Fascism and Christianity
by PRINCE HUBERTUS ZU LOEWENSTEIN
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GERMANY today is divided into three parts: National Socialism, socialist Labor, and Christianity. Though at present the first seems all-powerful, the very fire of Nazi persecution is molding the two others, separated for so long, into a common revolutionary front. Ever since the days of Karl Marx and of Ferdinand Lassalle, organizer of the socialist unions, Labor has been an important factor in German politics. And the inclination of the German people toward religious and metaphysical values is something to be reckoned with by the most skeptical statesmen, the most cynical of “leaders.”
By liquidating, along with all others, the Catholic Center Party and the German National Party, which had been closely connected with official Protestantism, National Socialism helped against its own will to prepare the new unity between Christianity and Labor. These parties had formerly incurred the distrust of the working masses, which saw in the party leaders appeasing politicians who did not object to the abolishing of labor rights so long as church rights remained untouched. The Catholic Center Party, in spite of its governmental coalition with the Social Democrats, did not hesitate to negotiate secretly with the Nazis as early as 1931. At the session of the rump Reichstag in March, 1933, the Center even voted for the “Enabling Act” granting dictatorial powers to the new masters, whose favor it hoped to buy. Finally, it was due to the efforts of the Centrist politician Herr von Papen, and Monsignor Kaas, chairman of the party, that on July 20, 1933, the concordat was concluded between the Vatican and the Third Reich. The impression was thereby created that Nazism, time and again condemned by the German Bishops, had become acceptable to Christianity.
Yet, in spite of the evil record of church politicians and the traditional antagonism of Continental Labor towards organized religion, a deep community of ethos and destiny has always existed between Christ ianity and democratic socialism. For Christianity as well as socialism, power is ethically and teleologically defined. While the socialist will work for a classless society in which, according to Marx’s famous word, “the State will have withered away,” for the Christian the word of St. Paul holds true, that in the end Christ will put down all authority, sovereignty, and domination. To the Christian no people is more than an interdependent part in the great drama of humanity’s development toward God, while the socialist conceives of a future world community freed from nationalistic and economic oppression and ordered in accordance with the precepts of human reason.
In irreconcilable opposition to both these philosophies, fascism proclaims power as an absolute, justified in itself and serving, not mankind, but the expediency of a “racial community.”
“Democrats, Socialists, and Catholics, different as their outlook on life may be,” Norbert Guerke, Nazi international lawyer, explained in Deutsche Recktswissenschaft (vol. II, p. 75), “all profess doctrines which aim at the inclusion and liberation of the whole of mankind.” A better formulation could hardly be found.
Since January, 1942, when I analyzed the position of the Church in the Atlantic, a significant change has taken place in the pronouncements of the German hierarchy. The socialist leaders are either dead, imprisoned, or working underground; and as there are no other public tribunes, it is from the pulpits alone that the voice of the people can now be heard.
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This mandate thrust upon the Church by the enslaved and silenced masses has been courageously accepted. While formerly the hierarchy confined itself largely to the defense of the rights of the Church, emphasis is today openly laid on the rights of man, regardless of denomination or nationality. A fierce war is being waged by the Nazi government against Christianity, without distinction of confessions. Cardinal Faulhaber recently declared that Catholics and Protestants are working together in most peaceful relations; they know that it is a question of the very existence or annihilation of religion.
“I used to go to four or five Masses some Sundays,” the former NBC correspondent in Berlin, Alex Dreier, reported in the London weekly Catholic Herald; “it was touching, it was often breath-taking. You felt that they were taking their lives in both hands. They are a force tugging against a terrific current.” The Protestant clergy, he concluded, are just as resolute as the Catholic.
“We demand justice!” Bishop Count Galen exclaimed from the pulpit of St. Lambert’s Cathedral in Munster, in defense of Pastor Niemöller; “it is not merely a Catholic demand that I am expressing, but a Christian demand, a religious, human, national demand! ”
Innumerable soldiers at the front, Bishop Konrad Groeber of Freiburg said, — men like Moelders, Germany’s greatest flying ace, — feel deepest pain and indignation about the crimes committed against the people at home. While in earlier years he was not free from appeasement tendencies towards the regime, the Bishop now defied the Hitler government as treasonable to the German Reich. It was clear to his congregation what he meant by his reference to Colonel Moelders. In a wire to Hitler, Moelders had refused to go on fighting unless the Gestapo would give up the persecution of the people at home. Shortly afterwards the DNB announced his “accidental” death.
