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My choicest political adviser is God,
who told me to run for the Presidency.
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Rev. Pat Robertson, quoted in the
Church Times , March 1988
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When all countries lived under absolutist governments, the
Churches enjoyed a much closer relationship with the State than
they do in democratic societies. The Church happily accommodated
some of the cruellest rulers in history.
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 role
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 Roman 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 other political
theories. His successor, 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. Catholicism became the only recognised religion
in Italy with monopoly control over areas like births, education,
marriages and deaths. Mussolini described the Pope as a "good
Italian", and the Pope described Mussolini as “a
man sent by Providence”. He also 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. One of the justifications for carrying out various
atrocities including the use of poison gas was the that local
attachment to Monophysite belief — an early form of Christianity
regarded by the Catholic Church as heretical.
  A
Catholic political party “Catholic Action” was founded
in Italy and emulated in Spain, Portugal and Croatia to promote
Catholic and fascist interests. Extreme right wing movements
were openly supported by the Catholic Church in Austria, Hungary
and Slovakia. So too in the Republic of Ireland where the Blue
Shirt Movement — modelled on Hitler's Brownshirts and Mussolini's
Blackshirts — was dedicated equally to fascism and the
Catholic Church, neither party regarding this as anything other
than natural. Religious profession was part of the membership
requirement. Blue Shirt volunteers fought for Franco during
the Spanish Civil War.
Franco 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.
His overthrow of the elected government was hailed as La
Crujada — “the Crusade”.
When Franco won his holy Crujada, Pius XII (pope 1939-1958)
sent him a telegram congratulating him on his "Catholic
victory". Divorce became illegal, adultery became a criminal
offence, and religious education was made compulsory, with the
Church controlling the textbooks. 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 Roman 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".
In general, the Roman Church adopted a 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 Roman 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 Roman 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 Roman 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. Within Hitler's lifetime the Jesuit
Order's statutes prohibited membership to anyone failed
to prove that he had no “Jewish blood” within five
generations. This was cited in the 1930s by both Nazis and Italian
Fascists in support of their anti-Semitic ideas.
 Neither
were Hitler's intentions secret. He promised the annihilation
of the Jews for example in a well documented speech on 30 January
1939. His whole panoply of persecution was founded on Christian
precedents. Hitler's Nuremberg laws of 1935 had been 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 the
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 Osnabrück that
he would do nothing that the Church had not done for 1,500 years*.
 Before
the Holocaust Hitler had encouraged the expulsion of Jews from
Germany, just as Pope Leo VII had done in 937, almost exactly
1,000 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 pastime. 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 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.
It was no accident that the belt-buckle of the SS uniform bore
the legend Gott Mit Uns.
 Although
Christian statues were left alone, bronze statues of people
the Church did not like were melted down to help the Nazis for
the war effort. A notable exemple was a statue of the Chevalier
de la Barre, a youth who had been tortured, mutilated and executed
at the instigation of the Church in 1766, whose statue was melted
down for munitions in 1941. The traditional Christian blood
libel against the Jews was revived. In 1934 Der Stürmer,
in its 18 th edition, 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 with Christian crosses in the background.
This was just 20 years after the Vatican itself had stopped
propagating the blood-libel in its own newspapers*.
Another Church has since reprinted the same accusation —
and indeed the whole of the 18 th Edition of Der Stürmer
— in English*.
| Front page, Der Stürmer,
18th Ed |
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Front page, Der Stürmer,
18th Ed, detail
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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 Roman 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 50 th 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 Anschluss to have been ordained by divine
providence. Hitler himself on occasion referred to the divine
providence that controlled his actions*.
Here he is in one of his speeches justifying his anti-Semitism::
My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour
as a fighter…In boundless love as a Christian and as
a man I read the passage that tells us how the Lord at last
rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the
Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His
fight for the world against the Jewish poison.... *
In 1939 and 1940 Pope Pius XII and a number of bishops were
unusually fulsome in their birthday greetings to the Führer.
On Hitler's 51 st birthday, 20 th 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
altars on 20 th 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 canon 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, though nominally neutral, seemed to many to favour
the Axis powers during World War II. 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 Roman 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. Joseph Goebbels had been
excommunicated for marrying a divorced Protestant., but not
a single Catholic was ever excommunicated for participating
in war crimes, though practicing Catholics made up about 30%
of the army and 25% of the SS. (The balance was made up of members
of other Christian denominations). Except for Jehovah's Witnesses it is difficult to find more than a handful of Axis
Christians whose behaviour approached what might reasonably
have been expected of all Christians - which explains why the
same few names (Deitrich Bonhoffer, Martin Niemoller, etc.)
are invariably cited by apologists.
