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Title: Nazi and Nazarene
Author: Ronald Knox (1888-1957)
Date of first publication: 1940
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Macmillan, 1940 (First Edition)
   [Macmillan War Pamphlets 5]
Date first posted: 27 January 2008
Date last updated: 27 January 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #67

This ebook was produced by: Dr Mark Bear Akrigg




    MACMILLAN WAR PAMPLETS 5
    3d net




    NAZI AND NAZARENE

    _By_

    RONALD KNOX


    LONDON
    MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD
    1940




NAZI AND NAZARENE


Most of us, in youth, have greeted with impatient ridicule
the argument that such and such a thing is the thin end of
the wedge. Most of us, as part of the little wisdom we
garner during life, are driven to the conclusion that there
was something in it after all. And the short history of Nazi
Germany might be represented by a surrealist picture
consisting entirely of wedges; not, indeed, that the thin
ends of them are very thin--the angle is often one of sixty
degrees; but that has been the method of the Third Reich,
and it has not failed yet. You see it in Hitler's rise to
power, first figuring as the leader of a constitutional
party, then allying himself with Hugenberg's Nationalists in
order to secure a working majority, then playing the cuckoo
in the Conservative nest. You see it in his foreign
policy--his studious friendliness towards Poland until
Poland's turn should come, and that was not until the
swallowing of Austria had laid the flank of Czecho-Slovakia
bare, and Czecho-Slovakia itself (in two gulps, this time)
had been thoroughly assimilated. You see it, equally, in the
Nazi encroachment on the Christian faith; above all in the
Nazi encroachment on the privileges of the Catholic Church,
which is the subject of this study.

The wedge-driving method has this obvious advantage--that
you are continually playing off two human temperaments
against each other. There is a temperament which is for
resisting the first sign of aggression, yielding no inch to
the suspected enemy, for fear he should take an ell; in a
word, the temperament which is convinced that wedges have
thin ends. There is another, more peaceful temperament which
urges, "No, not yet; it would be an error to take our stand
on such flimsy provocation as this; throw a sop to the
wolves, in the hope that it may suffice them; wait until the
situation becomes really intolerable before you strike."
This latter temperament is for ever selling the pass, slope
by slope, to the enemy. Where the foreign policy of the
Reich was concerned, most of us have had illusions which
time was destined to shatter; this is not the hour for
recriminations. Just so, in his dealings with the Catholic
Church, Hitler has continually taken advantage of those
moderating counsels which have urged concessions in this
crisis or that. He has played off the Innitzers against the
Faulhabers.

Whether this kind of piecemeal aggression is due to a
subtle, calculated policy, or whether the Third Reich is led
on from one encroachment to another as the vistas of
possible self-aggrandizement open successively to its view,
there is no need here to determine. Some represent Hitler as
a chess-player of consummate skill, who has thought out all
his moves a full decade ahead. Others regard him as an
illuminist who acts upon the instinct of the moment, so that
it is never possible to prophesy what he will do next--a
view which has become especially popular with those whose
duty it is to guess what he will do next. But in truth
Hitler is not an ogre, he is a human being; and probably,
like most of us, he lets forethought and opportunism wait
upon each other; in shaping events, he allows events to
shape him. I doubt if he has, personally, such bitter
feelings towards the Catholic Church as many of those who
have persecuted her; in the old days when he fought against
Communism, I doubt if he realised that he would be
concerned, one day, to combat her influence. But the logic
of his own immoderate aims has driven him to it.


Before the Fhrer

In fairness to both sides, something must be remembered
which is customarily forgotten,[1] that the conflict between
Nazism and the Church began before the Nazis came into
power. In 1931, the Bavarian bishops issued a declaration
which protested against the movement's racial doctrine, its
attitude towards the Bible, and certain other aspects of its
religious code. Priests were forbidden to take any part in
it, and active members of it were to be denied the
Sacraments. This did not prevent many Catholics from voting
for the party at the crucial election; already the
meet-them-half-way temperament had begun to assert itself;
and, after all, anything was better than Communism. But
friction between the official representatives of the Church
and the official doctrines of the party had been, thus
early, foreshadowed. It is also fair to remember that the
Nazis, on their side, professed no love for the Church;
there was no treachery, in this instance, about their
approach. Nobody expected that the thin end of the wedge
would be exactly a burglar's jemmy; but the householder had
every reason to be on his guard, and not suffer his house to
be broken up.

