|
My choicest political adviser is God who told me to run for
the Presidency
Rev. Pat Robertson, quoted in the Church Times, March 1988.
When all countries lived under absolutist governments the Churches
enjoyed a much closer relationship with the State than they do in
democratic societies. Some of most cruel rulers in history were
happily accommodated by the Church. (Vlad the Impaler was a convert
to Roman Catholicism).
In recent centuries the Roman Church has always favoured authoritarian
regimes that have allowed it privileges, while opposing liberal
and democratic governments that have not. For example, in 1862 Pius
IX concluded a concordat with the right wing Roman Catholic President
of Ecuador, who had achieved power through a coup against the liberal
government. Roman Catholicism was to be the only religion permitted
and was to be given a dominant rôle in the country's affairs.
The Church was granted total control of education. This was the
sort of arrangement that the Church would try to emulate wherever
it could.
As it still does today, the Church felt itself competent to give
direction on political matters. Pius IX forbade Catholics from engaging
in Italy's new democratic process, either as candidates or voters.
Pius's successor, Leo XIII (pope 1878-1903), was a keen critic of
socialism, and of other political theories. The next pope, Pius
X who reigned between 1903 and 1914, consistently criticised and
suppressed liberal and socialist influences. On the other hand he
was exceedingly tolerant of right wing groupings such as Action
Française in France and Azione Cattolica in Italy. Pope Pius
XI (pope 1922-1939) had equally clear ideas about the suitability
of national governments. He was a fierce opponent of communism.
Much more acceptable were the politics of Mussolini, Hitler, and
Franco, all of whom were Roman Catholics.
In 1928 Pius reached an easy accommodation with Mussolini, under
which civil divorce was not to be permitted in Italy. Under the
terms of a Concordat the following year, priests in Italy who left
the Church were to be penalised, for example by being precluded
from certain jobs. Under the terms of the Lateran Treaty the pope
recognised the state of Italy with Rome as its capital, getting
in return the Vatican City as an independent state, an indemnity
for the loss of the Papal States, and an undertaking that Roman
Catholicism should be the state religion of Italy. Mussolini described
the Pope as a "good Italian", and the Pope declared that
the treaty had "given Italy back to God". Pius must have
been highly impressed by Mussolini's ability, since he encouraged
him to use it by invading and colonising Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia)
in 1935.
Franco also enjoyed the most cordial relations with the papacy.
The pope had denounced the separation of church and state in Republican
Spain and supported Franco when he started the Spanish Civil War
in 1936. For his part Franco felt himself to have been appointed
by God, and considered the Civil War to be a Holy War. A devout
Christian, he persecuted atheists and habitually carried around
the mummified arm of St Theresa of Ávila. He even granted
the Blessed Virgin Mary the rank of Field Marshal in the Spanish
army. The Roman Church supported Franco throughout. When he won
the war Pope Pius XII sent him a telegram congratulating him on
his "Catholic victory". Under Franco divorce became illegal,
adultery became a criminal offence, and religious education was
made compulsory, with the Church controlling the text-books. Children
had to be given at least one name with adequate religious connotations.
Some 25,000 civil marriages were declared invalid. A Concordat with
the Vatican in 1953 made it illegal to publish works of religion
or philosophy without the approval of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Church had a slightly less easy time with Nazi Germany, yet
did not find too much difficulty with the relationship. In 1933
the Catholic bishops in Germany, at a conference at Fulda, voted
down a resolution critical of Nazism. Instead they issued a pastoral
letter expressing gratitude to Hitler for his moral stance, their
ideas of morality being concerned with matters like family planning
and mixed bathing . Like many other Christian leaders, Cardinal
Faulhaber thought Hitler to be a good Christian, although he had
doubts about some of his "evil associates".
The Roman Church adopted an altogether positive attitude towards
Hitler's regime. As soon as he came to power in 1933 Rome advised
that there would be no support for any policy of opposition. A concordat
between Germany and Rome concluded in the same year reassured Catholics
that the German State was legitimate and acceptable. Pope Pius XI
had little difficulty in negotiating his concordat with Nazi Germany.
It followed an established authoritarian model of the Lateran treaties
. It explicitly documented the symbiotic relationship between Church
and State, binding them together in the traditional manner. Article
16 for example included a bishops' oath of loyalty to the State,
and Article 30 a prayer for the Third Reich . As a Roman Catholic
himself Hitler made basic decisions concerning the Catholic Church
personally, leaving the Protestant Churches to his Protestant colleagues.
