from The Collected Works

Into the Ecclesiastical Abyss: The Catholic Church  –Part 2

[Note: This is a transcript of lectures delivered in 1964. With the passage of time, considerable research has been devoted to the behavior of  the German Catholic Church during the Nazi era. Much has come to light in favor of the Church, or at least in favor of the ordinary clergy. Particular attention is directed to Kevin Spicer's Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler's Berlin (2004), a detailed review of which appears HERE. ]

The Inconvenience of Jesus' Jewishness

It was painful for the Catholic clergy, just as for the Protestant clergy of Niemoller's type, that Jesus was a Jew. How does one deal with this inconvenience?

The embarrassing fact that Jesus had been a Jew was handled in a similar manner. In a pastoral letter of 1939 Archbishop Gröber conceded [1939–please note the date!] that Jesus Christ could not be made into an Aryan, but the Son of God had been fundamentally different from the Jews of his time–so much so that they had hated him and demanded his crucifixion, and "their murderous hatred has continued in later centuries."

 

Jesus had been a Jew, admitted Bishop Hilfrich of Limburg in his pastoral letter for Lent 1939 [again as late as this] but "the Christian religion has not grown out of the nature of this people, that is, is not influenced by their racial characteristics." . . . Christianity . . . was therefore not to be regarded as a product of the Jews; it was not a foreign doctrine or un-German. "Once accepted by our ancestors, it finds itself in the most intimate union with the Germanic spirit."¹³

I ask you to read the whole book. It's a treasure trove of this material. I am only picking out a few short passages.

Helping to Identify Jews

Another interesting problem that confronted the Catholic just as much as the Protestant Church was the problem of research into ancestry, which was decreed to establish who was of Jewish origin.

Now in the period before the introduction of a state register, the registers of births were kept by the churches.

One could have expected that–since the establishment of Jewish origin had the aim of inflicting harm on those German citizens concerned, of delivering them to concentration camps, of mistreating them, of massacring them, and, finally, of gassing them–that perhaps the episcopate of both churches would have refused to make the ecclesiastical records available for picking out who the Jews were.

In fact, neither of the churches refused to cooperate in the establishment of who was of Jewish origin so that they could later be killed.