The Great Scandal
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The Great Scandal is a term coined after World War II to describe the Roman Catholic church's alleged tacit or active collusion with, accommodation of and initial refusal to condemn Adolf Hitler and his nascent Third Reich.
When discussed, the Great Scandal is generally split into two periods. The first, that of Pope Pius XI who ruled from 1922 to 1939, concerns internal politics within the Weimar Republic and has seen allegations of church acquiescence during the birth of Naziism. The second period, that of Pope Pius XII throughout World War II, has seen allegations of institutional anti-semitism within the church and discussion of its treatment of Jews and victims of the Third Reich.
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[edit] Pope Pius XI
[edit] Background
Pope Pius XI (birth name Achille Ratti) came to office shortly after a 1918-1921 tenure in Poland. Thus, he was acutely aware of the violent revolution, civil war, and adoption of Marxism-Leninism in the neighbouring Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) —he was in Warsaw when it was threatened by the Red Army—and of Soviet hostility toward organized religion.
[edit] Franz von Papen, Pius XI and the German Episcopate
Pius XI is not considered an anti-semite, and in fact published strong and clear guidelines which should have prevented any such political error as martial dictatorship. Cornwell alleged that Pius XII is tainted with some personal anti-semitism [1]. Both are recognised as being primarily driven by desire to create a political bulwark against rising secularist Communism. (Toland)
Historical strength is accorded to the allegations of compliance or collusion with well known anti-semitic Hitlerism [2] in 1933. This is partly due to the rapid change undertaken by the German Episcopate throughout Germany during precisely the implementation of the Reichskonkordat between the Holy See and Germany (see:[3] 1933 March 28 The German Catholic episcopate, organized in the Fulda Bishop's Conference, withdraws its earlier prohibition against membership in the Nazi party, and admonishes the faithful to be both loyal and obedient to the new Nazi regime. (Lewy),use=fair use)
Subsequent rapid deterioration between the German hierarchy and the Nazi Party do not negate the series of u-turn re-directions in episcopal teaching. This u-turn from previous strongest condemnation now enjoined acceptance and gave new approval to National Socialism. Franz von Papen was the chief civil co-ordinator of this reversal. Adolf Hitler's concurrent acceptance of an alliance with both Christian denominations was investigated at the Nuremberg Trial and Papen stated that the Nazi Party (as opposed to Hitler) were contrary to the Catholic Church and to Christianity. Papen defended himself from the prosecutors' assertion that the very Reichskonkordat was a maneuver intended to deceive by referring the Trial to the then pope, Pius XII and to Ludwig Kaas, both in the Vatican and unavailable for interview.[see 14 below]
A mild conclusion from deteriorating events is that the Vatican's Germany policy was deeply mistaken, probably resulting from the high-handed simplifications of Papen and Pacelli more than from Pius XI himself. This would be the kinder analysis, as the allegations go far into the realms of longstanding Christian anti-semitic tradition. This boiled down to Hitler's known assertion, shortly after his odd procedural rise to power through the Enabling Act, and during the composition by Ludwig Kaas of the actual Concordat, that he Hitler only planned to do to the Jews what you (addressing two of the highest ecclesiastics in Germany) yourselves have sought to achieve for a thousand years. Lewy see 26 April 1933 [4]
[edit] Bolshevistic Atheism
Pius XI focused throughout his tenure upon the threat, literally one of disestablishment of his Church and actual execution of his priests, knowing this to be internal Soviet policy in order to achieve the modern atheistic state. The Russian Revolution itself centred upon this aim due to complete Orthodox Church association with the worst inhumanity of the former Romanov czarist monarchy.
Deep anti-communist surety (see [5]) underlay Pius XI's policy and was reinforced by the spectre of successful revolution in Germany in 1919. In fact the so called German "Revolution" was a short lived affair which laid the ground-work of beneficial social legislation. It collapsed within months due to infighting between fraction and then abdication into the following Weimar bourgeois constitutional regime. However the Communists remained a force in Weimar Germany by rising from 2 to some 17% by November 1932.['Alan Bullock Hitler & Stalin p 1066]
[edit] Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII
Pius XI's successor, Eugenio Pacelli was placed in Germany from 1917, as a Papal Nuncio or direct representative, and therefore witnessed at first hand the "revolution", understood the political forces at work on the right and the left. This future Pius XII is noted for co-ordinating his pontiff's unsuccessful attempts at resolving a peaceful conclusion to World War I.