[Footnote 1: See Michael Power, _Religion in the Reich_,
pp. 12 _sqq._]

Germany went totalitarian in 1933. It was no matter for
surprise that, in the course of that operation, the Centre
party should have disappeared. All parties were merged in
the Party, and the Centre, which for so many decades had
been the rallying-ground of moderate opinion, swinging to
right or left as a pendulum was needed to redress the
balance of the political machine, was the last kind of
interference which would be welcomed by a Government pledged
to desperate expedients. The gradual throttling of the
Catholic Press, which was only completed in 1935,[2] might
also have been expected; the totalitarian Government does
not tolerate criticism, from whatever quarter, any more than
it tolerates independent political action. So far, a grave
wrong had been done, but it was a wrong done to democracy in
general, not to the Catholic Church as such. All that had
passed so far was only the preliminary to an assault.

[Footnote 2: See Edmond Vermeil, _Hitler et la
Christianisme_, p. 61.]

It was understood, of course, to be the exact opposite.
Before we condemn the compliance or the short-sightedness of
those Catholics who helped, in spite of episcopal warnings,
to vote Hitler into power, we must try to understand, as it
is not easy for us to understand, the attitude of mind in
which those who accept (without welcoming) a totalitarian
Government strike the balance between their gains and their
losses. The thing, it seems to them, has got to come; it is
the only way in which the country can be pulled together, or
it is the only way of avoiding bloodshed and constant
friction; our political liberties must go; what remains to
us? Our personal liberties, at least; a totalitarian regime
can have no reason to grudge us those.


Political and Personal Liberty

It is to be remembered that political liberty and personal
liberty are not the same thing; if you belong to a minority
in a country where matters are decided by the counting of
heads, your personal liberty may be drastically curtailed.
And this applies not only to the individual (as when a
majority of your fellow-citizens determines to enforce
prohibition laws), but to voluntary associations within the
State, and above all to religious bodies. The Catholic
Church, in particular, has had much to suffer from the
democracies. Where she is in a minority, statesmen will
often forbid her the liberty of teaching, or of public
action, precisely for fear that the minority may grow into a
majority, to the detriment of their own rival culture. In
Germany, her position had been threatened by State
Lutheranism on one side, by international Socialism on the
other. Amid the tangle of political parties, German
Catholics had been driven, unwillingly, to organise a
political party of their own; it had seemed the only way of
defending their personal liberty. When all the parties
disappeared, the Centre with the rest, it looked as if
personal liberty might be secured for the Church as the
price of her political renunciation.

The new men who had come into power professed to be
indifferent over the rival claims of Catholic and Reformed
theology; international Socialism was their professed enemy.
Was it not reasonable to hope that Catholics would be left
to live their own lives, undisturbed by the threat of State
interference?

Nor was this merely an _a priori_ expectation; there was an
obvious parallel to be drawn from the situation in Italy.
Events have moved so rapidly that it is difficult to carry
our minds back to the state of things which existed less
than ten years ago, when all Europe saw in Hitler a mere
imitator of Mussolini. Mussolini, like Hitler, was a
Catholic who had given up, so far as was known, the practice
of his religion; there was no reason to think that he loved
the Church. But, from the moment when the Partito Popolare
was dissolved, he seemed clearly anxious to delimit the
spheres of God and Csar with accuracy, and abide by the
delimitation. Why should not Hitler do the same? Catholic
sentiment, in Germany as in Italy, was a useful bulwark
against Communism; it was expedient for him, surely, to keep
on the right side of it, even if it were true that a few
extremists in the Nazi Party were trying to float a religion
of their own.


The Concordat

This, at least, seems to have been the feeling in Rome,
whatever misgivings German Catholics themselves may have
entertained. The result was the Concordat signed in July,
1933, between the Holy See and the new government of the
Reich. It was a diplomatic triumph for Hitler[3], and was
interpreted in the world at large as expressing a measure of
agreement between the ecclesiastical and the civil
authorities which never in fact existed. Popular ignorance
imagines that a Concordat is only drawn up where a country
is on especially friendly terms with Rome. This is the
precise opposite of the fact; a country which was on ideally
good terms with Rome would not need to have a Concordat at
all; and the existence of such a document implies that the
two signatory parties are, in a more or less degree,
distrustful of each other's intentions. It is an attempt to
regularise a difficult situation by tying down either party,
on paper, to a minimum of good behaviour. In July, 1933, the
situation was not that Pope Pius XI believed Hitler would
treat the Church well; he may have hoped that it would be
so, and that a document formally attested would have some
effect on Hitler's policy; but if there had been no
distrust, there would have been no Concordat. Nothing could
be more absurd than to represent the transaction as if it
meant that the New Germany and the Vatican were working hand
in glove.

[Footnote 3: "By the signature of the Concordat, National
Socialism has been recognised by the Catholic Church in the
most solemn manner possible."--_Vlkischer Beobachter_,
July 24, 1933.]

