Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (120 page)

15. Ibid., 146.

16. Ibid., 86–87.

17. Dietrich,
Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich,
102. See also Lewy,
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany,
331.

18. Evans,
German Center Party,
393.

19. Cornwell,
Hitler's Pope,
152. István Deak points out that Brüning was "quickly shunted aside without much, if any, protest by other German Catholics," and therefore downplays, against Cornwell, the significance of the concordat and the loss of the Center Party. Deak, "The Pope, the Nazis, and the Jews," 47.

20. Dietrich,
Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich
, 106.

21. Quoted by Cornwell,
Hitler's Pope,
156.

22. Ibid., 158.

50. The Seamless Robe in
1933

1. The screenplay of
The Robe
was written by Philip Dunne, from the novel by Lloyd C. Douglas.

2. Psalm 22:18.

3. Dietrich,
Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich,
98.

4. Wighton,
Adenauer,
20.

5. Stehlin,
Weimar and the Vatican,
180.

6. Blackbourn,
Populists and Patricians,
178.

7. Blackbourn,
Marpingen, 376–77.
See also Dietrich,
Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich,
101.

8. Helmreich,
German Churches under Hitler,
245–46.

9. Schrader,
Church and State in Germany,
8.

10. Quoted by Lewy,
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany,
104. See also Blackbourn,
Marpingen,
377.

11.
Völkischer Beobachter,
quoted by Schrader.
Church and State in Germany,
8.

12. "Denkschrift der Deutschen Bischöfe an Hitler," in Hans Muller, ed.,
Katholische Kirche und Nationalsozialismus: Dokumente,
1910–1935 (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1963), 377. I gratefully acknowledge the Reverend Milton McC. Gatch for translation assistance. For a reference to the "handshake of trust," see Gordon Zahn, "Catholic Resistance? A Yes and a No," in Littel! and Locke,
German Church Struggle,
210. The bishops' message to Hitler ended, "We pray to Almighty God that he take under his protection the life of our Führer and Reich Chancellor, and that he grant his blessing to your great statesmanly goals." Less than a month later, the Nuremberg Laws were decreed, the severest attack yet on Jews. The bishops said nothing. Helmreich,
German Churches under Hitler,
275–76.

13. Quoted by Lewy,
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany,
90.

14. The phrase is used by Helmreich,
German Churches under Hitler,
249. The same phrase is commonly used to refer to the rooms in which Anne Frank and her family hid.

15. Quoted by Helmreich,
German Churches under Hitler,
249.

16. Ibid.

17. Dietrich,
Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich,
102.

18. Ibid., 105.

19. Zahn, "Catholic Resistance?," in Littell and Locke,
German Church Struggle,
210.

20. Dietrich,
Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich,
137.

21. Ibid.

22. Quoted by Dietrich,
Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich,
137.

23. Dietrich,
Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich,
195. The Vatican declaration "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" praised "the well-known Advent sermons of Cardinal Faulhaber in 1933, the very year in which National Socialism came to power, at which not just Catholics but also Protestants and Jews were present, land which] clearly expressed rejection of the Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda" (3.10). But is that so? Dietrich says that Faulhaber's sermons were "not condemnations of antisemitism." At the meeting I attended in Chicago in March 1999, Cardinal Cassidy, the principal author of "We Remember," was challenged on the point. An elderly rabbi who identified himself as having been sixteen years old and living in Munich at the time of Faulhaber's sermons remembered that the prelate had declared "that with the coming of Christ, Jews and Judaism have lost their place in the world." Historians present at the meeting recalled that the Nazi propaganda Faulhaber was rebutting referred to denigrations of the Old Testament, "Jewish Scriptures." Cardinal Faulhaber was careful to say that he was not defending Jewish people alive in his time. He was addressing, he said, only "Israel of biblical antiquity." His sermons, he insisted, "will discuss only pre-Christian Judaism." A year later, in a clarifying letter, his secretary insisted that the cardinal "had not taken a position with regard to the Jewish question of today." (Quoted by Lewy, "Pius XII, the Jews, and the German Catholic Church," in Ericksen and Heschel,
Betrayal,
131.) In Chicago, the rabbi then asked how the Vatican today could single out such "resistance" for praise in a document that claimed to be concerned with the fate of Jewish persons? Cardinal Cassidy seemed embarrassed by the question, and answered, according to my notes, "These quotations were put into the document by historians ... I did not have them in the original document." For further discussion of Cardinal Faulhaber's Advent sermons, see Hamerow,
On the Road to the Wolf's Lair,
140–45.