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.
(It is 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 argument that the Holocaust was relatively unimportant
to the Pope is also difficult to sustain in view of other matters
that were occupying his 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 the 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 Roman 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. Although 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 role in the success of Nazi persecutions,
a fact that keeps alive a great deal of bitterness in Germany
and elsewhere. In recent years the German Roman Catholic bishops
have edged nearer to admitting their complicity in Nazism, but
their failure to make any sort of clear unambiguous admission
continues to irritate and anger many.
Throughout Europe, Roman Catholic groups carried out atrocities
during World War II. The Croat Ustaša, who were overwhelmingly
Roman 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 Roman Catholic fascist movement in Croatia that flourished
between 1941 and 1944:
The Ustaša, as this terrorist organisation was called,
was responsible for the forcible conversion of some 240,000
Orthodox Serbs to Roman Catholicism and for putting about
750,000 of these people to death. There was, from the beginning,
close collaboration between the Catholic clergy and the Ustaša.
Archbishop Stepinać, whom the Vatican appointed 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 Croatian head
of state, Pavelić. 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
Franciscans, whose monasteries had for some time been used
as arsenals. Several monks and priests agreed to work as executioners
in the hastily set up 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 Stepinać, 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 Stepinać, 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.
Pope Pius XII had been happy enough to meet Ante Pavelić
in 1941, after his murder spree. (It was this meeting that caused
a British official in the Foreign Office to describe the pope
as “the greatest moral coward of our age”).
Towards the end of World War II, 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 Spain and Argentina*.
Sometimes they were dressed as priests for the journey*.
A parallel "gold-line" funded this so-called "rat-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*. The Vatican
provided passports, bogus documents, money, shelter and cover
stories along with an international network of sympathetic contacts.
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 1980s at least. This was confirmed in 1988 by
Cardinal Franz König, who knew two such men personally,
although he declined to name them*.
Such admissions are untypical within the Church. More usual
is the pattern of denial and obstruction. A similar case arose
in 2005 in respect to events connected to the break up of Yugoslavia
in the 1990's . The Church was suspected of sheltering Ante
Gotovina who had been charged with crimes against humanity.
He was wanted in connection with murder and the deportation
of up to 200,000 people during a Croatian offensive, Operation
Storm, in 1995. The UN prosecutor Carla del Ponte believed
the Croatian Church to be hiding him in a Franciscan monastery.
The Pope declined to answer her letters. The Vatican said it
had no intelligence. A spokesman for the Croatian bishops"
conference commented that “A Franciscan monastery is a
broad definition. She always has information, but she can"t
say where” — suggesting that they were not prepared
evento make enquiries. Del Ponte had no doubt that the Vatican
could have found out where Gotovina was hiding in a few days
if it had wanted to and commented publicly that “The Vatican
refuses totally to cooperate with us”*.
(The case mirrors that of Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb war
criminal from the opposing side, who sought refuge from UN prosecutors
among Orthodox Christian monks in Montenegro*)
Within the Roman Catholic Church, explicit support for extreme
right-wing organisations is still common. In France, Masses
are still said for Marshal Pétain, and leaflets for Jean
Marie Le Pen's National Front are available at church doors*.
The Church also looks on neo-fascists in Italy 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 crowd of 10,000 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 altar. 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 various South American dictatorships
under their military juntas.
The position of Protestants is 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 3 rd 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 1930s Deutsche Christen, 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 Aryan 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. 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 20 th July 1944, the Clergy Council
of the German Evangelical Church sent a telegram to him that
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. 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*.
During the latter part of the twentieth century, the Roman
Church in much of South America abandoned its traditional right-wing
friends and, to the annoyance of the Vatican, espoused Liberation
Theology, a system of thought verging on Marxism. While priests
and bishops support revolutionaries, their traditional role
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 Roman 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. Traditional anti-Semitic churchmen are frequently
quoted by Christian neo-Nazis*.
The only political party in Britain that decrees religious allegiance
for its members is the Nazi Party"*.
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