Two clauses in the agreement safeguarded the interests of
Csar. Each bishop on his appointment was to take an oath of
loyalty to the German State; and the Holy See undertook that
the clergy should not belong to, or further the objects of,
any political party. In return for this, the German
Government promised, with almost suspicious alacrity,
complete freedom to the Catholic schools, and to
associations of Catholics for purposes other than political;
meanwhile associations which were sponsored by the State
should not interfere with the religious life, or form the
religious conscience, of Catholic children and young people.
In a word, the Church would never have to regret her action
in allowing the Centre party to be liquidated; the
privileges for which that party was prepared to fight should
be hers without the necessity of fighting.


Six Days Later...

"Six days after the signing of the Concordat, the State duly
promulgated the Sterilisation Law, which gave powers for
sterilisation, by force, even of the blind."[4] Suddenness
is a recognised part of the Nazi technique: the moving of a
piece on some quite different part of the board, to make
your opponent wonder how this move is connected with the one
before, or whether it is connected at all. In this case, it
can hardly have been an accident that the new rulers of the
Reich proceeded so quickly from an instrument of peace with
the Catholic authorities to a legislative act so repulsive
to Catholic principles.

[Footnote 4: Power, _op. cit._, p. 34.]

There is no need to consider here the ethical implications
of the measure. We are concerned with it, not as an act of
persecution, but as an act of provocation. This, surely, was
its immediate purpose. It was the thick end of the wedge,
this time, thrust in to open the door for that crusade of
race and force which has been the chief characteristic of
the Nazi philosophy. Catholics were to realise, without loss
of time, that the regime which had gained respectability by
the signing of the Concordat intended to flout the
convictions, not only of all Catholics, but of all
Christians in Europe. It was clear provocation; why was it
important that the provocation should come so soon?

For this reason above all--that the rulers of Germany wanted
to make it appear, from the first, as if the Concordat had
been broken on the Catholic side. A few pulpit declamations
against the new law--and who could doubt that they would be
forthcoming?--would lend colour to the claim that the
bishops were not observing their pledge to support the
Reich; after that, it would be possible to drive a coach and
four through the Concordat and still maintain that you were
not the aggressor. The Nazi technique never neglects
propaganda. Very little colour may be needed to justify its
actions before a public which only knows what it is allowed
to hear, and is not encouraged to comment even on that. But
always some colour must be found to excuse even its most
flagrant performances. And whenever Nazi propaganda is taxed
with persecution of the Church, its reply is always the
same--that the Catholics began by refusing to keep
"politics" out of the pulpit. Actually, it was not till
Cardinal Faulhaber preached his Advent course at the end of
this same year, 1933, that a kind of official challenge was
thrown down by the Church to the Nazi philosophy. But it was
soon enough.

The year 1934 saw only the beginnings of that forward drive
by which the Nazi culture, with Rosenberg at its head, aimed
at filching from the Church the loyalty of youth. The reason
for this was plain; at the end of that year a plebiscite was
to be held in the Saar district, which would decide for or
against its reincorporation in the Reich. Catholic influence
in the Saar was strong; it would not do to let the Nazi
State appear as the open enemy of the Church. As the youth
organisations of Catholic Germany began to disappear, Hitler
"received Cardinal Schulte and gave him verbally his promise
that the rights of Catholics would be protected, and no
article of the Concordat infringed."[5] Unconvinced, the
bishops wrote a joint pastoral at their yearly meeting at
Fulda, expressing their anxiety over the turn things were
taking. It was confiscated by the Gestapo, and the faithful
never saw or heard it.

[Footnote 5: Power, _op. cit._, p. 49.]


The Oath of Loyalty

In a sense, the Concordat between the Reich and the Holy See
was based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Pope Pius, in
agreeing that the bishops should take an oath of loyalty to
the German State, obviously did not intend anything more
than a recognition of the German Government as the
constituted government of the country. Catholic bishops
might swear loyalty to it in the same sense in which
Anglican bishops swear loyalty to his Majesty the King,
without thereby binding themselves to accept, without
protest, every step which the Government might, from time to
time, choose to take. They agreed, further, that they would
not attempt to resuscitate the Centre party, in a country
where parties had ceased to exist; that they would restrain
their clergy from indulging in party activities. Was this to
preclude bishops and clergy alike from protesting, even in
sermons, against a pagan philosophy which the State was
encouraging, against scurrilous attacks on religion in the
party newspapers, against invasions of the Church's own
rights, now apparently guaranteed to her? No reasonable
political theory would admit such a conclusion. But the Nazi
doctrine of the State construes all criticism of the
Government and its measures as _lse-majest_; you must
accept everything in silence, or you are accused at once of
political activity. Thus it may be said that the two
signatories of the Concordat were not using terms in the
same sense.

