The Response of the Catholic Church to Nazi Anti-Semitism - Term Paper Example

The Response of the Catholic Church to Nazi Anti-Semitism Outline After Hitler had become the German Chancellor, the Catholic hierarchy sought accommodation with the Nazi regime, which was made official in the form of the 1933 concordat. However, this did not prevent episcopal and clerical protests against the continuing encroachment of the State into areas of life customarily controlled partly by the Church. When faced with the harsh reality of Nazi anti-Semitism, the most common reaction was passivity. At one extreme some German Bishops and clergy openly supported the Nazis in their anti-Semitism, while others strongly condemned the atrocities that these attitudes motivated. The Catholic Church offered no coordinated and widespread resistance to anti-Semitism, although many individuals either protested or acted clandestinely to save the lives of Jews. Text One might have hoped that, with the advent of the brutal anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime, the traditional anti-Jewish tradition in the Catholic Church would have been cast aside in favour of solicitude and concern for the persecuted. However, several historians have characterised anti-Semitism as a policy area in which National Socialism and the Catholic Church had considerable common ground. Generally, the response of the Church was inaction. At the highest level, the Pope failed to issue public condemnations of the atrocities being committed across the continent, of which he was made aware. However, it should be noted that, despite the failure of the Church as a coordinated institution to protest, many Catholic individuals protested actively and often heroically, and that privately, even the Pope tried to save some Jews from the death camps. While the widespread reluctance to act may have been partly motivated by a Christian tradition of anti-Semitism, the fear of reprisals against European Catholics was also a strong factor. In general terms, once Hitler had been established as Chancellor, and had begun to consolidate his hold on the German government, the Catholic Church as an institution sought an understanding with the new regime, despite many of its less savoury policies. In March 1933, in the course of a conference of bishops at Fulda, the Catholic Church in Germany abandoned its previously hostile stance towards the National Socialist movement, stating that ‘there was reason to be confident’ that previous ‘prohibitions and warnings may no longer be necessary’ (Bracher, 479). At the same time, negotiations began for a concordat between the Church in Rome and the Nazi administration in Berlin. These negotiations were concluded in July 1933, with the issuing of a concordat. This involved a recognition by the Church of the Nazi regime, and an acceptance of restrictions on Catholic organisations in Germany. In return, the Catholics were promised freedom of religion, the protection of the Church and the right to issue pastoral letters (Bracher, 479). This led to the formation of some Catholic organisations which actively supported and participated in the National Socialist ‘Revolution’, and Hitler’s objective of Gleichschaltung, or total state control over society. These bodies include the Working Group of Catholic Germans and the Catholic League for National Politics (Bracher 479). Bracher acknowledges that it ‘has been argued that the concordat gave the Catholic Church better leverage in its fight for life and in its protests against the total claim of the Nazi regime’, but concludes that ‘the political and moral price extracted was high’ (480). By acknowledging the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, the Catholic Church had forfeited an opportunity to offer the kind of institutional and coordinated opposition to Nazi anti-Semitism which was displayed by some of the Protestant congregations. Indeed, the President of the Rhine Province was able to write to the Prussian Interior Minister in September 1933 that, since the concordat, ‘a substantial proportion of the Catholic population, which up to now has shown an inner reserve toward the Reich Government, has now been unconditionally won over to allegiance to the new Reich’ (Bracher 480). This situation did not leave much room for future opposition to anti-Semitism. Even though the Nazis consistently contravened the terms of the concordat, many senior Catholic figures, including Archbishop Gröber of Freiburg and Bishop Berning of Osnabruck continued to support the notion of Nazi-Catholic cooperation. Indeed, the former was willing to openly invoke Catholic traditions in support of Nazi racism, citing the exclusion of those of Jewish ancestry from the Jesuit Order (Grunberger 553). The Catholic Church clashed with the authorities on many issues unrelated to Nazi anti-Semitism. For example, they fought for control of youth organisations and schools, in which they were ultimately beaten by the State, and they forced the regime to allow the Crucifix to remain in the classroom. A strong example of Catholic opposition on other policies is the papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, published in 1937, which attacked the Nazi position on religious education. According to Kershaw, both major Churches in Germany were ‘engaged in a bitter war of attrition with the regime, receiving the demonstrative backing of millions of churchgoers’ (173). The Bishop of Münster, Count Galen, for example, delivered fierce condemnations of Nazi euthanasia programmes. Indeed, for his opposition to many aspects of Nazi policy, he earned himself the popular title, ‘The Lion of Münster’. Many church leaders enjoyed a visibly enhanced popularity, evinced by applause whenever they appeared in public, huge attendances for Christian festivals and holy days of obligation, and busy church services. For Kershaw, this represents public sanction for the struggle with the regime in which some church leaders were engaged. However, when it came to opposing the anti-Semitism of the Nazi government, which some individual churchmen and churchgoers showed great courage in resisting, the Catholic Church as an institution is largely held to have failed in its moral obligation to direct all its energies towards a condemnation of such action. Indeed, Kershaw felt able to write that in ‘defence of humanitarian rights and civil liberties, the response of both Churches [Catholic and Protestant] was muted’ (174). Some individuals, notably Father Lichtenberg, the Catholic parson of Berlin cathedral, have attainted heroic status for their opposition to such