Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber

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Memorial stone of von Faulhaber in the Munich Frauenkirche

His Eminence Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber (born March 3, 1869 in Klosterheidenfeld, Unterfranken, died June 12, 1952 in Munich) was Roman Catholic Archbishop of Munich for 35 years, from 1917 to his death in 1952. In 1921 he became a Cardinal, with the title of Cardinal Priest of S. Anastasia, and at his death was the last surviving cardinal appointed by Pope Benedict XV. He ordained the future Pope Benedict XVI as a priest in Munich in 1951. Faulhaber served as a priest in Würzburg from 1892 until 1910 when he was appointed Bishop of Speyer, serving there for six years.

Faulhaber was a key figure in the rapprochement between the Roman Catholic Church and the Nazis. On April 1, 1933 the violent "boycott" of Jewish businesses took place and a week later Jews were banned from the German civil service by the Nazis. Yet, "At a meeting of the Bavarian Council of Ministers on April 24, 1933 the Premier was able to report that Cardinal Faulhaber had issued an order to the clergy to support the new regime in which he (Faulhaber) had confidence" [parentheses in original].^[1]

According to Friedlaender:

The 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses was the first major test on a national scale of the attitude of the Christian churches toward the situation of the Jews under the new government. In historian Klaus Scholder's words, during the decisive days around the first of April, no bishop, no church dignitaries, no synod made any open declaration against the persecution of the Jews in Germany.^[2]

Friedlaender quotes Faulhaber:

In a letter addressed ... to the Vatican's secretary of state, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, Faulhaber wrote: We bishops are being asked why the Catholic Church, as often in its history, does not intervene on behalf of the Jews. This is not possible at this time because the struggle against the Jews would then, at the same time, become a struggle against the Catholics, and because the Jews can help themselves, as the sudden end of the boycott shows.^[3]

Faulhaber was also involved with Cardinal Pacelli in the negotiations of the Reichskonkordat which was signed on July 20, 1933 and ratified in September of that year.^[4] By the time the Concordat was signed the Nazis had eviscerated representative government in Germany but there was no objection in the document to that or to the Nazis' anti-Jewish activities. Articles 31 and 32 spelled the doom of the organized Roman Catholic resistance to the Nazis in the German Center Party.^[5]

On the significance of the Reichskonkordat, Lewy writes:

There is general agreement that the Concordat increased substantially the prestige of Hitler's regime around the world. As Cardinal Faulhaber put it in a sermon delivered in 1937: "At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with cool reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat expressed its confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the new government abroad."^[6]

Faulhaber was, at best, an inconsistent opponent of Nazism. In an Advent 1933 sermon, he preached: "Let us not forget that we were saved not by German blood but by the blood of Christ!" in response to Nazi racism, while in the same year he wrote in a hand-written letter to Hitler, "May God protect our Chancellor for our people."

As Friedlaender notes:

Cardinal Faulhaber himself later stressed that, in his Advent sermons, he had wished only to defend the Old Testament and not to comment on contemporary aspects of the Jewish issue. In fact, in the sermons he was using some of the most common clichés of traditional religious anti-Semitism.^[7]

In 1934 an unknown person fired two shots at the cardinal's study. In 1938 a Nazi mob broke the windows in his residence.

Faulhaber was an opponent of the Nazi euthanasia program. In a letter to the head of the Reich Chancellery, Faulhaber wrote:

"I have deemed it my duty to speak out in this ethico-legal, non-political question, for as a Catholic bishop I may not remain silent when the preservation of the moral foundations of all public order is at stake."^[8]

On Jun 29, 1951 Faulhaber ordained Joseph Ratzinger (who was later elected as Pope Benedict XVI) and his brother Georg Ratzinger as priests.

[edit] Notes

↑ Lewy, Guenter (2000). The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80931-1. p. 41. Amazon Books. Retrieved May 8, 2005.
↑ Friedlaender, Saul. (1997). "Consenting Elites, Threatened Elites." Chapter 2 in Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol I - The Years of Persecution 1933-1939. New York. History-of-the-Holocaust.org. Retrieved May 8, 2005.
↑ Ibid.
↑ See Lewy, pp. 72, 73, 101-104.
↑ For information on the Center Party and the Nazis, see Carroll, James (2001). Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. ISBN 0-395-77927-8. pp. 497ff.
↑ See Lewy, p. 90.
↑ Friedlaender, op cit.
↑ See Lewy, p. 265.