Behind the Dictators A Factual Analysis of the Relationship of Nazi-Fascism and Roman Catholicism by L. H. LEHMANN
CHAPTER V. HITLER AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Contents
HITLER is a product of the Catholic Church. He has never renounced the religious doctrines nor condemned the political aims and aspirations of the Church into which he was born and baptized. Just as his father regarded the Catholic priesthood as the highest state to which anyone could aspire, so to him as a child the priest appeared as the ideal human being. In his autobiography Hitler says that he was deeply impressed with the religious ceremonies of the Catholic Church and was a member of the choir in his parish church. In his free time he took singing lessons at the nearby monastery. “This,” he says, “supplied me with the best opportunity to steep myself in the solemn magnificence of the brilliant feasts of the Church.”1
These early emotions never completely disappeared, and he has always remained conscious of the extremely suggestive value of ecclesiastical surroundings. Toward the end of his book he describes “the psychological conditions which tend to create that artificial and mysterious half-light in Catholic churches—the wax tapers, the incense …” In fact, in his Mein Kampf Hitler approves of everything particularly relating to Jesuit Catholicism as opposed to Protestantism. He approves of the indisputability of Catholic dogmas,2 of the intolerant attitude of Catholic education,3 of the necessity of blind faith,4 of the personal infallibility of the pope— imposed upon the Church by the Jesuits in 1870,5—and of the compulsory celibacy of the Catholic clergy. These are all matters that make Catholicism radically different from the other churches of Christendom. In an open and prophetic expression of his admiration for the Catholic Church, he says:
“Thus the Catholic Church is more secure than ever. It can be predicted that, as passing phenomena vanish away, she will remain as a beacon light amid these vanishing elements, attracting blind adherents in ever-increasing numbers.”
1 Cf. Mein Kampf, p. 4. 2 P. 293. 3 P. 385. 4 P. 417. 5 P. 507. 6 P. 513. See The Catholic Church in Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’; 15c Agora Publishing Co. It was a priest, Father Staempfle, not Hitler, who really wrote “Mein Kampf.”
This enthusiastic declaration of the Fuehrer is not only an expression of the prophetic sense generally attributed to him, but the manifestation of a desire firmly rooted in his soul. Like all Catholics of Central Europe, he was educated to resist Protestantism—the historical enemy which has always endeavored to detach governments and peoples from the political and religious influence of the Church of Rome. Throughout his book he has no word of disapproval for the Jesuit campaign against ail forms of Protestantism. It is true, that, in places, he states that both Protestantism and Catholicism, as religious units, are of equal worth, so far as his National Socialism is concerned. But an analysis of his particular statements regarding the two religious systems immediately shows how closely he is bound to ultramontane Catholicism. In the matter of racism and anti-Semitism, Hitler clearly indicates his hostility to Protestantism. He says:7
“Protestantism opposes in an extremely vigorous manner every attempt that is made to rid the nation of its worst enemy; in fact, the position of Protestantism with regard to Judaism is more or less dogmatically fixed. But we have now come to a point where this problem will have to be solved; otherwise all attempts at the renaissance of Germany and national regeneration will be of no avail.”
It is true that Protestantism can never associate itself with Jesuit racism. The protest to Hitler by the German Confessional Church in 1936, makes this clear: “Anti-Semitism,” it says, “often provokes excesses that nothing can justify, and which are merely the result of hatred for the Jewish minority.”8
The identity of Hitler’s ideology with that of traditional Jesuit Catholicism cannot be denied; nor the fact that by ruthless persecution and armed might, in collaboration with the other Catholic dictators, he has forwarded the ultimate objectives of the Catholic Church. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar (the Catholic dictator of Portugal) ousted Jewish, Masonic and Protestant influence from all of Europe from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. In spite of this, however, many in America are still skeptical of any predetermined connection between Nazi-Fascism and Jesuit Catholicism. They point to the “persecution” of the Catholic Church in Germany, and to professions of faith in democracy by some Catholic spokesmen in the United States.
7 p. 123.