No Christian Church seriously opposed Hitler, and many supported
him. Some even regarded him as a new redeemer, sent by God. In 1936
Hitler warned Cardinal Faulhaber that: "unless National Socialism
gets the better of Bolshevism, all is up in Europe for Christianity
and the Church" .
Hitler had been brought up as a Catholic, and would certainly
have absorbed anti-Semitism from his earliest years. In a speech
made in April 1922 he had spoken about his own Christian feelings,
and said that it was not merely possible for a Christian to be anti-Semitic,
it was necessary for a Christian to be anti-Semitic . Again, he
wrote in Mein Kampf:
"…I believe that I am acting in accordance with the
will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
Jew, I am fighting for the word of the Lord".
Nazi ideas about the Jews and measures against them were not the
invention of contemporary minds, they were what the Church had been
saying and doing for centuries. There was nothing at all new in
Nazi anti-Semitism. It was simply repackaged traditional Christian
anti-Semitism. The whole panoply of persecution was founded on Christian
precedents. Hitler's Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were modelled in part
on the decrees of Popes Innocent III and Paul IV. Jews were once
again deprived of civil rights, and marriage between German Christians
and Jews was once again forbidden. When Nazis confined Jews to specified
districts they consciously called those districts ghettos, maintaining
respectability by emphasising that what they were doing was exactly
what the Roman Church had done. The link was explicit. Before the
war Hitler had boasted to Bishop Berning of Osnabrüch that
he would do nothing that the Church had done for fifteen hundred
years , .
Before the holocaust Hitler had encouraged the expulsion of Jews
from Germany, just as Pope Leo VII had done in 937, almost exactly
a thousand years before. Denial of citizenship to Jews dated from
the earliest days of Christian power. So too the denial of civil
rights, and the restrictions on practising medicine. Public humiliation
of old Jews was another traditional Christian pass-time. Nor did
the Nazis invent the idea of making Jews wear distinctive badges;
they simply adopted Church practices, even down to the colour yellow.
Other minority groups had also been forced to wear a distinctive
"badges of infamy" by the Church, and new minorities were
obliged to wear them under the Nazis. The SS used much the same
propaganda techniques to whip up hatred against the Jews as the
Dominicans and Franciscans had used for centuries. The traditional
blood libel against the Jews was revived. In 1934 Der Stürmer
carried a front page article under the headline Jüdischer Mordplan
(Jewish Death-plot), with an illustration showing Jews draining
blood from the throats of blonde haired infants.
In medieval times beneficiaries of Church justice had been obliged
to don sulphur shirts in order to help them burn in purpose built
furnaces. The Nazis used the same basic idea, but carried it out
more efficiently with gas chambers and crematoria. Towns boasted
in Nazi times that they were free of Jews (Judenrein), just as they
had done in Medieval times. The concept of collective guilt, the
burning of books, the destruction of synagogues - all were traditional
Christian ideas and practices promoted by the Holy Mother Church
and validated by men like Luther.
While the encyclical Divini redemptoris explicitly condemned
Communism in Russia, Mexico and Spain, a simultaneous encyclical
directed at German Catholics, Mit brennender Sorge failed to make
any explicit criticism of Nazism, and consequently had little if
any impact. Article 24 of the Nazi party programme stated explicitly
that "The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive
Christianity" and its protection was guaranteed. When Nazi
Germany seized Czechoslovakia in 1939, the recently elected Pope
Pius XII refused to criticise the seizure, describing it as one
of the "historic processes in which, from the political point
of view, the Church is not interested". The following month
both Roman Catholic and Protestant church bells rang out in celebration
of Hitler's fiftieth birthday, and Cardinal Bertram sent him a congratulatory
telegram. Throughout the war, Church bells were to ring out not
only for Hitler's birthday, but also for each of his victories,
at least until the bells had to be melted down to help the Nazi
war effort. When Hitler incorporated Austria into Nazi Germany he
was greeted in Vienna by Cardinal Innitzer who proclaimed the ansluss
to have been ordained by divine providence. Hitler himself on occasion
referred to the divine providence that controlled his actions .
In 1939 and 1940 Pope Pius XII and bishops were unusually fulsome
in their birthday greetings to the Führer. On Hitler's 51st
birthday, 20th April 1940, Cardinal Bertram conveyed "warmest
congratulations" in the name of all bishops in Germany, and
assured Hitler that these congratulations were associated with the
"fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending
to heaven on their alters on 20th April for Volk, army and Fatherland,
for state and Führer" , a sentiment that was to be echoed
on subsequent birthdays until Hitler's suicide. When he heard of
Hitler's death in 1945, the Cardinal, writing in his own hand, instructed
all priests in his archdiocese "to hold a solemn requiem in
memory of the Führer and all those members of the Wehrmacht
who have fallen in the struggle for our German Fatherland…"
. According to Roman Catholic Church Law at the time, a solemn requiem
could be held only for a public concern of the Church. Unlike the
invasion of Czechoslovakia, this was an historical process in which
the Church was interested.