Even cases of suicide among German soldiers were reported by the Anglican Bishop Bell of Chichester after his return from Sweden last August; they felt so overwhelmed and humiliated by the hatred brought on Germany by Gestapo atrocities at home and abroad, which they were helpless to prevent, that in despair they took their own lives.
Count Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, publicly condemned Nazi atrocities in Poland. The situation there, Cardinal Bertram, his predecessor as chairman of the Fulda Conference, wrote to the Vatican, recalled the early days of Christianity. It was on his request that the Holy Father granted power to priests, in the provinces annexed by Hitler, to absolve penitents collectively without individual confession. Thus Nazi efforts to deprive the Poles of the consolation of religion were thwarted.
In his Christmas message of 1942, Bishop Preysing attacked every single aspect of Nazi policy toward the occupied countries: the theory of “inferior” races, unequal justice, exploitation, and the shooting of hostages. Such departures from right and justice, he predicted, would sooner or later be broken against the foundations of God’s Kingdom.
Of the thirty-odd members of the German and Austrian hierarchy there are few who have not spoken out against the regime. Even Bishop Bornewasscr of Trier, who yielded to Nazi pressure during the Saar fight; Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna, who once signed a letter with “Heil Hitler”; Archbishop Waitz of Salzburg, Prince Primate of the Church in Germany; and many others less known abroad preach from the pulpits: “Where our faith is concerned there can be no yielding. We must stand firm or die.”
That their individual fight is part of a concerted action was proved anew by the pastoral letter of Easter Sunday, 1942, signed by the entire episcopate, which has jurisdiction over some thirty million German Catholics. The Church, it declared, must stand up not only for the rights of religion but for the human rights bestowed by God upon mankind; without these rights Western culture must inevitably break down. The natural rights to personal freedom must be restored and no one deprived of them without due process of law. All those robbed of their liberty without proof of a punishable act must be released. “Every man has a natural right to life and to the goods essential for living,” the letter concluded. “The living God is the sole master over life and death.”
Such language is reminiscent of the Declaration of Independence. Is it the language of a beginning revolution?
A later pastoral letter was submitted to such rigid Nazi censorship that its significant passages became known in the United States only after months had passed. In December, 1942, the outspoken Swiss Catholic newspaper Ostschweiz revealed that the German Bishops had by no means retracted their opposition, as the Nazi news releases had seemed to indicate. “A nation that imposes on itself an exclusive scale of morality and proposes to justify its own purposes,”the pastoral said, “perishes through its own deification.” It condemned the “monstrous plan that contemplates breeding systematically a new people, or even a superman, without matrimonial and moral ties.”
The bold language of the Church is not confined to the hierarchy. Because of their position the Bishops naturally receive publicity abroad, but there arc countless unknown clergymen all over the country who say the same things. That they are not all flung into concentration camps can be explained only by the growing strength of the Christian and socialist front which stands behind them.
“The men I take my hat off to,” a correspondent of the London Universe reported after his return from the Continent, “are the parish priests in the Berlin suburbs. There is a Gestapo reporter in every congregation, yet these priests do not hesitate to denounce what they know to be Anti-Christ.”
I think I still know those Berlin suburbs. I had friends and youth groups in almost every one of them. There one must talk a militant language, for those suburbs are “red,” as they have always been.
In the last few years German leftist leaders and publications have paid tribute to the lead which the churches have assumed in the common fight for liberation. Papal encyclicals and pastoral letters were broadcast by the leftist Liberty Radio, and widely distributed in leaflet form and through all the other channels of the underground movement.
