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I had this in my files on Serbia. I wish I could copy the photos and include them, but I am not high tech enough. Not sure of the web site this came from, but if you find it it will have all the photos The Pictures Accuse: The Catholic Church and Nazism in Germany and Croatia
Photo montage and text by Jared Israel
[Posted 22 April 2005. New Introduction, 11 April 2006] Did the Catholic Church help German Nazism? "Antagonism to the Jews of today must not be extended to the books of Pre-Christian Judaism."
-- Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber in the Advent sermons, delivered in 1933. According to the Vatican statement, "We Remember: Reflections on the Holocaust," the Advent sermons "clearly expressed rejection of the Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda." For more on Faulhaber, see below (broken link).
The Vatican claims Nazism was the antithesis of the Catholic Church:
[Excerpt from "We Remember: Reflections on the Holocaust," starts here]
At the level of theological reflection we cannot ignore the fact that not a few in the Nazi Party not only showed aversion to the idea of divine Providence at work in human affairs, but gave proof of a definite hatred directed at God himself. Logically, such an attitude also led to a rejection of Christianity and a desire to see the Church destroyed or at least subjected to the interests of the Nazi state.
It was this extreme ideology which became the basis of the measures taken first to drive the Jews from their homes and then to exterminate them. The Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its anti-semitism had its roots outside of Christianity and, in pursuing its aims, it did not hesitate to oppose the Church and persecute her members also.
[Excerpt from "We Remember: Reflections on the Holocaust," ends here]
If you read the text of "We Remember: Reflections on the Holocaust," you will see that the Vatican refuses to acknowledge that the Church ever officially aided Nazism; it names only Church officials who allegedly opposed the Nazis. (Regarding this, I have posted (broken link) the argument, made in "We Remember," that Cardinal Faulhaber stood up to Nazi antisemitism, plus two excerpts from Faulhaber's actual remarks.)
Indeed, "We remember" quotes Pope John Paul II saying that the Church not only opposed Nazism and repudiated Nazi racial doctrines, but that it had always rejected the views held by some Christians that Jews were to blame for supposedly killing Jesus:
"In the Christian world--I do not say on the part of the Church as such--erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility towards this people."
-- John Paul II as quoted in "We Remember: Reflections on the Holocaust" http://tinyurl.com/bxszb
Pope John Paul II and "We Remember" are widely praised for supposedly facing up to errors made during the Holocaust.
I ask: if the Church never aided, and indeed opposed, the Nazis, and never even accepted religion-based antisemitism, to what errors did the Vatican face up?
Here's how Joseph Ratzinger explains it. Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, wrote the following when he was a top advisor to John Paul II:
"'Even if the most recent, loathsome experience of the Shoah (Holocaust) was perpetrated in the name of an anti-Christian ideology, which tried to strike the Christian faith at its Abrahamic roots in the people of Israel, it cannot be denied that a certain insufficient resistance to this atrocity on the part of Christians can be explained by an inherited anti-Judaism present in the hearts of not a few Christians.'" (My emphasis - Jared Israel.)
-- Joseph Ratzinger as quoted by Abe Foxman in an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) press release welcoming Ratzinger's election as Pope. http://www.adl.org/PresRele/VaticanJewish_96/44698_96.htmAlso quoted on boston.com http://tinyurl.com/hfpob
So Joseph Ratzinger claims that: a) Nazism was "anti-Christian"; b) Christianity erred only by "insufficient resistance" to Nazism, not by complicity or active support; c) even this error resulted from individual Christian's religious hostilities to Judaism - "an inherited anti-Judaism present in the hearts of not a few Christians" - rather than widespread and virulent antisemitism and the policies of religious organizations, such as the centralized Catholic Church.
But the evidence shows that:
A) The Catholic Church hierarchy - especially Eugenio Pacelli, before and after he became Pope Pius XII - aided the Nazis. Indeed, Pacelli and the Church played a central role in making Hitler the dictator of Germany.
B) The Catholic Church was active in Nazi movements outside Germany, especially in the Baltic region and in the Balkans, where the Church helped run the Nazi puppet State of Croatia. After the war, the Vatican sheltered Croatian Nazi war criminals.
C) Although at Yad Vashem, Pope John Paul II described the Nazis as having "a Godless ideology," this is not how the Nazis presented themselves or how the Catholic Church described the Nazis when they were in power.