It is no coincidence that the groups who suffered most under the
Third Reich were precisely the groups traditionally persecuted under
Christianity - Jews, homosexuals, the physically and mentally handicapped,
gypsies, and other dissenters from the current orthodoxy. Jehovah's
Witnesses and others who were killed for their beliefs by the Nazis,
can be seen as successors to the heretics who were killed for refusing
to swear allegiance and for refusing to enlist in armies or fight
in wars.
Pius XII (pope 1939-1958), though nominally neutral, seemed to
many to favour the axis powers during the second world war. He could
not bring himself to criticise Nazi atrocities. Nor did he see fit
to criticise the many bishops and priests who supported the Nazis
and collaborated with them. After the war the Pope's behaviour was
explained by loyal Catholics in a number of ways: the Pope had not
known about the atrocities, or he had known but had felt unable
to speak out because he did not interfere in political matters,
or he had more important matters to deal with, or alternatively
he could not make a stand because of the vulnerability of the Vatican
- it was better for the Church to sit out this time of difficulty
so that he would be of help after the war had finished. All of these
arguments are untenable . In the first place the Vatican knew full
well about Nazi atrocities. At one stage Vatican radio broadcasters
had criticised them, but the Nazis had complained and the criticism
immediately ceased. Jan Karski and the President of Poland, on behalf
of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, asked the Pope to excommunicate
those responsible for persecution and murder. The answer was no.
The mass murder of Jews was reported directly to the Pope by Gerhardt
Reigner, but again no action was taken. When the US government asked
the Vatican whether it could confirm information about genocide
the Vatican refused to do so.
The story about the Pope not wanting to interfere in politics
is also difficult to sustain: there has never been a time since
the creation of the Papacy that it has not been actively involved
in the politics of numerous countries. Many people have been excommunicated
for purely political reasons, and there were adequate grounds for
excommunicating Hitler and his government. (People were at that
time excommunicated for trivial reasons, for example for having
expressed a wish to have their bodies cremated after death. It is
also noteworthy that the Pope frequently threatened to excommunicate
Communists because of their beliefs). Furthermore the Pope took
an active interest in the conduct of the war and felt free to speak
about it. For example he was quite prepared to speak out against
the allies when he thought they might bomb Rome.
The relative unimportance of the Holocaust is also difficult to
sustain in view of the other matters that occupied the Pope's time
(he was for example concerned about the danger of black men on his
property. When Rome was liberated he asked the allies not to use
black soldiers to garrison the Vatican). Finally the excuse that
his personal safety was necessary for the survival of the Church
cannot be sustained. The Pope could have given implicit guidance,
even if he feared to give explicit guidance. He could for example
have stated that the injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself
applies to all neighbours, not merely Christian ones. He could have
stated that there are circumstances when military orders can justly
be disobeyed. He could have pointed out that Mary, Jesus and the
apostles were all Jewish. He could have said that mass murder was
contrary to one of the Ten Commandments. He could have done any
of these things without endangering himself in the least. Also,
apart from any ethical considerations it is a fact that Pius kept
silent even after Rome was safe, the allies were winning and Germany
was on the defensive. The bald fact is that the Papacy was far more
sympathetic to Nazis and Fascists than to the Democracies. Only
after the War was lost, Hitler dead, and world opinion unanimous
did the pope disclose to his college of cardinals that Nazism had
been a "Satanic spectre" and an "arrogant apostasy
from Jesus Christ".
Pius had also enjoyed friendly relations with Pétain's
Vichy government, Pétain being another keen Catholic leader
with a taste for exterminating Jews and other minorities. Marshal
Pétain and his government were appointed in July 1940 by
an overwhelming vote in the democratically elected French parliament.
Under this government Jews were rounded up by French police, herded
into cattle trucks and sent to Nazi death camps. Altogether, over
70,000 French Jews were seen off by their Christian neighbours,
never to return.. Though he failed to criticise such atrocities,
the pope did again manage to find time to condemn communism. He
also found time to deplore the surrender terms demanded by the allies
at Casablanca. Even after the war Pius never quite found the time
to make public statements about Nazism, genocide, atomic weapons
or global war. He was occupied with matters such as the bodily assumption
of Mary into Heaven, which he was to proclaim in Munificentissimus
deus in 1950.