But, if so, the blame lies unquestionably at the door of the
German rulers. They knew that they were coining a new
language. Bishops and priests were to honour the
constitutional government, and avoid acts which might
endanger the welfare of the State--supposing that the French
bishops had made a similar undertaking, would anyone in his
senses have interpreted it as meaning a reverential silence
in the face of any decree which the French Chamber might
enact? You must not attach new senses to words, and then
employ those words in drawing up a contract with a second
party who does not share your vocabulary. Nor can Hitler
have imagined for a moment that Pope Pius was signing the
formula in that sense. No religious body could conceivably
sign away, on a blank cheque, all its rights of criticism
and of protest. The sixteenth and thirty-second clauses of
the Concordat were face-saving clauses, to be used if and
when it should become necessary to declare that the
Concordat was a dead letter.


Next the Schools

The Saar plebiscite was taken at the beginning of 1935, with
an intoxicating success for the cause of greater Germany.
Once more shock-tactics were applied; fifteen days later
"the official Bavarian Press opened fire on the Confessional
schools".[6] If a propaganda of mixed cajolery and
intimidation could produce such results in a district which
was only German by anticipation, what might it not do in a
province which was already part of Germany? Goebbels brought
all his batteries to bear on the public mind. "He who sends
his child to the denominational school wrongs his child, and
interferes with the unity of the people. We do not want
Catholic or Evangelical schools, we want the school of Adolf
Hitler." Such were the slogans which were posted up
everywhere, and an intensive Press campaign followed up the
posters. The effect was that in this year only sixty-five
per cent. of the Bavarian electorate voted in favour of the
confessional schools, against eighty-nine per cent. in 1933.

[Footnote 6: Power, _op. cit._, p. 50.]

So far the success of the agitation, however lamentable, was
not wholly unexpected. There will always be weaker brethren
among the Catholic population, even of a traditionally
Catholic country. There will be those who complain that the
priests are too anxious to keep everything in their own
hands; after all, it is possible to bring up your children
as Catholics without sending them to exclusively Catholic
schools. Hours were set apart for religious teaching in the
provided schools (as we should call them), and priests had
the right of entry. Was it not doing the fair thing by one's
children to give them the opportunities of advancement which
were opened to them by being educated on the State model?
Already it was clear that you had to be a good Nazi to get
anywhere; it was not yet clear that it was impossible to be
a good Catholic and a good Nazi at the same time;
Rosenberg's eccentricities were not the established religion
of Germany. Sixty-five per cent. is as much as the Church
can ordinarily count upon in the way of out-and-out
supporters, where there is a conflict between the voice of
ecclesiastical and civil authorities. If the thing had
stopped there, the Church might legitimately have complained
that the State had grossly exceeded its powers by adopting a
violently partisan policy in an issue where it should have
remained neutral; that pressure had been exerted in defiance
of the spirit in which the Concordat had been signed; but it
would have had to be admitted that the human weakness of the
weaker brethren had been to blame in selling the pass to the
enemy.

But the thing did not stop there. A fresh vote was taken in
1936, after more propaganda, and the number of parents who
voted for the confessional schools had been reduced to
thirty-five per cent.; another in 1937, and now the faithful
remnant was reduced to four per cent. This speeding up of
the tempo was frankly inartistic; an offence, not merely
against justice, but against the law of averages. You
cannot, by legitimate means, break down the resistance of a
people so rapidly as that. A statistical triumph of this
kind only serves to raise the suspicion that there has been
manipulation of the votes. If there has not been
manipulation of the votes, there must have been intimidation
on a reckless scale to account for such a turn-over. What is
quite certain is that you have not taken a free vote.


Bullied into Submission

It is not relevant here to consider whether the Catholics in
Bavaria and in other parts of the Reich (for these others
fared no better) might not have shown a stronger front to
the oppressor, and let their schools go down fighting,
instead of being jockeyed into a show of acquiescence.
Persecution is none the less persecution when it is
successful. What chiefly unnerved resistance was probably
the feeling that resistance would necessarily be in vain. It
was quite clear, from the way in which education was being
handled, that the Government was determined to get rid of
the denominational schools, and many may have felt that it
was better to let them have their way, for fear that they
should make all Catholic education, even in the provided
schools, impossible. What is quite certain is that the
Nazis, by the constant threats to personal liberty which the
Gestapo and the rubber truncheon secure, tyrannised over the
consciences of the German Catholics, bullied them into
submission without persuading them; and it is there that the
essence of persecution lies. Indeed, it would have been more
honest if the State had simply taken over the schools by
open confiscation, instead of trying to persuade the world
that their abandonment had been voluntary. Probably it is
impossible for anyone who has breathed the air of a free
country to realise the numbing effect which the new form of
persecution has on those who are subjected to it: the
shrieking of the Press, the fear of spying, of mock justice,
of the concentration camp; above all, the impossibility of
free discussion and open exchange of ideas. We have to
remember, besides, that the wedge method always makes
compliance with the Government demands something less than a
sacrifice of absolute principle; religion was taught, and is
still taught, in the State schools where the parents demand
it.

