dietrich

1.

The failure of the Catholic Church as an institution to live up to its own standards of moral responsibility when faced with the Nazi onslaught was, and indeed still is, a major issue for its current life and witness. Two major explanations have been provided. Some have rights pointed out that the Nazi regime was a terrorist dictatorship that was unrestrained in the repression of its perceived enemies. The threat of being taken off to a concentration camp operated already in the beginning of 1933, and served to create a pervasive fear and caution sufficient to deter most people from challenging the regime in any significant way. The notorious reputation of the Gestapo along with the cooperation of many ordinary citizens only increased as the Third Reich became even more oppressive. Normal citizens were frequently co-opted into the system for their own personal gain. The clergy in particular were carefully scrutinized. Agents of the Gestapo and informers took notes of weekly sermons.

The already overdeveloped German habit of social control could readily enough be applied to any church member believed to be in any way lacking in loyalty to the regime on its political agenda. Church members who sought to uphold their personal and institutional traditions were indeed intimidated and often paid the price of their defiance of the regime. For example, nearly one third of the Catholic priests in Germany endured some form of reprisal during this timeline year period. The Catholic response was mixed, however, since there were incidents of local resistance. Priests did preach crucial sermons, and Catholic laity and clergy, especially in rural areas, did resist Nazi incursions into their communal life.

Historians have also suggested much less favorable explanations for the lack of resistance and the decline of moral integrity among the clergy and the laity of the Catholic Church. There is overwhelming evidence that in the heady days of 1933, after Hitler had been appointed Chancellor, a very large proportion of Catholics was swept up by their expectations of an increasing potent anti-Communist policy and by their hope for the national renewal and regeneration offered by the Nazi propagandists. The euphoria of the initial mouths of Nazi governance was unparalleled since the similar enthusiasm of 1914, the beginning of World War I. By 1935, the scales had fallen from the eyes of the bishops and other institutional leaders, but their opposition to the Nazi totalitarian ambitions was bifurcated, since Catholic, 30% of the population, had from the Kulturkampf (1870) award been fearful that any opposition could be labeled as unpatriotic. Theologically and socially Catholic did offer some dissent from Nazi policies. Simultaneously, however, the usually fervently approved Nazi foreign policy goals and the elimination of the so called Jewish influence in German political, economic, and cultural life. The Vatican concluded a Concordat (Treacy) in 1933; Catholics compromised their moral stance on issues of sterilization and even euthanasia; the church defended only Jews who had converted to Catholicism. No one in authority defended the Jews as Jews, primarily because of the 2,000 years of religious anti-Semitism that had become in the 19 th and 20 th centuries a weapon to be used against political, social and economic “modernity.” Catholics defended their institutional church, but not the victims, except through the fairly abstract and prudent pronouncement of Pius XII.

In a sense, the Catholic Church was caught in a predicament that was facing Europe as a whole during these years. All of the Christian churches were caught up in a series of major crises, both organizationally and spiritually, which profoundly affected the exercise of their authority and influence. In the 20 th century, men and women have increasingly shaken off the moral tutelage of ecclesiastical institutions and have rejected the authority of religious dogmas. Instead of adhering to ecclesial admonitions, with an alarming degree of wishful thinking, the belief grew that the individual’s ethical guidance could be found in purely secular and subjective terms, regardless of the claims of history or community. At the same time, the modern state, also without any willing reference to transcendental values, has advanced its own demands for supremacy. As Richard Rubenstein has pointed out: “With the collapse of every credible religious or moral restraint on the state, and with the inevitable depersonalizations of relations between the government and citizens, the state’s sovereignty can achieve an ultimacy unimpeded by any contending claim.” The history of the 20 th century has seen an exponential growth of technology on increasing bureaucratization of the state’s machinery of control, and an unprecedented readiness to manipulate whole populations for the alleged benefit from the dominant political group. Simultaneously these forces have been accompanied by a corrosive decline in the acceptance of a transcendent moral order and of humanitarian ideals.

2.

Let us look at the Catholic theological context. Such prominent theologians Karl Adam, Joseph Lortz and Michael Schomaus took the opportunity in 1933, and in the case of Karl Adam for the duration of the Third Reich, to publish articles urging a positive relationship between Catholicism and National Socialism. They encouraged Catholics to accept elements of the new regime’s ideology and tried to dissipate the mental reservations and scruples that might trouble the Catholic faithful. They also hoped to change the political radicalism of the government by adapting to some elements of the Nazi worldview. They and other Catholics felt comfortable supporting the “nation” even if not always in its varied political, i.e., state, concretizations. Detesting democracy, Catholic theologians and ecclesial leaders felt more at home in Hitler’s state, at least initially, than in the Weimar Republic . Thus, some theologians hoped that display of support might prove that Catholics, even in a Nazi state, could still be good Germans.

These political hopes were rooted in the national pressures that motivate their theological reasoning. These German theologians hope that the popular power