Significantly, none of the mainstream Churches spoke out against
the excesses of Nazism - true enough they protested loudly about
the removal of crucifixes from schoolroom walls, but with the arguable
exception of euthanasia, they lodged no objections and made no public
criticism of the invasions of successive countries, the suppression
of free speech, the abrogation of democracy, judicial murders, or
concentration camps. They did however offer prayers to the Lord
of Battles for the Führer's victory.
Since the end of the war the German bishops have consistently
failed to acknowledge their rôle in the success of Nazi persecutions,
a fact which keeps alive a great deal of bitterness in Germany and
elsewhere. In recent years the German Catholic bishops have edged
nearer to admitting their complicity in Nazism, but their failure
to making any sort of clear unambiguous admission continues to irritate
and anger many.
Throughout Europe, Catholic groups had carried out atrocities
during the Second World War. The Croat Ustasha, overwhelmingly Catholic,
ultra-nationalist and fascist outdid the Nazis in their barbarism
against Orthodox Serbs and partisans, and assisted in exterminating
Jews. Some of their leaders, who together were responsible for hundreds
of thousands of murders, were Franciscans. One, the commandant of
Jasenovac concentration camp, known as "Brother Devil",
accounted for 40,000 lives or more. Other churchmen also found common
cause with the Nazis. The President of Slovakia, Joseph Tiso, was
a leading Nazi responsible for setting up concentration camps in
his country. But this was not his only vocation, For President Tiso
was also a Roman Catholic Priest. He was executed for his crimes
in 1946. Other bishops and priests were responsible for many thousands
of deaths, having collaborated freely with the Nazi authorities.
Here is, Dr Joachim Kahl, an ex pastor and German Church historian
on the Catholic fascist movement in Croatia which flourished between1941
and 1944:
The Ustaša, as this terrorist organisation was called, was
responsible for the forcible conversion of some 240,000 Orthodox
Serbs to Roman Catholicismand for putting about 750,000 of these
people to death. There was, from the very beginning, close collaboration
between the Catholic clergy and the Ustaša. Archbishop Stepinac,
whom the Vatican appointed in in 1942 to be the spiritual leader
of the Ustaša, had a place, together with ten of his clergy,
in the Ustaša parliament. Priests were also employed as police
chiefs and as officers in the personal body-guard of the fanatical
Croation head of state, Pavelic. Nuns marched in military parades
immediately behind the soldiers, their arms raised in the fascist
salute. Abbesses were decorated with the Ustaša order. The
most cruel part of this movement was played, however, by the Fransiscans,
whose monaseries had for some time been used as arsenals. Several
monks and priests agreed to work as executioners in the hastily
set p concentration camps to which the Orthodox Serbs were sent
for mass execution by decapitation. These massacres were so brutal
that even Croatia's allies, the German Nazis, protested against
them and petitions were sent to the Vatican. Pope Pius XII, however,
said nothing, just as he also said nothing about Auschwitz. It was
not until some ten years later, in 1953, that he broke his silence
by promoting Archbishop Stepinac, who, as one of those bearing the
greatest guilt, had been sentenced\by the Supreme People's Court
of Yugoslavia to sixteen years' forced labour, to the rank of Cardinal
for his "great services" to the Church.
Cardinal Stepinac, Archbishop of Zagreb, had been imprisoned on
charges of collaboration. In the Ukraine, the Uniate Church (which
owes allegiance to Rome) was similarly associated with Nazism. A
number of Uniate bishops were arrested after the war, convicted
as collaborators, and given long prison sentences.
Towards the end of the Second World War the Vatican helped Nazi
War criminals to escape prosecution by issuing them with false passports
and moving them to safe countries. In one known case (that of Paul
Touvier, to which we will return) a convicted criminal was moved
from one European state to another over 30 years, entering countries
illegally and taking refuge in Church institutions. More usually
such criminals were transferred to the safety of Roman Catholic
countries. Often they were sheltered in monasteries, until red-cross
passports could be obtained, and then taken to countries such as
such as Spain and Argentina . Sometimes they were dressed as priests
for the journey . This so called 'rat-line' was funded by a parallel
'gold-line'. Gold taken from Jews, Serbs and Gypsies was spirited
to the Vatican where it financed the work of saving alleged and
convicted war criminals . Vatican reticence on the matter has been
largely due to the fact that the men responsible held high office
in the Vatican up to the late 1980's at least. This was confirmed
in 1988 by Cardinal Franz König, who knew two such men personally,
though he declined to name them .