It need hardly be said that any argument for compliance
which was based on the existence of "facilities" in the
State schools was ill-founded. The wedge system was still at
work; having, by 1937, obliterated the confessional schools,
the Government proceeded, in 1938, to issue further
legislation which was designed to take the sting out of all
religious teaching everywhere. Lay teachers were allowed to
do the work hitherto reserved for priests; priests were no
longer to teach unless they could "guarantee that nothing in
their religious classes would contradict the world-view of
National-Socialism", and so on.[7] But indeed, no amount of
facilities could suffice to counteract the Nazi atmosphere,
the Nazi teaching. It is not as if you could go to school
with the Nazis and acquire mere knowledge of facts, mere
principles of taste and of criticism, such as a secular
education would impart. The aim of the Nazis has been, from
the first, to capture the imagination and the loyalties of
youth; and to capture these for a perverted, though
carefully elaborated, world-view. There is no room in the
same child's head for the principles of Christianity,
however languidly acquired, and for the racial ideology
which has Hitler as its rule of faith, and the
world-domination of the German race as its end.

[Footnote 7: Power, _op. cit._, p. 54.]


The Hitler Youth

So much for the guarantee given by the Concordat that the
Catholic schools should be allowed to continue. Too
scrupulous to abolish them, the German Government had forced
the Catholic public to declare them unnecessary. But it is
not only during school hours that the totalitarian State
employs the time, and forms the character, of the young: it
will manage their leisure for them. Here is a piteous
reflection for anybody who has lived out half a century in
this crooked world. There was an officer in the Boer War who
distinguished himself by successfully defending an outpost
of British resistance, which caught the public attention and
the public fancy. His gallant services won him a
well-merited reputation among his fellow-countrymen, and he
determined to make good use of it. As Lord Baden-Powell, he
organised and still directs the vast Boy Scout movement
which counts its adherents in every corner of the earth. His
calculation was that by the use of a little drill, a little
uniform, and a great deal of comradeship, group discipline,
and outdoor adventure, you could help in bringing up a
generation of good citizens, of kindly and courageous men
and women, perhaps even of loyal Christians. People might
make fun of the methods by which the movement sought to
capture the imagination of boyhood, totem-symbols and
catchwords and all the rest of it, but nobody could quarrel
with its aims, which were wholly patriotic and humanitarian,
unless he were short-sighted enough to imagine that the need
for patriotism could vanish overnight. England, once more,
had shown an example to the world.

_Corruptio optimi pessima;_ the example proved to be a
fatal one. The peaceful thunders of Olympus have been stolen
by the Titans; the model on which, it seemed, international
brotherhood and universal good will were to dawn upon the
world has been the model on which the new totalitarian
States have built up the foundations of a contemptuous and
unscrupulous nationalism.... It is a poignant reflection
that Lord Baden-Powell, not many years since, was refused
permission to land in Denmark because, as Chief Scout, he
was wearing "uniform". In so far as it was his object to
build up a healthy, resourceful, outdoors generation of
boys, totalitarianism has faithfully imitated his ambitions.
In so far as his design was to build up a generation which
should fearlessly speak the truth, should help the weak,
should show kindness to all its fellow-men, totalitarianism
has borrowed his methods and warped them to the service of
ideals miserably other than his own. To catch the boy out of
school hours, to captivate his fancy with heroic legend, to
discipline his outlook by catch-words and by community
song--all that has been borrowed by the Nazis to build up a
race pagan in morals, obedient to the hive-instinct of the
new Germany, ferociously intolerant of all other cultures,
worshipping nothing except brute strength.

Can the fountain of youth be so poisoned at its source? Will
the dragooning of young Germans into Nazi ideals be a
success, or will it breed, as intensive education sometimes
does breed, a reaction? It is too early yet to say; the Nazi
experiment is comparatively young; perhaps there will be a
reversal in human fortunes which will leave historians
permanently wondering whether the scheme would have worked.
Meanwhile, it is certain that the institution of the
Hitler-youth, and the desire to make it the only
youth-movement in the Reich, led to inevitable conflict
between Nazism and the Church. In a sense, it may be said
that German Catholicism invited attack by the very
excellence of its organisation. It had founded a political
party--that party must go. It had an admirable network of
schools, religious and secular--those schools must be
denuded of their pupils. It was rich in youth movements,
some of them affiliated to the Boy Scouts, some of them
local and national--those movements must be engulfed in the
single, all-assimilating corporation of the Hitler-youth.