Pius XI kept Pacelli in Germany until 1929, and then Pacelli became papal foreign minister as Secretary of State, one of two such. Relevant to the subject, Pacelli himself had been groomed from early boyhood out of his strikingly Vatican connected family as a diplomatic "prince of the Church". His grandfather was principle legal architect of Vatican finance. He rose from Monsignor to Bishop to Cardinal to Secretary within ten years, becoming the valued lieutenant specialist in Pius XI's tireless anti-Communist diplomacy.[Cornwell]
Cardinal Pacelli signed the Reichskonkordat with Hitler's foreign minister von Papen on 20 July 1933 and is thus associated with what the world saw as the diplomatic entry of Nazism to the world stage. The personalities in the events leading up to this Concordat maintained communications with Cardinal Secretary Pacelli that are still not open to scrutiny. Vatican influence upon particularly the large and diverse Catholic Centre Party Germany was definite throughout the party's history, so much so that this very influence had hindered the Concordat ever since the failure of the WWI peace efforts , by taint of capitulation and popery (Catholics were a minority of the German population).
[edit] Present day
The recent and only third ever papal pastoral visit to a synagogue, in Cologne, was undiplomatically the occasion of reminder that the Vatican Archives remain barred from scrutiny for the relevant period. (It is suggested that this is purely the result of archival necessities, or that they are indeed open, or it is cause for further strong allegation and demands.) see Wikipedia Pope Pius XII, Pius XII & The Holocaust
[edit] The Allegation
Lambert alleges that Christianity played a role in the rise of Nazism. The allegation itself goes back to the very moment that the collusion appears to have openly operated, which is to Spring of 1933. An English book published by 1934 alleges purely Catholic malign influence upon events and information organs in the Saar as in Germany.The writer exposes division between the Vatican-Hitler pontifical interventions and the local Saar region.
- ...But the National Socialist revolution could not be carried out quite as thoroughly in the saar as in Germany because, for one thing, it was not possible to suppress all opposition by the simple method or rounding up objectors into concentration camps . Under the non-political rule of the Commission, both the Social Democratic and Communist parties survived, to form centres of opposition to national Socialism.
- The Catholic Centre party had been vigorously attacking the Nazis in its paper, the Landeszeitung. However, on March 28th 1933, there appeared an article strongly advocating a return to Germany. Attacks on Hitler gradually disappeared and the Saar centre party following the example of the German party came into line with the Nazis.[Lambert]
The 6-week period between the appointment of Hitler and the actual Enabling Act "legal" parliamentary empowerment are characterised by political and, in the Centre party, religious discussions carried forward from 1932. This January seizure of power itself was studied from the Nuremberg Trials onwards, and clear statements by the errant ex-Centre politician von Papen mark that overall Christian rapprochement but including (the Concordat) was central in the political foundations of the new Third Reich and laid by him as chief political fixer from that day forth. Von Papen it was, who fatally conspired to bring Hitler to the German Chancellery by purely Presidential approval on 30 January, using particularly industrialist influence, land-owning influence and the apparent, or alleged, wishes of the Holy See (who wished for Hitler as bulwark against Communism ). Despite all von Papen's founding assumptions all of these forces were in turn outwitted by Hitler's extreme criminality of purpose. What is of no doubt whatsoever is that Pope Pius XI himself welcomed Hermann Goering as Nazi representative at the formalisation of the Reichskonkordat process for precisely this stated reason.
[edit] 1932 Allegation
In 1968 Edgar Ansel Mowrer wrote, copyrighted, and published Triumph and Turmoil: A Personal History of our Time (ISBN 04920026). Mowrer was the correspondent in Berlin from 1923-1933 for The Chicago Daily News and was authorised to employ two assistants, the second of whom was Otto Brok, a " doctor of political sciences and a respected member of the (Catholic) Centre Party. Mowrer mentions Brok a number of times in relation to the Centre Party, metaphysical discussion of German philosophers and news sources but the central purpose of including Brok would appear to be for this his link into the Catholic (centre) party .
