Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (89 page)

As I reported earlier, on entering the church I was drawn immediately to one of the windows in the nearby western apse, not knowing why until I stood close enough to read the letters in the colored glass: "
Dr. Konrad
Adenauer, Bundeskanzler, 1956.
" The name took me back to the time I'd stood there with my mother, when Adenauer was the chancellor of West Germany. She had explained to me that Adenauer was the donor of the window, and I would later learn it had been installed only the year before. The association with the monastery of
DerAlte
(the Old Man), as he was called by then, had made the place seem doubly sacred because of Adenauer's postwar status as a hero of resistance to Hitler. Not only Catholics but Germans too had snuggled beneath the blanket of Adenauer's virtue, which was continually asserted by the unelaborated statement that he had ended the war in one of Hitler's concentration camps. During my recent visit, I noted that the window depicted a scene of Adam and Eve stunned in the gaze of a slyly tormenting serpent. In fact, Adenauer had been one of the first to criticize the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church for its failure to oppose Nazism. "I believe," he declared in 1946, "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 concentration camps as a result. But none of that happened and therefore it is best to keep quiet."
⁷
As indeed, on this subject, Adenauer mainly was. His fierce declaration was made in a private letter, and by 1956 Catholics like my parents had no knowledge of his position.

Near the window he sponsored is the entrance to the church crypt below. It is a dark, low-ceilinged chapel with a dozen dwarf pillars holding up the vaulted stone. Despite kneelers and an altar, it can seem more like a
Ratskeller
than a sanctuary. Yet it was here, at liturgies attended by only dozens of people during the 1920s, that the first so-called Dialogue Masses were celebrated. The liturgical text was still in Latin, but the laity recited it antiphonally with the priest, a first, powerful step toward the new ideal of universal participation that has now become a Catholic norm. No longer do we attend Mass as a collection of
isolatos,
each on his or her knees, face buried in hands from which dangle rosary beads. We do not approach God alone but as members of a praying community, members of a "folk," also known as the Communion of Saints, Mysterium of Christ.

The prophet of this movement was the Maria Laach monk Odo Casel (1886–1948), whose work
Theology of Mystery
had a great impact in the Church, nowhere more than in America. A monastery that monks from Maria Laach had founded in Minnesota (St. John's, in Collegeville) became, in turn, the center of the liturgical movement in the United States. The most influential American liturgist was the St. John's Benedictine Godfrey Diekmann, longtime editor of
Worship
magazine. Father Diekmann was familiar to me when I was a seminarian at the Paulist College at Catholic University. In the early 1960s, he was often at CU, a burly, overpowering man whose brilliant white hair and masculine ruddiness underscored the sense we all had that a new spirit was blowing through the Church. Diekmann's magazine was a rallying point, and it exerted a life-changing influence on Catholics of my generation. The man himself, in my several glimpses of him, had no less an impact. As a classically trained and fully credentialed Benedictine, Diekmann legitimized what critics dismissed as an arcane set of fads, but which the old guard astutely recognized as a revolutionary movement in midcentury Catholicism. We embraced one liturgical innovation after another—unheard-of modifications of vestments; a once unthinkable use of the vernacular; communion in the form of ordinary bread (Wonder bread indeed!) instead of sterile wafers, that bread placed in the communicant's hands instead of, infantilizingly, on the tongue; those renditions of "Kumbaya" replacing Tantum Ergo. The unstoppable sequence, like waves at a crumbling dike, broke down the everlasting Catholic resistance to change.