The pressure of this growing Black-Red resistance has forced the Hitler government to throw off the last vestiges of law. In the fall of 1942 the president of the “People’s Court,” Otto Tierack, a man who has sent thousands of Christians and “Reds” to their death, was named “Minister of Justice.” He received authority from Hitler to provide the judges with whatever “laws” expediency might demand. A few weeks earlier the power of the SS army of occupation in Germany had been increased to over 750,000 men. These measures, the Manchester Guardian rightly commented, were taken in anticipation of civil unrest emanating from religious and other centers of opposition.
Of course there arc many points on which Christians and unbelieving socialists do not and cannot agree. The barriers separating them will not come down until the Christian world has cleansed itself of reaction and realized a social justice truer than that proffered by any other doctrine. Then the time will come when the spiritual power of the Faith will be resurrected in the hearts and minds of all who erred from it, scandalized by the ill-will or negligence of many a churchman or pseudo-Christian politician. Should the present comradeshipin-arms between Red and Black in Germany mature into a genuine brotherhood after Hiller’s fall, it may well lead to a reorientation of church as well as of socialist policy in all countries.
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While Labor can rely on the support of its radical and liberal sympathizers abroad, the churches in Germany have not received corresponding support in their struggle against fascism. There are still sections of world Christianity which, fearing the awakening of the peoples, favor some kind of fascism to check the rising tide of revolutionary democracy.
While the oft-mentioned Irish sentiment is largely motivated by anti-British nationalism, the attitude of certain sections of GermanAmerican Catholics has not had such an “excuse.” When I came to America for the first time, in 1935, I expected as a matter of course that the Gcrman-Amcrican Catholics would readily respond to the appeal for help in cleansing the name of their old country. Instead I found a truly remarkable reluctance to commit themselves, particularly on the part of the powerful Catholic Central Verein of America with its thousand or more member societies and string of German language newspapers. It was not always easy to detect the line of demarcation between mere political ignorance and positive connivance at the forces against which their brethren in faith in Germany were struggling so desperately. At a time when tens of thousands of Christians filled Nazi concentration camps, German-American Catholics were told by local organizers that unconditional opposition to Hitlerism was inspired by “Jewish propaganda” or was suspect of “Bolshevism.”
Lately, a number of German-American Catholic publications seem to have tied up with the Strasserites. Only recently I read in a Buffalo weekly a strongly anti-Semitic article by Father Bernhard (Otto Strasser’s brother and agent in the United States), which heaped insults on the leaders of the genuinely anti-Nazi German camp. The “Free German Movement” of Otto Strasser, whose ambition it is to restore National Socialism in its “original purity,” would be a far cry from democracy should it ever achieve power.
Had all German-Americans followed the lead of the late Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago, or of so prominent a German-American Catholic. as Victor Bidder, who recently joined the steering committee of the militantly anti-Nazi organization, United Americans of German Descent, founded by the well-known labor leader Otto Saltier, much misunderstanding could have been avoided.
The American hierarchy, in its Annual Message of November, 1942, has again come out forcefully for unconditional victory over the powers of fascism, and for an equitable peace among free nations.
The message also contained this significant passage: “Since the murderous attack on Poland . . . there has been a premeditated and systematic extermination of the people of this nation. The same satanic technique is being applied to many other peoples. We feel a deep sense of revulsion against the cruel indignities heaped upon the Jews in conquered countries and upon defenseless peoples not of our faith.” The Bishops joined with their brother bishops in subjugated France in favor of the Jews, “in the name of humanity and Christian principles for the imprescriptible rights of human nature.”
In November and December, 1942, I spent six weeks at Assumption College, Windsor, Ontario, a school which I have always regarded as representative of American Catholicism at its best. It is a sounding board for Catholic opinion in Canada and the United States, and I most decidedly did not find there the slightest sympathy for Coughlinite ideas, or for clerical fascism and reaction. It is characteristic that the “Christian Culture Award” of the Basilian Fathers, in previous years conferred upon Jacques Maritain and Sigrid Undset, was in 1948 given to Philip Murray, president of the CIO. This is a recognition of labor rights which cannot fail to inspire all opponents of totalitarianism, Catholic and nonCatholic, in their present struggle.
