Popery Opposed Fuhrer from Very Beginning

ZENIT - The World Seen From Rome
Date: 2004-06-11

On Hitler, the Holy See and the Jews
Interview With Historian Father Giovanni Sale

[QUOTE]The first German bishop to take action against National Socialism was the archbishop of Mainz, who already in September 1930 published some norms with the objective of impeding Catholics from being contaminated by the National Socialist epidemic.QUOTE]

In the Prussian bishops' conference meeting in Fulda from August 17-19, 1932, it was decided, "keeping in mind the danger that the National Socialist Movement might constitute for souls," to issue dispositions that would prohibit Catholics from belonging to Hitler’s party. The document was approved unanimously.

It was on the occasion of the electoral campaign for political elections of March 5, 1933, that the opposition between National Socialism and the Catholic world came into focus for the first time.

The latter, considered by many as a "confessional party," appealed to Christian values to condemn and combat the principles of National Socialism; National Socialism, instead, appealed to the struggle against Communism to mobilize the Catholic forces against the common enemy. And we also know that many men of the Church were not at all insensitive to such an appeal.

However, as early as April 1933 the Holy See had let Hitler know, either through channels of papal diplomacy or through the mediation of Mussolini, of disapproval of the anti-Semitic legislation adopted by the new government, as it was in violation of the natural law and did everything possible to attenuate its rigor.

Woe to the German people, von Galen warned, if it allows the killing of the innocent, leaving unpunished those who perpetrate such crimes.

Pope Pius XI's 1937 encyclical against Nazism commanded world attention and was widely seen as a heroic denunciation of Hitler's regime, says a historian.

That is why it became one of the most important and most courageous denunciations of Nazi barbarism, pronounced in an authoritative manner by the Bishop of Rome, when a great part of the European political world still regarded Hitler with a mixture of admiration, surprise and fear.

A note of April 1, 1943, from the Secretariat of State said: "To avoid the mass deportation of Jews, which is taking place in many countries of Europe, the Holy See has requested the attention of the nuncio of Italy, of the chargé d'affaires of Slovakia, and of the Holy See's charge in Croatia."

Using the Vatican diplomatic channels, he did all he could to obtain something -- often, unfortunately, very little -- in favor of the Jews from those governments. It is known, moreover, that he exhorted the local episcopate, in particular the German, to strongly denounce the horrors committed by the Nazis against Catholics and Jews.

It should be recalled that the greater part of papal interventions had as their principal objective to defend Catholic Jews and to guarantee the indissolubility of marriages between Jews and Catholics, based on the concordats stipulated with these states. Really, the Holy See could not ask or do more through the official diplomatic channels.

The archives of the Reich's Foreign Ministry are full of periodic addresses of the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, on the Jews. However, the dispatches he sent to the Secretariat of State show how difficult his situation was.

Father Sale: Pius XII's 1942 Christmas radio message, dedicated to the pacification of states, presenting the moral and natural law as criteria for the re-establishment of a new order among nations, is one of the most significant and at the same time most controversial acts of Pope Eugenio Pacelli's pontificate.

In particular, the Pope denounced the extermination of European Jews. "This desire for peace," the Pope said, "humanity owes to the hundreds of thousands of persons who, for no fault at all, at times only for reasons of nationality or race, are destined to death or are left to died gradually."

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