- "Following the May 1932 elections Brok one morning rushed into the office in tears and shouting "It is all over , it is all over ". On Mowrer's asking for the cause of this distress, Brok is reported as saying "Last night at a meeting of the Centre Party, which I attended, our Party leader , Monsignor Kaas, read a letter from the Secretary of State at Rome , Cardinal Pacelli, whom you knew in Munich as nuncio." "The Cardinal wrote that the Pope was worried about the rise of communism in Germany and advised our Party to help make Hitler chancellor. The Zentrums [Centre Party] leaders agreed ," he sobbed "Yes, go on" I said. "But, Edgar , that means HItler in power! Hitler wants a new war and he will get it." Once more he broke into tears. "Otto, may I report the cardinal's message and the Party's decision to cooperate with the Nazis?" " 'Nein. It was a secret meeting. But you will see." Mowrer's text having referred to this previously as a betrayal of the Catholics, continues from this Brok testimony: And see we did. From that day the Centre regularly supported Hitler. In November, the Party urged Hindenburg to take Hitler as chancellor. Even when in February, 1933, the Catholics realised it was too late to hold him to the Constitution, they voted an Enabling act doing away with personal freedom, democracy and law in Germany. This they called clarifying the situation.
Von Papen and the Centre Party's Chairman since 1928, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, are named in recently (1992, K.v. Klemperer) as being the two most decisive forces in engineering Hitler's rise to power. This was achieved parliamentarily, under emergency Weimar rules, that appear still to be quasi-legal abuse of the very legislation enacted, referred to as the Enabling Act of March 23, 1933. A proposition of dormancy of arrested communists appears in Wikipedia, at an undetermined date around 28 February and the Reichstag Fire Decree, but are not within that presidential decree. A procedural change to the Institution of the Reichstag was also effected either by vote, or by use of a 'Council of Elders', allowing for crucial discounting of the absent arrested and wounded and murdered Communist deputies. To which must be added 26 or so Socialists. The Enabling Act does not refer to such powers against the institution as any of these.
[edit] Monarchy Allegations
Linked allegation below however precedes this period in Avro Manhattan's 1949 publication of Vatican right-ward influence upon World history. He traces the continuity of such influence in Germany or attempts thereof to 1925. Of itself, the Vatican would have had such relations and influence stretching back though its two millennia, however the nature of the modern, post-1918 era political allegation is stronger in that it affects the political plunge into state anti-semitism and Holocaust genocide. The contrast between the Vatican's diplomatic accord reached with Hitler's criminal government of Germany in 1933 the Reichskonkordat against popular conceptions of Christian doctrine remain the driving force, along with resulting Jewish sufferers, for the appellation "Great Scandal".
By 1949 Avro Manhattan used the term Nazi Pope to identify the later Pius XII, and recently reference both for and against has settled on that used by John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope. Manhattan is remarkable for elucidating extremely murky Weimar political machination ('engineering') undertaken by the Holy See whilst Pacelli was still Cardinal nuncio in 1929. This was directed through the following 3 years towards an un-democratic Germany by adoption of an extreme right-wing political alliance. This failed earlier intrigue would firstly have continued with the nationally iconic Hindenburg Presidency before, at his death, the re-instatement of the Crown Prince of Germany and thereby replace the lost Monarchy. This plan was to prevent all Communist drift, ensuring Concordat demands for the Church and economic stability (domination) by the merchant and land-owning classes. It was conducted with sufficient secrecy as to evade published proofs and is revealed only tangentially, through the then Centre Party's German Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning. By merging into the later 1932 and 1933 period the last version of the monarchist plan would have installed Hitler as reigning Chancellor to the reigning figurehead monarch.
[edit] The Partial Quid pro Quo
Earlier during the 1946 Trials reference to the affects of the alleged collusion are referenced. Investigation into the overthrow of democracy at the close of the Weimar Republic tried the central personality of Franz von Papen. (The trials qualified this high Catholic noble Hitler collaborator as double faced in his connection with Church policy in particular ).
The detail of the allegation centres on the period of December 1932 towards July 1933. It seems accepted by all that a quid pro quo was undertaken between Hitler and the Holy See but only concerning a particular barter. This was the negotiation of the voluntary dissolution of the Centre Party Germany, a long standing and noble Catholic German political Party) for the Reichskonkordat. Hitler desired the absorption of German Catholicism into his Party, and desired a veneer of political respectability obtainable by both dissolution and concordat . The one internal to Germany, the other for Germans and all the world to see. The Holy See through Ludwig Kaas effected the Concordat's contents, and re-defined the Catholic relationship to Nazism.
[edit] The Anti-Semitism
Consideration of historic Christian anti-semitism (linked below) and its effect on the Nazi rise to power and acceptance in Germany has been published since 1941 . During WWII, definitive analysis revealing Germany's own longstanding development of anti-semitic thought was published by R.D. O'Butler of All Souls College Oxford. This showed that the acceptance of Hitlerism in Germany was very logical considering the line of philosophy since 1783 and the era of the French Revolution. This was hardly shattering news at the date of publication, and since then such analysis has been in abeyance, possibly in order to obtain reconciliation in Europe. Whatever analysis provides, it rests upon clear texts of a long line of known philosophers since.