The German Catholic Church's Centre Party (Zentrum) did clash with the Nazis in the 1920s, but as Hitler wrote (see quote below (broken link)) their quarrel was over politics, not Catholic religious teachings, let alone belief in god. I can find no record from the period of Nazi rule of the Catholic Church attacking the Nazis as atheists, perhaps because they weren't. The Nazis themselves claimed they were fighting against atheism, specifically Bolshevist atheism, which they charged was a Jewish-created movement. In attacking the Jews, the Nazis routinely employed Christian symbolism and traditional Christian antisemitic arguments, with which Europeans were familiar.
On 23 March 1933, the Nazi government put forward the Enabling act, which would allow Hitler to create new laws without parliamentary approval. This was after the Nazi-staged Reichstag fire; after the banning of the huge Communist party and subsequent arrest of thousands of communists and other anti-Nazis; and amidst a campaign of violent antisemitism. To become law, the Enabling act needed a 2/3 parliamentary vote. Before the vote, Hitler addressed the Reichstag (parliament) saying:
"While the Government is determined to carry through the political and moral purging of our public life, it is creating and insuring prerequisites for a truly religious life. The Government sees in both [Catholic and Protestant] Christian confessions the most important factors for the maintenance of our folkdom. It will respect agreements concluded between them and the States. However, it respects that its work will meet with a similar appreciation. The Government will treat all other denominations with equal objective justice. It can never condone, though, that belonging to a certain denomination or to a certain race might be regarded as a license to commit or tolerate crimes. The Government will devote its care to the sincere living together of Church and State." (My emphasis - Jared Israel)
--- http://tinyurl.com/g8gh3
The Social Democrats fiercely opposed the Enabling act. Hitler needed a 2/3 majority, so the balance lay with Zentrum, the Catholic Center Party. Zentrum leader Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, a close friend and advisor to Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, addressed the Reichstag. Far from attacking the Enabling act, or disputing Hitler's claim that Nazism was based on Christianity, Kaas called for a 'yes' vote. The Zentrum faction did vote 'yes,' and the act became law. According to National Catholic Reporter correspondent John Allen, a liberal Catholic and student of Vatican history (he has written a biography of Joseph Ratzinger):
[Excerpt from John Allen's Telegraph article starts here]
Kaas acted in co-ordination with the German bishops. Four days later, on March 28, the German bishops rescinded their ban on Nazi party membership. On April 1, Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau addressed German Catholics in a letter, warning them "to reject as a matter of principle all illegal or subversive activities". To most Catholics, it looked as if the church wanted a modus vivendi with Hitler.
The same impression was created a few weeks later when Hitler held a plebiscite to endorse his decision to pull Germany out of the League of Nations, which received the endorsement of the Catholic press and of several Catholic bishops. When Hitler and the Church came to terms for a concordat, it cemented the impression that Hitler was a man the Church "could do business with". http://tinyurl.com/jj2g4
[Excerpt from John Allen's Telegraph article ends here]
Three and a half months later, on 6 July 1933, the Catholic Church's Center Party, Zentrum, dissolved itself. Two weeks after that, the Vatican and the Nazi government signed the Concordat, confirming the alliance between the Catholic Church and the Nazi state. Article 16 of the Concordat, published below, required that Catholic bishops swear to honor the Nazi government, to make their subordinates honor it, and to shun acts that would endanger it. (Notice that the Church was not promising to avoid just illegal acts, but any acts that might endanger the Nazi state, even if such acts were not yet outlawed.)
"Article 16
Before bishops take possession of their dioceses they are to take an oath of fealty either to the Reich Representative of the State concerned, or to the President of the Reich, according to the following formula: "Before God and on the Holy Gospels I swear and promise as becomes a bishop, loyalty to the German Reich and to the [regional - EC] State of . . . I swear and promise to honor the legally constituted Government and to cause the clergy of my diocese to honor it. In the performance of my spiritual office and in my solicitude for the welfare and the interests of the German Reich, I will endeavor to avoid all detrimental acts which might endanger it." (My emphasis - Jared Israel)[/CENTER] http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_ss33co.htm
Notice that the Vatican committed German bishops to "honor the legally constituted Government." The Vatican was publicly asserting that the Enabling act, which could not have passed absent Catholic Church-controlled votes, made the Nazi dictatorship "legally constituted." So first the Catholic hierarchy fights to get the Center party to vote for the Enabling act (because there was an internal fight over this that Monsignor Kaas, who was very close to the Vatican, won) thus giving the dictatorship a pseudo legality and then the Vatican orders the German Church from bishops on down to honor the Nazi Reich because... it was legally constituted!
The Nazis pledged, among other things, to give certain organizational Church decisions the force of criminal law. For example:
"Article 10
The wearing of clerical dress or of a religious habit on the part of lay folk, or of clerics or religious who have been forbidden to wear them by a final and valid injunction made by the competent ecclesiastical authority and officially communicated to the State authority, is liable to the same penalty on the part of the State as the misuse of military uniform."