Unknown to us, Godfrey Diekmann came to his role as the Pied Piper of "folk" reform no stranger to the enthusiasm of such a movement. As a theology student a generation earlier, he had lived at the mother house, Maria Laach, from 1931 to 1933. The time there solidified his identity as a disciple of Odo Casel and a committed liturgical innovator. But Diekmann was alive to what else was happening at that moment in Germany. His biographer, Kathleen Hughes, cites a letter young Father Diekmann wrote to his abbot back home in Minnesota during that fateful spring. "Today is election day in Germany," it begins, enabling us to know it was March 5,1933. Two days before, the Reichstag in Berlin had been set ablaze, an act of arson the Nazis succeeded in blaming on the Communists. What is striking about Diekmann's letter is the glimpse it offers of the anti-Communist hysteria that was sweeping even through the cloisters of Maria Laach. "All manner of the wildest rumors are floating around about 'discovered' plans of the communists. Maria Laach was officially warned by police that the Reds have evil intentions, and that a thorough nightly guard must be kept. Accordingly, every night a patrol of four or more men keep watch: the 'fire-department' has had drills, and large electric lights are strung all about the premises, so that the entire surroundings can be flooded with light, should any nightly emergency arise. Everybody is all excited: the abbot gave a conference on the proximate end of the world last Wednesday."
⁸

That abbot was Ildefons Herwegen, and his palpable sense of panic, as reflected in Diekmann's letter, may partially account for his urgent embrace that spring of a pro-Nazi Catholic movement. Abbot Herwegen is credited with being a father of the worldwide Catholic liturgical renewal. Yet in him, perhaps more than in anyone else, can be seen that "fundamental kinship" between Catholic and German impulses of the time: Abbot Herwegen was also a father of what came to be known as
Reichstheologie.
That chillingly named school of theology included some of the greatest Catholic theologians of Germany. They would promote not just an accommodation with National Socialism, but an alliance reaching to the deepest levels of religious meaning. Such instinctive pro-Nazi enthusiasm on the part of Catholic intellectuals would, for the most part, be relatively short-lived. Within a few years, talk of the "fundamental kinship" would be silenced by the onslaught of Hitler's brutality. But the importance of the intellectual and spiritual connections made in the name of a common longing for a "total" society in that crucial early period should not be overlooked. It was the theological equivalent of the pragmatic deal-making that brought Pacelli and Hitler together.

Our interest in
Reichstheologie
goes beyond its significance as one of the sources of Catholic accommodation with Nazism. Indeed, our concern remains less with the Church's failure to oppose Nazism than with the ways in which Nazism was able to tap into the fundamental currents of the Christian imagination.
Reichstheologie
is a manifestation par excellence of that phenomenon. It was also, of course, a root cause of Catholic acquiescence. What makes early theological and political accommodation of Catholicism with Nazism an unfinished matter of moral quandary is the fact that it was clear to all from the start that the "totality," whether defined religiously or politically, would, by that very definition, exclude the Jews. The Nazis were explicit in defining the Jews at the outset as the rejected group against which the "totality" defined itself. If the Church was not offended by this, it was because Christianity had done the same thing.

Protestant theology has its own history as an incubator of Nazi ideology, and figures like Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch, and Gerhard Kittel have been subjects of searching examination. "The Protestant theology they inherited and shaped allowed them," as Robert Ericksen has written, "to endorse enthusiastically the rise of Hitler and to accept without complaint the removal of Jews from German life."
⁹
The most notable of the Nazi-friendly Catholic theologians was Karl Adam of Tübingen. His
Spirit of Catholicism,
published in the mid 1920s, an important text in my own training forty years later, was a prophetic statement of the new idea of the Church as a community. That Adam was perhaps the most notable Catholic theologian of his generation is why it matters that it was also he who said that the Nazi movement and the Catholic Church complement each other like nature and grace. As for Hitler, Adam wrote in 1933, "Now he stands before us, he whom the voices of our poets and sages have summoned, the liberator of the German genius. He has removed the blindfolds from our eyes and, through all political, economic, social, and confessional covers, has enabled us to see and love again the one essential thing: our unity of blood, our German self, the
Homo Germanus
"
¹⁰
When my seminary professors introduced me to the work of Karl Adam, no reference was made to such ideas.