The reception therefore of the engineered seizure, allegedly assisted in return as if by quid pro quo from the Holy See, was cheerful and swift in Germany, Catholic Centre voters flocked to join the hitherto Church-proscribed Nazi party en masse, whilst the Bishops hailed a great new dawn .[Alan Bullock Hitler & Stalin p1066]. True disquiet amongst voters now inhabiting a violent one-party Sate of Dictatorship is reflected arithmetically :
- 5 March 1933 last Free General Election
44,685,800 Eligble Voters, 39,343,300 Valid Ballots .NSDAP17,277,200
- 12 November 1933 One-Party election
45,141,900 Eligble Voters, 42,988,100 Valid (NSDAP), Invalid ballots 3,349,363
[edit] See also
- Heinrich Brüning
- Enabling Act
- Adolf Hitler
- Hitler's Pope
- Monsignor Ludwig Kaas
- Pope Pius XI
- Pope Pius XII
- Reichskonkordat
- Franz von Papen
- Weimar Republic
[edit] Sources
- Rohan D' O Butler, The Roots of National Socialism 1783-1933, Faber and Faber, London 1941.
- John Toland, Adolf Hitler, copyright 1976, Doubleday, p. 315
- Margaret Lambert, The Saar, Faber & Faber, 1934
- Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Triumph and Turmoil, George Allen & Unwin, 1968
[edit] External links
- [6], abbreviates Avro Manhattan's 1949 The Vatican in World Politics
- [7] The Vatican Concordat With Hitler's Reich by Notre Dame University Professor of Theology Robert. E. Krieg
- [8] , the shrill The Scandal of Roman Catholicism contains source re : Episcopate in Nazi Germany
- [9] Jewish Virtual Library resource, refers to the International Catholic-Jewish Commission; a source to 1933 League of Nations', Pacelli's Nazi awareness; his Holocaust knowledge; Vatican Archives closure from 1923 onwards.
- [10] Ex US Federal Prosecutor John Loftus 'confirms' USA Industrial Robber Baron -Nazi link.
- [11] -to reference the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith .
- [12] Stephen F. Pollard 's Money and the Rise of the papacy: Financing the Vatican 1850-1950 ISBN 0-521-81204-6 reviewed by Fordham University's Marymount theologian Patrick J. Hayes; deals with Bernadino Nogara and the Vatican financial affairs and investment.
- [13] New Oxford Review, The Pius War by Joseph Bottum, David Dalin & William Doino Jnr. contains links to further current defensive /offensive books on the Pacelli question
- [14] "The Augustine Club" at Columbia University posted review of recent Books defending wartime Pacelli/ Pius XII ( Pinchas E. Lapide ) and Anthony Rhodes ) and Harold C. Deutsch.
- [15] The Avalon Project's Yale Law resource : a day in Franz von Papen's prosecution (he was acquitted of the offences charged ) at the Nuremberg Trial , contains prosecution assertion , by Papen himself , that the Reichskonkordat was a maneuver intended to deceive ; discusses nature & timeline of von Papen's Church(es) priority .
- [16] Gregory S.Paul presents sourced dissertation entitled The Great Scandal:Christianity's Role in the Rise of Nazism, published from India in anti-conversion (to Christianity) resource/blogspot .
- [17] Pro-democrat, LaRouche Democrats Steve Douglas 2002 US tract Will the US go fascist ? The Nazi Germany precedent ; a round-up accusation re: enabling of Hitler from their Executive Intelligence Review; reveals contemporary political anxiety.
- [18] Shows Present Day relationship source .
- "The Great Scandal: Christianity's Role in the Rise of the Nazis" by Gregory S. Paul at the Council for Secular Humanism website, reprinted from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 4.
- "Is Religion the foundation for morality?" by Peter Adegoke, president of the Bertrand Russell Society, Nigeria.
- "Tracking the Nones" by Martin S. Marty in Sightings, a publication of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago.
- "1945: The German churches before and afterwards" by Johann Neumann, emeritus professor for the sociology of law and the sociology of religion, University of Tübingen, Germany; translated and edited by Muriel Frazer for the National Secular Society
- "Fascism Part I: Understanding Fascism and anti-Semitism" by Geoff Price at rationalrevolution.net.