policies. Indeed, it has been estimated that perhaps a third of Catholic clergy were in some way punished by the regime for their attacks, with 400 Catholic priests being imprisoned at Dachau concentration camp, near Munich (Kershaw 174). Some senior churchmen also wrote to government ministers expressing their concerns about the anti-Jewish stance of the government. The Bishops present at Fulda even issued a pastoral letter stating that ‘Religion cannot be based on blood, race or other dogmas of human creation, but only on divine revelation’, the publication of which was banned by the Gestapo, but widely disseminated in defiance of this prohibition (Grunberger 556). It is clear that Catholic opposition to Nazi anti-Semitism, where it was made manifest, was done so on an individual or localised scale. This is made obvious by a survey of the German episcopate. There were some, like Berning and Gröber, who were supportive of the regime. Grunberger goes so far as to claim that some of the definitions in the latter’s Manual of Contemporary Religious Questions ‘were distinguishable from the corresponding sections of Mein Kampf merely by their more elegant style’ (559). At the other end of the scale, Bishop Preysing of Berlin adopted a strong anti-Nazi position. There has been much criticism of the inaction of the Pope of this era, Pius XII. He was appointed Pope in 1939, and beforehand, in his position as Cardinal Pacelli, Pius had played a key role in the negotiations which led to the conclusion of the concordat. As soon was he was elected by the conclave, it is true that Pius spoke out against Italian laws banning mixed marriages. However, it is possible to list dozens of occasions over the following years when, despite being well-informed as to the suffering of Jews under Nazi rule, Pius chose not to act publicly. In the spring of 1940, for example, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, wrote to the Vatican Secretary of State, requesting that the Papacy should use what influence it could to prevent the planned deportation of Lithuanian and Spanish Jews to Germany, but nothing was done (Schoenberg). In 1941, the United States delegation to the Vatican requested that the Pope publicly condemn the atrocities being committed against Jews, and in 1942, Pius was informed that Slovakian Jews were being sent to Nazi death camps in the occupied territories. The Papacy responded by expressing its reluctance to act publicly because it could not risk reprisals against Catholics in Nazi-controlled territories (Schoenberg). There was a complete lack of public condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitism from the Vatican. It should be acknowledged that privately, Pius instructed Catholic institutions to provide a safe haven for those Jews who came to them for help. 477 Jews were hidden thus within the Vatican City itself, and a further 4238 in monasteries and convents across Europe (Schoenberg). However, these numbers are insignificant in comparison with the broad picture of the Catholic response, when confronted with a viciously aggressive and anti-Semitic regime. Kershaw suggests that the reluctance of many senior Church figures to launch the whole Church into a struggle against anti-Semitism may have stemmed from the harsh treatments meted out to those priests who had had the courage to speak out. Kershaw accurately describes this as a ‘institutionally understandable but morally regrettable reluctance’(174). In one notable case, after Galen had delivered his fierce anti-euthanasia sermon, although he was considered too senior and popular to be punished, the government executed three Catholic priests who had distributed his sermon. Thousands of clergy ended up in prisons or concentration camps, while there were widespread defamation campaigns against Catholic clergy, and show trials in 1935, for those accused of moral crimes (Bracher 482). Goebbels ensured that the stories of these unjust trials were carried in every German newspaper. Grunberger supports this analysis, in describing Nazi anthems, when he notes that ‘a perennial favourite of the SA had this refrain: ‘Storm Trooper comrades, hang the Jews and put the priests against the wall’’ (557). Many ordinary Catholics participated in the horrific results of Nazi anti-Semitism, with about a fifth of SS troops being Catholics, and it is scarcely conceivable that all were coerced into such service. Nevertheless, the cruel punishments for the disobedient are one mitigating factor that should be taken into account. Bishop Berning wrote to a Catholic Auschwitz guard, ‘One must not obey immoral orders, but nor must one endanger one’s own life’ (Grunberger 568). Another factor must surely have been that Catholic churchmen and Catholic churchgoers had been reared on anti-Semitic rhetoric for generations. As Bracher puts it, ‘because anti-Semitism was part of the Catholic tradition, the Church failed to take a principled position on National Socialist Jewish policy’ (481). Grunberger goes even further, stating that ‘Anti-Semitism provided a tempting point of convergence for Nazi dogma and a deep-seated Catholic animosity’ and quotes a sermon delivered by Cardinal Faulhauber in 1933, in which he declared his surprise that the Old Testament, with its ‘condemnations of usurious land grabbing and of the farmer’s oppression by debt’ should be a ‘product of the spirit of Israel’ (559). Kershaw correctly categorises the opposition offered by the Catholic Church to Nazi anti-Semitism as ‘limited, fragmented, and largely individual’ (175). Grunberger issues a condemnation of Christian inaction: ‘The German Christians washed their hands of Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity alike’ (570). Only the Confessional Church of Prussia organised formal protests against the treatment of Jews in the Third Reich, and issued a declaration of protest which was read out from all Confessional pulpits in 1943. Bibliography Bracher, Karl Dietrich. The German Dictatorship: Origins, Structure and Consequences of National Socialism. London: Peregrine, 1973. Print. Grunberger, Richard. A Social History of the Third Reich. London: Penguin, 1974. Print. Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. London: Hodder Education, 2000. Print. Modras, Ronald. “The Catholic Church and Antisemitism, Poland, 1933-1939”. Studies in Antisemitism. Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994. Web. 14 September 2010. Schoenberg, Shira. “Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust”. jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Jewish Virtual Library, 2010. Web. 14 September 2010. Read More