Another notable Catholic "Reichstheologian"—the scholar Michael Lukens calls him "the most pivotal figure"
¹¹
—was Joseph Lortz, publisher of
Reich und Kirche,
a series of short books arguing for the compatibility of Nazism and Catholicism. Lortz, a priest and theologian at Braunsberg, actually became a Nazi Party member in 1933. He articulated more clearly than anyone the intellectual basis for the new compatibility. He argued that German Catholics "were obligated in conscience," in Guenter Lewy's phrase, "to support National Socialism wholeheartedly."
¹²
Lortz offered this summary of his analysis:

...insofar as [our present situation] is constructive, it is so in reaction against those spiritual factors and attitudes to life which laid the foundation of the modern age, which fashioned modern development, and then dominated it until the turn of the century. The new trend is (a)
Philosophically,
a turn from doubt, hypercriticism, historicism, or subjectivism, to a form of objectivism...(b)
Ethically,
the trend is from unrestrained freedom to authority, from the egoism of individualism to communal thinking, (c)
Politically,
the liberal and democratic idea together with its most concrete political manifestation, parliamentarianism, is yielding to the principle of leadership in the form of dictatorship, or government without parliamentary majorities, or nonparty government (Fascism, Nazism), (d)
Religiously,
there is a better understanding of the value of institutional religion, of the value of a Church as such, and an appreciation also of the unique character of religion and its special claims."
¹³

Because of his association with Nazism, Lortz was tried by the Allied tribunals after the war, and barred from teaching. In 1950, he was appointed director of the Institute for European History in Mainz, a position he held while I was living only three miles away. He regained his respectability and held his position in Mainz until 1975, the year of his death.

A milestone gathering of the Catholic proponents of
Reichstheologie
took place at Maria Laach on April 3, 1933, with Abbot Herwegen as host."
¹⁴
This was two days after the Nazis' nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses, measures from which the Church had officially distanced itself. The group at the abbey included Catholic intellectuals, journalists, and professionals, organized around theologians. It called itself
Kreuz und Adler,
Cross and Eagle"
¹⁵
(once again the cross in a context far from any meaning it could have had for Jesus or his followers). Maria Laach, presumably freeing itself from that Communist-induced panic about the "proximate end of the world" on which Abbot Herwegen had preached the month before, now became a center of the effort to join, in Lortz's phrase, the Reich and the Church. One
Kreuz und Adler
leader described its obligation to support the Third Reich as a "Christian counterrevolution to 1789."
¹⁶

In July 1933, three months after the
Kreuz und Adler
meeting, the abbey hosted the convention of an association of Catholic academics, with prominent Catholic theologians in attendance.
¹⁷
One of those was Robert Grosche, whom I cited as having seen the parallel between the papal infallibility declaration of 1870 and the Enabling Act of 1933. The meeting turned into a German Catholic festival celebrating the recently announced
Reichskonkordat
between Berlin and the Vatican. Festivity may have been the note in any case, but the arrival at Maria Laach of Franz von Papen guaranteed it. He had just returned from Rome, where he and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli had signed the concordat. As we saw, the Te Deum was being sung at nearby Trier, where Papen had represented Hitler at the solemn showing of the Seamless Robe.

An English translation of the text of the concordat, published at the time by a group calling itself the Friends of Germany, indicates its significance to Germans by citing this comment from the Augsburg newspaper
Postzeitung:
"No document will command such widespread attention as the text of the Reichs-concordat, the origin and object of which Vice Chancellor von Papen interpreted in response to an invitation of the Catholic Academic Union at Maria Laach before a crowded executive meeting of representatives from all parts of Germany. It proved an historic event, never to be forgotten by those present ... Papen regaled his audience with an elucidation of various background details, as for instance, the reaction of the Holy Father to the treaty."
¹⁸
It was here, on July 22, that Papen drew the connection between the dissolution of the Center Party and the concordat.
¹⁹
The pope, Papen said, was especially pleased at the promised destruction of Bolshevism.
²⁰
Indeed, Pius XI had agreed to the treaty "in the recognition that the new Germany had fought a decisive battle against Bolshevism and the atheist movement."
²¹