24. Dietrich,
Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich,
269.

25. Ibid., 283. István Deak says that "scores of priests" were jailed by the Nazis, "charged with sexual crimes or currency speculation." Deak, "The Pope, the Nazis, and the Jews," 47.

26. Helmreich,
German Churches under Hitler,
358. Perhaps as many as 20 percent of Polish priests were murdered by the Nazis. Pius XII, who is so widely faulted for saying too little about the murders of Jews, said nothing about this atrocity against his own clergy, a silence that, Deik says, "remains more incomprehensible than his extreme lateness in objecting to the persecution of the Jews." Deak, "The Pope, the Nazis, and the Jews," 47.

27. Blackbourn,
Marpingen,
376.

28. Ibid., 370–71. Blackbourn cites a 1935 source that between ten and fifteen thousand pilgrims were visiting annually, but this is lower than the number of people who came every day at the height of Marpingen enthusiasm in the 1870s.

29.
Mit Brennender Sorge
notably defends the Old Testament against Nazi assaults on it as Jewish: "God has given his commandments in sovereign form." But the papal defense, repeating the promise-fulfillment pattern that we noted as a foundational problem, extends only to the Scripture and its Christian significance: "The culmination of Revelation in the Gospel of Jesus Christ is final, binding forever." The encyclical condemns Nazi racism—"the so-called myth of blood and race"—but does not refer to antisemitism. The point of that distinction would become clearer as the Church consistently defended those Jews who had become Christians (victims of Nazi "racism," which did not recognize religious conversion) while saying nothing of Jews as such (victims of mere antisemitism).
(Mit Brennender Sorge,
in Matheson,
Third Reich and the Christian Churches,
69–70.) In contrast to such indirection, another encyclical,
Divini Redemptoris,
appeared only days later. It was an uneuphemistic broadside against "bolshevistic and atheistic Communism ... a barbarism ... the satanic scourge...[the] terrorism that reigns today in Russia, where former comrades in revolution are exterminating each other." In Carlen,
Papal Encyclicals,
537, 538, 542.

30. Cardinal Adolf Bertram, in Matheson,
Third Reich and the Christian Churches,
11. The cardinal concluded his statement, "One might mention in passing that the Press, which is overwhelmingly in Jewish hands, has remained consistently silent about the persecution of Catholics."

31. Hoffmann,
History of the German Resistance,
12.

32. Ibid., 15.

33. Ibid.

34. Quoted by Matheson,
Third Reich and the Christian Churches,
36.

35. Quoted by Helmreich,
German Churches under Hitler,
254.

51. Maria Laach and
Reichstheologie

1. Joseph Lortz, quoted by Michael B. Lukens, "Joseph Lortz and a Catholic Accommodation with National Socialism," in Ericksen and'S. Heschel,
Betrayal,
159.

2. Ibid., 164–65.

3. Quoted by Harold M. Stahmer,"
Kristallnacht
and Political Catholicism: Maria Laach, Martin Buber, and Father Caesarius Lauer, O.S.B.," unpublished lecture delivered before the Jesuit Student Philosophical Union, Kraków, Poland, November 12, 1997, 16. I am indebted to Professor Stahmer, who lived at Maria Laach as a student in the early 1950s, for my understanding of Maria Laach's place in this story.

4. Ibid.

5. Zahn,
German Catholics,
21–13.

6.I acknowledge this despite my own role as a celebrant of numerous folk Masses when I was a priest. I even took up the guitar for a time.