The Concordat Defied

Once more, the Concordat had to be defied. By Article 31, it
was laid down that, "Such Catholic organisations and
associations as serve a purely religious, cultural, or
charitable purpose, and as such are subject to the Church
authorities, will be protected in their establishments and
activities."[8] Religious associations may be of three
kinds. Some of them will be frankly political in their aims
and methods, like the Centre or the Partito Popolare. Some
will confine their activities to the sacristy: pious
sodalities which meet for prayer and mutual edification.
Between these two extremes you have a no-man's-land of
promiscuous organisations which are covered, roughly, by the
definition "cultural and charitable". The Nazi Government,
it hardly needs to be said, lost no time in annexing the
no-man's land. Either they would stretch the law so as to
include these organisations under the term "political"; or
they would simply merge them, in the name of efficiency,
with non-religious organisations of their own. And, above
all, the youth movements.

[Footnote 8: Power, _op. cit._, p. 31.]

Baldur von Schirach, the head of the Hitler-youth, declared
war against the Catholic organisations as early as March,
1934, when he told his audiences at Essen that "sport had
nothing to do with religious beliefs", and the Catholic
Jugendverbnde were gravely mistaken if they thought they
could retain "their political power" in a country which now
had only one political orientation.[9] They held out bravely
as long as it was possible to hold out. Two thousand German
boy scouts went to Rome for the Holy Year in 1935. "On their
return ... they were set upon at Constance by the secret
police. Their cameras, rucksacks, rosaries, musical
instruments, souvenirs of Rome--everything they had with
them was confiscated. Their shirts were torn off their
backs. They did not see their belongings again."[10] The
struggle could not be maintained; the strength of an
association is its weakness--by a single decree you can
disband it or merge it in some parallel but wholly
dissimilar organisation. In 1938, practically all the
Catholic Jugendverbnde were dissolved, and now the
Hitler-youth is a necessary element in the training of every
German. From this, it need hardly be said, every religious
influence is jealously excluded.

[Footnote 9: Vermeil, _op. cit._, p. 67.]

[Footnote 10: Power, _op. cit._, p. 58.]


"Enemies of the State"

It must not be supposed that this campaign for the
destruction of religion was carried out with no other
grounds to recommend it than the _Sic volo, sic jubeo_ of
the new Government. The Nazi technique always employs
publicity (an art which it has studied intensively) to aid
its onslaughts, just as it employs parachute troops to
undermine the enemy's defences in military attack. Somehow
the Catholics must be made to look as if they were the
enemies of the State. Nothing would secure this more
effectively than a series of legal condemnations; a legal
condemnation, even in a country which has witnessed the
Alice-in-Wonderland procedure of the Reichstag trial,
carries with it a flavour of impartiality. And here the
Nazis were in luck; it was not necessary for them to invent
a law which Catholics would be certain to break, since the
exigencies of their position called, quite legitimately, for
currency regulations which Catholics did break.

Early in the regime, in order to secure the stability of the
currency, a veto was imposed on the export of German money
to foreign countries. Special exemption was granted to
business firms which owed money abroad, none to individuals
or to charitable organisations. Now, when the mark fell,
under the Weimar Government, many religious Orders had
borrowed money from their foreign houses.[11] They had no
exports with which to repay these loans; they could only
repay them in money by smuggling. Conscience thus presented
them with rival claims; but, whereas the repayment of the
loans was a moral duty, the law forbidding the export of
money was only a penal law, and could therefore be infringed
if you did so at your own risk, and were prepared to face
the consequences. From the point of view of Catholic
propaganda, it would have been very much better if the
debtors had defaulted, pleading the impossibility of
carrying out their contract. But it is not surprising that
they should have preferred the honest to the legal solution.
That they should be punished was not unreasonable; that they
should be savagely punished was not unexpected. The malice
which lay behind these prosecutions showed itself in a more
subtle way; it has been pointed out[12] that the Nazi
authorities deliberately spread these trials over a period
of months taking them roughly at the rate of one a week, so
as to keep them continually before the public eye, and give
the impression that "the Catholic Orders had no other
occupation than the smuggling of German currency."

[Footnote 11: Vermeil, _op. cit._, p. 74.]

[Footnote 12: Power, _op. cit._, p. 66.]