Defenders of the Catholic Church, such as the Vatican official, Jesuit Peter Gumpel, argue that:
"As the Vatican authority itself and the most astute Catholics foresaw, Hitler never had any intention of respecting the Concordat, rather, with the exception of the strictly liturgical or para-liturgical functions, the rest of the Church’s activities were systematically hampered and later gradually suppressed."
-- Quoted by the Catholic news agency, ZENIT, at http://tinyurl.com/qh2a5
To read Emperor's Clothes articles supporting the charge that Gumpel, the main Vatican advocate for Pope Pius XII, is also a public advocate for antisemitism, see
http://tenc.net/vatican/pope-2.htm (broken link) and
http://tenc.net/vatican/pope-3.htm (broken link)
It is certainly true that the Nazis reneged on parts of the Concordat, especially over issues involving control. And the German Church did sometimes criticize Nazi policies, for example regarding forced sterilization (which contradicts Catholic doctrine) but not, as the Vatican now claims, over Nazi treatment of the Jews. But the secondary fact, that German Catholic-Nazi relations were not always smooth sailing, does not mitigate the horrific truth: by voting to give Hitler dictatorial powers, the Catholic Center Party made it possible for Hitler to set up his dictatorship with a (phony) appearance of legality; by dissolving the Center party, the German Church eliminated a potential source of resistance and, for many Catholics, took away their only vehicle of political expression; by dropping the ban on Catholics joining the Nazi Party, the Church made Nazism an alternative vehicle for political action; and by signing the Concordat, the Vatican gave Hitler international respectability and told millions of Catholics in Germany and worldwide that the Pope was cooperating with the Nazis.
Put yourself in the position of a 1933 German Catholic as you read the text of the Concordat between Nazi Germany and the Vatican, the Reichskonkordat. http://tinyurl.com/8js9c
The German Catholic Church has rescinded its ban on joining the Nazi Party. The Catholic Center party has dissolved itself. In the Reichskonkordat, the Vatican has promised that German Bishops and their subordinates will be obedient to and honor the Nazi state (Article 16). It has promised that German Catholic educators will teach children patriotic love for the Nazi state (Article 21). It has requested and received the Nazi dictatorship's promise to enforce internal Church decisions (Article 10). Cardinal Bertram of Breslau has called on Catholics to avoid all subversive or illegal (by Nazi definition) activities. How should you respond to the Nazi's new nightmare state? Doesn't the Catholic Church teach you to view Church officials as exemplary? Shouldn't they be emulated? Isn't the Pope's word law, and didn't the Pope sign the Reichskonkordat, an agreement with the Nazi dictatorship, that reads:
"In the performance of my spiritual office and in my solicitude for the welfare and the interests of the German Reich, I will endeavor to avoid all detrimental acts which might endanger it."
--Mandatory pledge for newly appointed Catholic Bishops, as stated in the Reichskonkordat, or Concordat Between the Holy See and the German [Nazi] Reich, Article 16 http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_ss33co.htm
Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, wrote:
"...it cannot be denied that a certain insufficient resistance to this atrocity [the Holocaust] on the part of Christians can be explained by an inherited anti-Judaism present in the hearts of not a few Christians."
Sure, there was plenty of "anti-Judaism," not to mention plain antisemitism. But the Vatican had committed the German Church to honor the Nazi dictatorship and "Avoid all detrimental acts which might endanger it." Is Pope Benedict XVI, formerly the Vatican's Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and before that a German professor of Theology, perhaps unfamiliar with the Reichskonkordat? Or does Ratzinger think the German Catholic Church should have rebelled against the Vatican?
And what if Fr. Peter Gumpel is correct? What if, as Gumpel argues, "the Vatican authority itself and the most astute Catholics" expected the Nazis to renege on some or all of what they promised in the Concordat? What if, in other words, the German Catholic hierarchy and the Vatican ordered Catholic deputies to vote for the Enabling act and negotiated the Concordat while expecting that Hitler would not deliver promised guarantees to the German Church? What then was the motive of the Vatican and the German Catholic hierarchy for taking actions which put the Nazis firmly in power, permitted Catholics to join the Nazi party, and gave Hitler a document, signed by the Pope, which committed the German Church to honor the Nazi Reich and shun actions "which might endanger it"?
Catholic Church participation in Nazism was visible to the world starting in 1933, and despite recent Vatican efforts to whitewash the past, a pictorial record survived. These pictures accuse.