8 Cf. Basler National Zeitung, July 20, 1936.
There is here a case of obvious contradiction between reality and appearance. In the first place, Nazi opposition to the Catholic Church in Germany has been confined to its “liberal” elements, and Catholic leadership has always opposed these more than any others. The Jesuit party has long feared the infiltration of Protestant and liberal ideas into the German Catholic mind. During the post-war years, when Germany was a democratic republic, many of the ordinary secular clergy and some of the religious orders became enamored of the liberal, secularizing spirit. They formed the backbone of the Catholic Centre Party—which was the last bulwark against Hitler’s rise to power. But this last element of liberalism in Germany was dissolved by order of Pope Pius XI, as a stipulated condition of the Vatican’s concordat with Nazism; its leader, Klausener, was assassinated in the “blood purge” of June 30, 1934. The last liberal party in Italy also, headed by the exiled priest Don Sturzo, shared the same fate at the hands of the same Pope Pius XI. It is nothing new in Catholic history that religious and social reformers from within the Church should be the first to suffer its enmity. The heretics of history, delivered over to autocrat civil power for burning and imprisonment by the Church, are mute witnesses to this unchanging policy of intransigent Catholicism.
It can easily be seen that the identity of Jesuit political thought with the objectives of Nazi-Fascism makes it imperative to conceal it from the American public. Were it otherwise, the Catholic Church would suffer complete loss of its prestige in the United States—in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. It is not surprising, therefore, that the following evident contradictions may be noted with regard to Catholic Church propaganda:
1. Opposing views of Jesuit authors on actual questions concerning politics, economics, and even religious matters;
2. The adoption of national peculiarities in all countries, even in pagan lands;
3. The combatting of socialism with one hand and ottering it friendship with the other;
4. The favoring of chauvinist and nationalist views as well as of international pacific tendencies;
5. The making of eloquent declarations in favor of democracy, and at the same time seizing upon every possible means to undermine and wreck it;
6. The creation of situations apparently contradictory of one another.
Apart from this, there is nothing insincere on the part of intransigent Catholic leadership. The guiding forces of modern Catholicism are as sincere in their conviction as their predecessors of old that nothing good can come out of liberal political and social regimes. Liberalism in religion is anathema to them and their greatest enemy. They desire peace, but hold with the Nazi-Fascists that peace can come only by war, with all its appalling consequences, as a necessary evil. For by victorious war alone, they hold, can men and nations to be made to submit to the hierarchical idea of a world-order of states, races and individuals. Their conviction is that peace can come only from that “harmonious” acquiescence of men bound to their “natural place” in society and religion. From its apex, this pyramid of states is to be totally ruled by the theocratic institution of the Catholic Church, with the Pope of Rome as the Vicar of Jesus Christ and the sole mouthpiece of Almighty God.
Alone, and without well-planned direction, Adolf Hitler never could have accomplished what he did to this end. All the world is now convinced that he was no idle dreamer, nor just a poor paper-hanger, when he attempted his Munich Beer-hall putsch. His visions were realistically sketched out for him by those who directed him as a youth, and the grandeur of their ideas of a totalitarian world, symbolized by ritualistic ceremonies in cathedrals and churches, urged him to action.
When Hitler drew Austria into his hierarchic confederation, his action was greeted by Heils from Catholic Church prelates. After his bloodless absorption of Czechoslovakia and the land of the hated Hussites, there was rejoicing again within the Catholic world. A feeble, easily answered complaint from the Vatican followed his blitzkrieg that brought Catholic Poland again into the orbit of a centrally-controlled Europe. Definite refusal met the request of President Roosevelt, through his “peace ambassador” to the Vatican, that Pope Pius XII condemn Hitler’s invasion of Protestant Denmark and Norway.
Only short-sighted, idealistic Americans fail to understand that Hitler and the intransigent leaders of Roman Catholicism are one with Mussolini when he declared:
“Capitalism, parliamentarianism, democracy, socialism, communism, and a certain vacillating Catholicism, with which, sooner or later, we shall deal in our style, are against us.”
All of these, particularly the last, are the forces which the Jesuits and their counter-Reformation have fought against (and made use of) since the time of Martin Luther and his associates.