Charges of Immorality

It seems to be generally admitted, however, that the staging
of these prosecutions was not very effective in discrediting
the Church. Early in 1937, a fresh attempt was made; this
time the appeal was made to that large class of newspaper
readers which delights in filthy revelations, and the
character of the charges brought was such as to harden
public opinion against the Catholic cause in the Schools
question, which was then at its height. Some Franciscan
lay-brothers, who had charge of mentally deficient children,
were accused and found guilty of unnatural offences against
those who were under their care. What truth there may have
been in the allegations will, perhaps, never be known. There
are black sheep here and there, no doubt, in the fold of St.
Francis no less than elsewhere, and some of the accused may
have been guilty. But it is to be remembered that the
judges, officials in a Nazi country, were predisposed to
credulity; it is to be remembered that the witnesses were,
in the nature of the case, half-witted (one thinks of Van
der Lubbe and his rle in the Reichstag trial); it is to be
remembered that abnormally constituted persons are
notoriously subject to hallucinations in the matter of sex.
In the case immediately under consideration, most of us will
be content to suspend judgment.

But the handling of the affair by the authorities has,
perhaps, no parallel in history. The whole of the controlled
Press fed its pornographically-minded readers with revolting
details, blazoned in its headlines, and promised them that
this was only the beginning of a series of prosecutions,
which would find no less than a thousand priests and nuns
guilty of immoral conduct. In pursuance of this object, a
great hunt was made for clerical delinquents in a society
honey-combed with informers. Offenders who had already been
found guilty and punished by ecclesiastical superiors were
dragged to light. The effect was to show that a mountain had
been made out of a molehill. The prosecutors succeeded in
obtaining convictions against fifty-eight priests, out of a
total of 25,000 priests in the Reich, and no nuns at all.
The public must have realised, in spite of the gagging of
the Catholic Press, that the whole business was a fiasco.
Yet everyone who knows how mud sticks, how minds are
impressed by insinuation rather than by proved fact, will be
able to form some idea of the discredit brought upon the
Church by this organised campaign of vilification.[13]

[Footnote 13: Power, _op. cit._, p. 71.]


"No Quarrel"

It is maintained by the Nazis, and by those who seek to
excuse their conduct, that they have no quarrel with the
Church as such--have they not left Catholics freedom of
worship? Do not their places of worship remain open, and
crowded?--but only with the Church's attempt to stake out a
claim on the loyalties and enthusiasms of youth. Youth
belongs to the nation, must be formed on a national model;
it was necessary, therefore, to loosen the Church's hold on
the nation's children, whether in school hours or out of
them. That done, the Government of the Reich has no further
quarrel with the priests; let them say Mass and conduct
prayers and mind their own business.

It would be difficult, in any case, to accept this account
of the matter. We should be disposed to ask why the Press
and the minor leaders of the party have conducted a campaign
of abuse against Catholicism for the last seven years; why
it has been necessary to send more than five thousand
priests to prison. Can we really be sure that we have seen
the worst of State interference, that there is no more to
come? In Germany itself, doubtless it was better not to risk
a frontal attack; Catholicism numbers its millions. But if
we want to understand the real Nazi attitude towards
religion, we may be pardoned for devoting some attention to
the treatment given to Catholics in other countries, which
have come under the Reich's domination unwillingly.


Naked Persecution

When Austria came into the orbit of the German Reich, she
was treated almost as a conquered country. The Catholic
schools were all closed down without the formality of a
vote, without any barrage of propaganda. Religious
instruction remains in the State school where parents demand
it, but it is mostly given by teachers fully imbued with
Nazi ideals. What has befallen the German Catholics over a
course of years befell the Austrian Catholics overnight.
Still, they are allowed freedom of worship, like their
co-religionists in Germany; they have not yet found
themselves members of a proscribed fraternity.

In Poland it is otherwise; there, naked persecution has
reigned ever since the conquest. That priests have been
butchered everywhere in the course of mass executions does
not, perhaps, belong to the story of persecution proper; the
reason there is a war of cultures rather than of religions.
It has been the German policy to choose as victims, when
victims must be chosen, the intellectual and cultural
leaders of Poland; that many of these should be priests is
only to be expected. I am not suggesting that this is an
extenuating circumstance; I am only pointing out that it
does not necessarily imply hostility to the Catholic
religion as such, or to the Christian religion as such. If
Poland had been a Mahommedan country, it may be surmised
that the officials of religion would have suffered equally.

What is more significant for our present purpose, because it
seems to be an index of the general Nazi attitude towards
Catholicism, is the wholesale closing of churches, the
wholesale imprisonment or expulsion of the clergy. That is
difficult to explain on merely cultural grounds. It is true
that in Poland, as in Ireland, religion and patriotism are
close bed-fellows. And you might have expected that the
clergy in a conquered Poland would be subjected to
irritating restrictions; that they would be watched by the
police, that their sermons would be reported, the bishops'
pastorals censored or suppressed; Polish Catholicism might
reasonably be feared as a rallying-point for Polish national
sentiment. But that does not account for what has happened.