- Jared Israel
Editor, Emperor's Clothes
11 April 2006
.
cnracer, I'm not sure that I can make the point any clearer than I previously did. I'll try again.... nobody can reasonably defend the atrocities committed in the name of the Roman Catholic Church. However, there is a clear distinction between true Christianity and doctrinal teaching of an apostate church. I am sure there are some Christians to be found in the RC Church, just as there are many non-Christians in the Protestant Churches. The point is, these acts are not committed for the purposes of Christianity, nor by Christians. As I have previously said, and as is made patently said in the Bible there is the true Church and the professing Church.
You should also be aware that you have quoted an obscure writer from the alternative media. I'm also not sure of your point here as it relates to the topic of atheism.
cnracer, I'm not sure that I can make the point any clearer than I previously did. I'll try again.... nobody can reasonably defend the atrocities committed in the name of the Roman Catholic Church. However, there is a clear distinction between true Christianity and doctrinal teaching of an apostate church. I am sure there are some Christians to be found in the RC Church, just as there are many non-Christians in the Protestant Churches. The point is, these acts are not committed for the purposes of Christianity, nor by Christians. As I have previously said, and as is made patently said in the Bible there is the true Church and the professing Church.
You should also be aware that you have quoted an obscure writer from the alternative media. I'm also not sure of your point here as it relates to the topic of atheism.
My point is to show there is a link between the Church and the Death Camps of WWII and the killings in Serbia of the 1990's, as well as the religious views of Hitler. Your response to the difference between churches is lost in the fact the foundation of your Christian faith is based on the Catholic Church and they are the writers of your Bible; which I see not as fact but rather as a somewhat distorted and one-sided view of history from the vantage point of the Vatican. Your frustration in the link is regrettable, but regardless of your feelings on the author, he has documented his facts. I suspect his obscurity as you called it may be due to the reluctance of non believers to speak out as the religious right.
Lets examine the 20th century – Stalin: atheist (20 million dead), Hitler: atheist (29 million dead directly including 5 million Jews, and 55 million indirectly), Mao: atheist (40 million dead), Pol Pot: atheist (1.7 million dead)……and the list goes on.
They were all Dictators. They wanted everyone to worship them, and only them. Hence, them having no religion, and the ban on having a religion.
Quote:
Whether you choose to believe it or not these are the facts:
§ Our nature is evil.
§ We can not remove sin from our lives.
§ We can not save ourselves.
Actually, those are not facts. That's called philosophy. In which, no train of thought is wrong.
We can quote any number of atheist sources that deny God, that's not difficult.
Have you ever stopped to consider the state of the world:
§ Crime, corruption, famine, climatic chaos, overpopulation.
§ The 20th century was the most bloody in history, and respite in this century is very unlikely.
§ The acute apostasy within Christendom (i.e. professing Christians who aren't true believers, mighty Churches that elevate men above men, deity above God, formality above love and worldliness - e.g. have you ever seen a "fundamentalist" who outwardly puts issues like abortion ahead of the message of salvation?)
§ Booming growth in non-Christian religion (including, sadly, large sections of the professing Church)
§ Conflict in the Middle East
§ The re-birth of Israel
§ The unstoppable growth of the occult (how many people read their “stars†in a newspaper or magazine, but refuse to read the Bible – because of course through science and intellectualization you know that there can’t be a God)
Christian’s who believe that the Bible is God’s word and study it as the truth, have known that all these things would come to pass. Even as early as the 1st or 2nd Century. Indeed, much of this is recorded in Old Testament prophecy going back much further.
Atheism implies that the self is the highest authority. If an individual’s true nature was good then we would be living in an atheistic paradise. Sadly, our nature is evil and the world you see is the result of that. If you don’t believe that, then just look outside, read a newspaper or watch any news broadcast.
The atheist says: “An atheist never goes to war to justify their disbelief. However, great wars have been fought in the name of Christianityâ€.
To start with, just because someone calls themself a Christian doesn’t necessarily mean that they are. If you look at all the major conflicts in the last 400 years they have been fought for many reasons such as economic, power and control. Christians don’t fight wars to convert people by force – that is a complete contradiction.
Lets examine the 20th century – Stalin: atheist (20 million dead), Hitler: atheist (29 million dead directly including 5 million Jews, and 55 million indirectly), Mao: atheist (40 million dead), Pol Pot: atheist (1.7 million dead)……and the list goes on.
How clever you are...
I see that you've "examined" the 20th century, only to come to the unfounded conclusion that the most horrid political regimes responsible for millions of deaths must be the result of atheist influence rather than a political agenda.