Such admissions a untypical within the Church. More usual is either
silence, or continued explicit support for extreme right wing organisations.
In France, masses are still said for Marshal Pétain and leaflets
for Jean Marie Le Pen's National Front pamphlets are available at
church doors . Neo-fascists in Italy are also looked on by the Church
with a kindly tolerance. When Giorgino Almirante, leader of the
MSI fascist party, died in 1988 his body was borne in state to the
church of Sant Agnese in Agone in Rome. After rousing shouts of
"Duce! Duce!" from the ten thousand strong crowd and a
hail of salutes from as many straight right arms, the body was led
into the church by the new Neo-fascist leader. There, eight priests
waited to perform the funeral mass amid the fascist political banners
hung around the alter. The sermon faithfully reflected the dead
man's political views, incorporating as it did quotations from his
lifetime of fascist thought .
Elsewhere, the Vatican has frequently lent support to right wing
groups. In 1946 Cardinal Mindszenty organised a plot with the help
of the Fascist Arrow Cross and Cardinal Spellman to overthrow the
Hungarian government. Fascism has had a good friend in the Roman
Catholic Church. Senior churchmen have supported every right wing
dictatorship - from Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar
to Argentina and other South American dictatorships under their
military juntas.
The position of Protestants is very little better than that of
the Roman Catholics. Luther had stated that the bible confirms the
right of the state to rule by force, and described this as a benevolent
provision of God. Protestants were thus happy to accept a Nazi dictatorship,
and collaborated with Nazis just as much as their Roman Catholic
brethren. On 3rd April 1933 German Protestants, at the first National
Conference of the Faith Movement, affirmed in a resolution that
for a German the Church is a community of believers who are under
an obligation to fight for a Christian Germany. In the 1930's Deutsche
Christen, Protestants who found Nazism and Christianity to be perfectly
compatible, became the largest Protestant faction. They were led
by Reichsbischof Ludwig Müller, a favourite of Hitler, who
regarded the Führer and the Nazis as 'presents from God'. Their
motto was "The swastika on our breasts; the cross on our hearts".
Their synods passed Arian legislation. They sang Nazi hymns. Nazi
flags hung in their Churches. Their pastors wore Nazi uniforms.
Their Church was an arm of the State. Like the Roman Catholic Church
they were funded by the State, and benefited from public taxation.
Church subsidies increased from 130,000,000 marks per year in 1933
to over 1,000,000,000 marks a few years later. Protestant Churches
advocated obedience towards the Führer, and gave prayers for
him and for the Third Reich. Congregations gave Nazi salutes in
Church. Bishops asked for God's blessing for those who accepted
the Führer's call. After the failed attempt on Hitler's life
on 20th July 1944, the Clergy Council of the German Evangelical
Church sent a telegram to him which said "Thanksgiving is being
offered in all the Protestant Churches of Germany for God's gracious
protection and his manifest preservation…" .
No mainstream Church offered any significant opposition. Very
few Evangelical pastors were imprisoned at all for opposing the
Nazi State. Amongst Roman Catholic bishops one was expelled from
his see, and another served a short term for currency offences.
Hardly any churchmen of any denomination spoke out against the evils
of Nazism. For political reasons, Church governments often refused
to show solidarity with those who had been arrested and condemned
for opposing the Nazi government . As Konrad Adenauer later wrote
to one pastor:
I believe that if all the bishops had together made public statements
from the pulpits on a particular day, they could have prevented
a great deal. That did not happen, and there is no excuse for it.
It would have been no bad thing if the bishops had all been put
in prison or in a concentration camp as a result. Quite the contrary.
But none of that happened and therefore it is best to keep quiet.
In recent years the Roman Church in much of South America has
abandoned its traditional right wing friends and, to the annoyance
of the Vatican, has espoused Liberation Theology, a system of thought
verging on Marxism. While priests and bishops support revolutionaries,
their traditional rôle has been taken over by Baptists and
other evangelists from the USA who find that their God has a strong
affinity for dictatorships. Sociological studies have frequently
noted the tie between Protestant fundamentalism and extreme right
wing politics in the USA (and sometimes between Catholic fundamentalism
and extreme right wing politics). One study showed that Protestant
fundamentalists accounted for much of the support given to George
Wallace in the 1968 presidential election in the USA . Extreme right
wing politics are espoused by fervent Christian organisations like
the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society (an extremist group
named after the Baptist missionary who founded it). The affection
between religion and extreme politics is mutual. As one commentator
has observed: "All Right-wing dictatorships today have established
churches of one world religion or another. The only political party
in Britain which decrees religious allegiance for its members is
the Nazi Party"
|