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In view of a recent tendency to absolve Fascist Italy as soon as “one man, and one man alone,” is overthrown, an editorial by Father James M. Gihis, C.S.P., in the Catholic World of January, 1948, deserves wide attention. He rebukes those Catholics who have skipped the fact that fascism is not only a tyranny but a heresy. “It irked me,” Father Gihis writes, “that my fellow Americans could excuse Mussolini’s bulldozing and browbeating, his blatant detestations of democracy, because . . . he ‘got results’!” The article reminds its readers that it is the system of fascism which is incompatible with the Faith; according to Mussolini’s own definition in the official Encyclopedia, the state is an absolute — there is nothing beyond the state, nothing above and nothing outside it. This, Father Gihis defines as blasphemy, and he concludes: “These pro-Duce Catholics not only ignored philosophy and theology, they also forgot history.”
Most striking, in my opinion, is the lesson which history has taught in our own days — namely, that one can never compromise with things which are morally evil. This should be taken to heart by all who may wish today for some kind of neo-fascism after the war, be it in Austria, in Germany, in the Latin countries, or in the United States of America itself.
In contrast to the Church in Germany, the Italian hierarchy has long backed the Fascist regime. This policy (as Gaetano Salvemini pointed out in the New Republic) may, at the inevitable fall of Mussolini, conjure up severe dangers for the Church. However, even in Italy Catholic opposition against fascism is growing. The Bishops of Trieste and Fiume, as well as the Bishop of Gorizia, who only a year ago endorsed the “holy war” of the Axis, have protested to Mussolini against the wiping out of Slovenian villages and the hostage system.
Also, judging from violent anti-Catholic outbursts of the party newspaper Regime Fascista, the attitude of the Italian clergy can no longer be entirely to the liking of the regime. The paper repeatedly denounced “parish priests who formulate insidious reservations against the Axis — and those spiritual advisers of nuns and ‘foreign-loving’ ladies who cause prayers to be said against the new persecutors of religion — our two great allies and friends.”
All fascists-at-heart continue to draw comfort from General Franco’s “Christian State” and now happily argue that “strategic reasons” demand even more appeasement and less criticism of this defiler of the Christian name. Neither will Franco’s address of December, 1942, in which he again endorsed the Axis governments, open their eyes. Should he ever, against his will and intention, be drawn into the conflict on the side of the United Nations (and in a war like the present one nothing seems impossible), his crypto-fascist friends in America would claim to have been right from the beginning.
Yet no strategic reasons or expediency must ever induce us to condone the appalling conditions in that unfortunate country where, according to an American Friends Service Committee report, one million people are in concentration camps, famine is raging, and the poor arc poorer than ever. But of protests against such misrule, rendered still more intolerable by mental slavery, we have heard nothing. The Spanish Bishops have contented themselves with rebukes to the government when it infringed administrative rights of the Church, and there still are “Catholic” publications in the United States that consider any criticism uttered against the Generalissimo as tantamount to blasphemy.
José de Aguirre, President of the Basque Republic, one of the ablest exponents of Iberian democratic Catholicism, whom I met repeatedly during the Spanish Civil War, pointed out upon his return from Latin America that appeasing Franco was likely to make the Latin nations of democratic conviction suspicious of the whole of American policy. “The United States,” he said, “must show that it stands clearly for democracy all over the world, and not just for democracy in some country.”
As always, appeasement encourages fascism everywhere, and in the long run it defeats even the strategic reasons of “expediency” for the sake of which it was undertaken. A fascist Spain wooed by the democracies offers to foreign and native fascists an ideal background for their propaganda throughout the Latin world. The diplomatic representations of Franco Spain serve, as is well known, as centers of fascist propaganda and hide-outs for Axis agents. We may wonder whether it is not from there that pro-Nazi clerics and Protestant pastors in Argentina, for instance, receive their means and instructions.
Their activities were recently exposed by the Congressional Investigation Committee of Anti-Argentine Activities. They “carry out persistent pro-totalitarian propaganda despite the severe anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian admonitions of the Supreme Pontiff himself,” the Committee stated, and it listed instances in which pro-democratic German priests were molested and persecuted for their convictions.