Consider that Stalin was educated in an orthodox Christian seminary. Hitler was raised as a Christian and the church in Germany was complicit with his agenda, mainly due to their owm anti-Semitic tendencies.
Quote:
Friedrich Nietzsche must be so proud. All of these men are true examples of the evolution of the self as the highest authority.
Whether you choose to believe it or not these are the facts:
§ Our nature is evil.
§ We can not remove sin from our lives.
§ We can not save ourselves.
The answer: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.â€
The overwhelming majority of people in the world are religious. Atheists are a small minority, something like 10%. A recent survey found that the general public considers atheists to be the must reviled and mistrusted group identified in that survey. And yet, here you are trying to attribute all of the world's ills to atheism. At least you're conforming to the findings of that 2006 survey.
Survey: U.S. trust lowest for atheists - Minnesota Daily (http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2006/03/24/67686 - broken link)
Whether you choose to believe it or not, here is the fact you're simply ignoring:
The pervasive long-term influence of religion (90% of the world is religious) has done nothing to address all of those serious problems you've identified.
But atheists are by their very nature, evil beyong imagining, in your twisted psyche. Please take time to consider that complex problems always have simple, easy-to-understand solutions that don't work.
Meantime, think about how much violence atheists have directed at religious people in your lifetime. I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with many examples.
I'd next like to ask if you think Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc... created a wave of "Atheism" through their societies??? Are we being so naive as to suggest that all of a sudden, Germany turned into an Atheist society overnight and as a result they lost all bearing as to what was right and wrong and decided that it was morally acceptable to gas and cook Jews in ovens?? No, that would be a pretty stupid assumption. Instead, it's probably more realistic to think that even if we agree that Hitler was an Atheist (which I'm quite certain he wasn't) that the majority of people who did his bidding were indeed religious themselves. Interesting, huh? But, yet, we wouldn't say that the Christian Nazi operating the ovens in Dachau was doing it because of his religious belief, right? So why paint the picture that Pot and Mao did what they did because they were Atheists?
And there were a bunch of Christians who were executed by Hitler because the objected to what he was doing. We're painting that picture that Pot and Mao must have done it because they were atheists--we are simply responding that if a madman massacred Jews in the name of his excessively perverse view of a god, then atheists have massacred even more by their adherence to a system that endorses atheism and the annihilation of religion.
Meantime, think about how much violence atheists have directed at religious people in your lifetime. I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with many examples.
If we're talking about what atheists and religious people do, why does it matter what that atheists haven't done much harm to religious people specifically? Atheists have killed over 100 million people. So no, I'm not hard pressed to come up with examples of atheists killings.
This has to be the single most offensive post I've ever come across. Not only expressing your hatred for Christianity but celebrating the death of anyone in such a hideous way is sickening.
if a madman massacred Jews in the name of his excessively perverse view of a god, then atheists have massacred even more by their adherence to a system that endorses atheism and the annihilation of religion.
Whoever believes in the same thing as the people who have massacred the fewest is the winner!
And there were a bunch of Christians who were executed by Hitler because the objected to what he was doing. We're painting that picture that Pot and Mao must have done it because they were atheists--we are simply responding that if a madman massacred Jews in the name of his excessively perverse view of a god, then atheists have massacred even more by their adherence to a system that endorses atheism and the annihilation of religion.
I'm not sure I really understand your post but I'm going to respond to what I think you mean. Even if Communism/Socialism endorses Atheism, it's not the Atheist doctrine that justifies the murder of millions. There simply ISN'T an Atheist doctrine. What you have to understand about Communism is that it doesn't leave room for religion or faith because the leaders end up becoming demi-Gods themselves. In effect, the worship of the leader becomes its' own religion. That's part of the whole thing.
A while back I posted about a documentary that Lisa Ling did in North Korea. If those people are not brainwashed to view Kim Jong Il (their "Great Leader") as anything less than a religious demi-god than I don't know what to think.
The same goes for Stalin, Mao, Pot, etc... Communism leaves no room for religion because the idealist mentality behind Communism is to basically abandon any semblance of identity in order to all work as one society instead of as individuals.
However, while it is entirely possible for people to murder in the name of their religion. I really don't think it's possible for an Atheist to murder someone in the name of "Atheism". There simply isn't a group or belonging. It's just how you classify someone who doesn't believe in God. They're just as capable of performing evil and horrible acts as any group of people, but I don't think they're committing them simply because of their non-belief. However, in a Communist country, the pre-requisite of lack of belief in order to make the idealist mindset work is what causes the problems, not the non-belief.
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