7. Konrad Adenauer,
Briefe
1945–1947 (selected correspondence), hrsg. von Rudolf Morsey und Hans-Peter Schwarz (Berlin 1983), S 172. Quoted by Scholder,
Requiem for Hitler,
139.

8. Quoted by Hughes,
The Monk's Tale,
68.

9. Robert P. Ericksen, "Assessing the Heritage: German Protestant Theologians, Nazis, and the 'Jewish Question,'" in Ericksen and'S. Heschel,
Betrayal,
23.

10. Quoted by Dietrich,
Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich,
116.

11. Lukens, "Joseph Lortz," 155.

12. Lewy,
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany,
107.

13. Quoted by Lukens, "Joseph Lortz," 159.

14. Stahmer, "
Kristallnacht
and Political Catholicism," 15.

15. Lewy,
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany,
46.

16. Quoted by Lewy,
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany,
46.

17. Ibid., 86.

18. Quoted by Schrader,
Church and State in Germany,
4.

19. Lewy,
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany,
86.

20. Schrader,
Church and State in Germany,
5.

21. Quoted by Lewy,
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany,
86.

22. Hughes,
The Monk's Tale,
66.

23. Quoted by Stahmer, "
Kristallnacht
and Political Catholicism," 15.

24. Hughes,
The Monk's Tale,
66. When the Church launched a canonical investigation into the wartime activities of Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, as part of the process of moving his "cause" toward beatification (he was beatified on September 3, 2000, together with Pius IX), it was learned that the money Roncalli, then apostolic nuncio to Turkey, used to purchase freedom for Jewish refugees "had come from Hitler's ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, a Catholic who did not want the Nazis to win the war." Desmond O'Grady, "Almost a Saint: Pope John XXIII,"
St. Anthony Messenger,
November 1996.

25. Lewy,
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany,
321.

26. Wighton,
Adenauer,
57–61.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 61.

29. Here is Stahmer's translation of a passage from
Adenauer: Eine Politische Biographie
by Henning Kohler: "A ghostly scene: applause and confidence shown to a conservative-Catholic policy and its representative von Papen, and hence also the applause for collaboration with Hitler; and during all this Adenauer, who had been removed from his political office, sat in a cell not far from the conference room."

30. See James Carroll, "Shoah in the News," Discussion Paper 27, Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics, and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, October 1997. "Chamberlain Plans to Ask Roosevelt to Join in Movement to Rescue Jews" was a
New York Times
headline on November 15, 1938. "Nobody knows yet," the news story read, "where the emigrants can settle permanently, although the United States can take 30,000 annually under the quota system." David Wyman points out that a total of 21,000 Jews were admitted to America while it was at war, which was only 10 percent of the legal quota. Wyman,
Abandonment of the Jews,
136.

52. Pius XII: Last Days of the Roman Ghetto

1. John Paul II,
Spiritual Pilgrimage,
62.

2. See Passelecq and Suchecky,
Hidden Encyclical
Because the unpublished encyclical, while condemning antisemitism in clear language, was also rife with traditional expressions of religious contempt for Judaism, many scholars regard its cancellation as a good thing. Others argue that even such a flawed encyclical could have helped some Jews survive.

3. See Marrus,
The Holocaust in History.
In the autumn of 1941, certain Catholic prelates in France denounced the Vichy regime's anti-Jewish legislation. Pétain's government sought an opinion from Rome. Marrus writes that "the French ambassador to the Holy See, Léon Bérard, sent an extensive report to Vichy on the Vatican's views. According to this diplomat the Holy See was not interested in the French antisemitic laws ... So far as the French were concerned, the Vatican essentially gave them a green light to legislate as they chose against Jews" (180).

4. The message deplores the fact "that hundreds of thousands of people, through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction." Robert Wistrich dismisses this as a "protest that lasted for the duration of a breath." "The Pope, the Church, and the Jews," 27.

5. Hochhuth,
The Deputy,
146.

6. Zuccotti,
The Italians and the Holocaust,
101, 104.