That the pro-fascist tendencies found among Argentine Catholics are in opposition to the sentiments of the majority of the people was stressed bv one of the foremost Latin-American prelates, Miguel de Andrea, Bishop of Temnos, during his recent visit to the United States. Speaking before the Inter-American Seminar on Social Studies, he took the only stand permitted to Christians when he stated that “liberty, justice, and democracy are the highest principles of human life.”
“I sustain democracy,” he said, “because it is a system of government which morally obliges all men . . . to work for the raising of the moral and material level of the people, and since no other system opens the way to the people, as does the democratic, to participate in the responsibility of power.”
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It is to be hoped that the way shown by the struggle in Germany and by enlightened men and groups everywhere will guide church policy and Christian statesmen when the war is over. Because of the unprecedented waste of natural and national wealth by the conflict itself and by the ruthless Nazi-Fascist regime, the vast majority of Europeans will find themselves reduced to a state of almost complete proletariation. By far the greater number of these proletarians will be practicing Christians. Their economic problems will be identical with those of the propertyless socialists of former days. To maintain the ban on democratic socialism, once justified because socialism was associated with Marxian agnosticism, would then be as incomprehensible to the Christian masses of proletarians as a condemnation of the heliocentric system, which in the sixteenth century was suspect of irreverence for the Book of Joshua, would be today.
“Socialism is a vague term,” the Archbishop of Canterbury writes in his newest book, Christianity and Social Order, “and in some sense we are committed to socialism already. No one can doubt that in the post-war world our economic life must be ‘planned’ in a way and to an extent that Mr. Gladstone (for example) would have regarded, and condemned, as socialistic.”
Much of the practical program of democratic socialism is Christian heritage, reiterated in the social encyclicals of modern Popes. Its philosophy must be baptized, so to speak, as St. Augustine and St. Thomas baptized the pagan philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. These great pioneers of the spirit bridged the conflict between philosophy and faith, then the most urgent problem of Christianity. In our time it is the conflict between the two contenders for social and spiritual freedom that must be overcome for the sake of man’s temporal and eternal happiness. The Marxist creed of internationalism, its aim of uniting the whole human race under one constitution of liberty, must be transfigured and redeemed by the Christian doctrine of the Mystical Body.
Today the paradoxical situation exists that, while Catholics and Protestants in Germany are fighting shoulder to shoulder with their socialist comrades, socialism remains anathematized, whereas Nazism, though denounced by the encyclical With Burning Anxiety, has never been banned in toto. To do this should be the first step, which would automatically lead to the excommunication of Hitler and his helpers, most of them Catholics by birth. It would have tremendous effects throughout Germany and all other occupied countries. It would also pave the way for people’s states, friendly to Christianity, in those countries where now the danger exists that the Church will be made to pay for the pro-fascist attitude of many of her representatives.
In the midst of the cold, hunger, and sorrow of the fourth war winter in Europe, the Christmas message of Pope Pius XII must have conjured up the vision of a better world to come. In his demands of respect for human dignity, recognition of the rights of labor, reinstatement as property owners of all whom a cruel system has made paupers, and an international order based on the moral law, all denominations will readily concur. The realization of these demands will help more than any sermon to bring the unbelieving back into the flock, and Christianity will receive new lifeblood from those millions who, though led astray, never gave up the fight for the bread and the kingdom. Socialists everywhere may then recognize that never was there a more revolutionary song intoned than Our Lady’s Magnificat: —
“He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their throne and exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty.”
Since it is on German soil that Anti-Christ has shown his ugly countenance most nakedly, it may well be that also the revolt against him will begin in that country, and that the church bells of Munster, Freiburg, and Munich, of Breslau and Vienna, will ring in the fight for universal deliverance.
“High above all conflicts,” Leopold von Ranke foretold in his History of the Popes, “there will arise from the ocean of error the unity of a conviction, untroubled in its steadfast security — the pure and simple consciousness of the everduring and all-pervading presence of God.”
Then the nameless masses of Christians and socialists who today, in the darkness of their night, gather around the banner of revolt may follow that hallowed black symbol, reddened by the Blood of Redemption, which stands for universal Freedom and the people’s Justice.