David Quinn
Some Christians will never sacrifice respectability to speak out against what is popular, writes David Quinn
The Catholic bishops of Germany have admitted in a new document that they did not do enough to resist the Nazis during the war. The 23-page report says: “Inasmuch as the bishops did not oppose the war with a clear ‘no,’ and most of them bolstered (Germany’s) will to endure, they made themselves complicit in the war.”
That is a big self-accusation to make. Why do so now? It is because this month marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.
A word like ‘complicit’ jumps out. It appeared in various headlines around the world. On its own, it makes it look like the bishops were actively pro-Nazi.
In fact, when you read its context, you see what they really mean is either that they did not do enough to resist the Nazis, or else they contributed to the general feeling of patriotism at the time, thereby boosting national morale.
We have been here before of course. John Cornwell famously accused Pope Pius XII of being ‘Hitler’s Pope’.
That was a very dramatic title and gave the impression that Pius was an active Nazi sympathiser, which was far from the case. When you analyse his record, what he can be accused of is not being outspoken enough against Hitler and his monstrous crimes, especially the Holocaust. Pius, rightly or wrongly, took the view that outspoken opposition in the context of the war would do more harm than good.
Justification
The German bishops say in their new document that their predecessors “may not have shared the Nazis’ justification for the war on the grounds of racial ideology, but their words and their images gave succour both to soldiers and the regime prosecuting the war, as they lent the war an additional sense of purpose”.
We need to go back a step before considering the issue further. Christianity is obviously a creed that is opposed in its very marrow to an ideology like Nazism. Christianity believes in the moral equality and dignity of all human beings. Nazism bases our moral worth on our ‘race’.
Nazism also subscribed in the most extreme way to the doctrine of ‘survival of the fittest’, meaning might is right and power is its own justification. Jesus taught us the antithesis of this, namely that the ‘first shall be last, and the last shall be first’.
One reason the German philosopher, Fredrick Nietzsche hated Christianity so much is because Christianity was opposed to the ‘will to power’.
Nazism was also a pagan creed at heart, and Hitler hated Christianity and would gladly have destroyed it if he felt he could. But even he had to make political calculations and one was that too many German were Christians, nominally at least, to seek to destroy the Churches and that is why he moved to suborn them instead. His pragmatic, temporary aim was to recruit Protestants and Catholics to the cause of German patriotism, if not Nazism, and he succeeded in this to too great an extent.
The Catholic Church in Germany had only emerged a few decades before from Bismarck’s ‘kulturkampf’, that is, a cultural war against the influence of the Catholic Church in Germany. He believed Catholicism was an alien presence, opposed to the will of the new, unified German State, too much under the control of the Pope. German Catholics became very sensitive to the accusation that they were not patriotic.
Nazism rose to popularity in the first instance because it promised to restore German pride after the humiliations of World War I, and the Nazi party, embodied by Hitler, identified the German State and German society with itself.
Many German Christians, Catholic and Protestant, including their leaders, allowed themselves to caught up in the patriotic fervour. It was groupthink, German-style. It took courage to stand against the current.
Right through the war, Von Preysing stood against the Nazis, a terrible rebuke to most of his fellow bishops”
We can see this in the recent movie A Hidden Life about the Austrian Catholic Franz Jagerstatter, who refused to swear loyalty to Hitler and was killed as a result. When he went to his bishop for support, he met only cowardice.
A handful of Catholic bishops did defy the Nazis, however. One was the Bishop of Berlin, Konrad Graf Von Preysing.
In 1937, he helped Pius XI prepare the anti-Nazi encyclical, ‘Mit brennender Sorge’ (‘With Burning Sorrow’), which was distributed illegally among German Catholics.
Right through the war, Von Preysing stood against the Nazis, a terrible rebuke to most of his fellow bishops who could not even rouse themselves to properly oppose the savage persecution of the Catholic Church in neighbouring Poland.
The Nazi never dared to arrest Von Preysing such was his standing. That was a further rebuke to his follow bishops.
Few Christians rise to the challenge, in any age”
Another defiant figure was Cardinal Clemens August von Galen, ‘The Lion of Munster’ (a province in Germany), who also helped to draft ‘Mit brennender Sorge’.
Von Galen and Von Preysing was both prophets, and if need be, were willing to be martyrs. In every age, Christians are potentially called both to prophetic witness and the ultimate form of witness: martyrdom.
But few Christians rise to the challenge, in any age, just as few people of any creed or political belief do. We cannot really afford to judge German Christians who lived through Nazism if we, in our time, who face no threat of death, or long spells in prison, won’t even stand up to the often anti-Christian spirit of our age.
On the other hand, we must make sure to give credit to all the Christians who did stand up to the Nazis, and not just the aforementioned bishops.
As the historian Michael Burleigh points out in his book, Sacred Causes: “Virtually all sections of German resistance to Nazism had had a Christian presence, with a third of Catholic clergy coming into some sort of conflict with the regime, in the form of warnings, threats, fines arrest or imprisonment.”
When we castigate the failure of Christians in past ages, and our own, to stand up to the evils of their day, we can easily miss the broader point, which is that they are failing their own Christian standard, which sometimes calls on them to go to the extent of laying down their lives for another.
Some Christians will not even sacrifice respectability in order to speak out against what is popular. But many have, and do.