"The Catholic churches in Poland were closed as from the
beginning of November. The faithful of Poznan can attend
Mass only on Sunday.... The administration of the diocese of
Chelmo, embracing the whole of Pomerania, though not
dissolved, is not allowed to function. The same applies to
the administration of the diocese of Silesia, in Katowice,
and that of the diocese of Kujawy, in Wlocavek.... The
majority of the clergy of the above-mentioned dioceses are
either in prison or interned in their own houses. In Poznan
alone, over a hundred priests are imprisoned.... In the
diocese of Chelmo alone, six hundred priests have been
either imprisoned or interned in concentration camps."[14]
"All the priests from the parishes of the Gniewkow deanery
(sixteen in all), of the Lobzenica deanery (twelve), of the
Naklo deanery (sixteen), and of the Znin deanery
(twenty-one) were expelled. ... Of the 261 parishes in the
Gniezno archdiocese, more than half have been deprived of
their shepherds."[15] Dull statistics like these, which have
little atrocity-value, are perhaps the surest index of
German intentions in Poland; religion is to be starved out.
And this, not because the conquerors of Poland could serve
any useful end by turning the Poles into a so-called virile
nation; who in Germany wants to do that? The conclusion is
irresistible that Nazi Germany, where it is not controlled
by consideration of prudence, is bent on the destruction of
Christianity as such.

[Footnote 14: _German Atrocities in Poland_ (Free Europe
pamphlet), p. 34.]

[Footnote 15: English Catholic Newsletter, No. 15.]


Two Types of Persecution

It is our duty, always, to make some attempt at
understanding those who disagree with us. And those who
persecute the Church do so, commonly, not because they hate
her in herself but because they identify her, obstinately,
with something other which they hate. Two types of
persecution may be easily distinguished by the colour they
take from their historical context. There is persecution in
the name of national security; where the rulers of a State,
commonly of an aristocratic State, identify, or profess to
identify, the Church with a foreign culture, suspect it, or
profess to suspect it, of antinational, because of its
international, sympathies. The clergy, however strong and
manifest be their patriotism, are regarded as foreigners
because they are in relations with their co-religionists
abroad, because some of them have been educated abroad; they
cannot be hundred-per-cent. citizens of their own country.
So it was in old days when Catholics were persecuted in
England: so it was in Germany at the time of the
_Kulturkampf_. And there is persecution in the name of
popular liberty; where the partisans of a democratic
revolution, in their eagerness to sweep away all the
landmarks of the bad past, profess to find in the Church,
and especially in her hierarchy, a relic of the older order
which must be swept away with the rest; of course the clergy
are the enemies of revolution, or how was it that all went
well with them in the days before the revolution? So once
more, though on quite different grounds, the Church is
persecuted.

The Nazi movement has, perhaps, both reasons for quarrelling
with Catholic influence in the Reich. For, on the one hand,
the German Catholics are bound by strong ties to Catholics
in other parts of the world, and the Nazi State distrusts
all such outside affiliations. And on the other hand,
Hitler's revolution, although we used to think of it as a
conservative revolution because it was anti-Communist, has
proved, in fact, a break with the past hardly less radical
than Lenin's. Whether because they remind him that there are
cultures other than the German culture, or because they
remind him that there was a pre-Nazi Germany, Hitler might
be expected to view the Catholics of the Reich with
distrust, and perhaps to harass them.

But does either motive account for the vigour, the
purposefulness, of the anti-Catholic drive? The Catholics of
Bavaria, and perhaps of the Rhineland, might be suspected of
sympathy with the old order of things; but not those of
Prussia and of the other German States. There, you feel, the
Lutherans might have been persecuted (as we know they have
been persecuted), and the Catholics let alone; yet the
suppression of Catholic influence has been nation-wide. Nor,
when you come to look into it, was there much in the cry of
"Foreign influence!" The German Catholics had no love for
France; they remembered the anti-clerical laws, and they
blamed France for the ill-success of Brning's
Chancellorship. Russia they hated, like the Nazis; Italy,
Germany's new friend, was endeared to them by the aid which
it lent to the anti-Communist rising of General Franco.
There was no reason in the nature of things why the new
German Government should not have pulled well with the
Church at first, if there had not been some more intimate
ground of disagreement.


A War on Christianity

The fact is, unless all the symptoms of the struggle have
wholly misled us, that for once the Church is being
persecuted not because she is Catholic but because she is
Christian. Wherever else we point to anti-clerical
legislation, and denounce it, our non-Catholic friends are
not slow to retort that the Church has invited attack by
being untrue to the spirit of her Master. But not in
Germany; there it is precisely because she is true to the
spirit of her Master that she is held up to scorn. She has
loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore she is in
exile. Many of the Church's persecutors would have been
moved to compunction, or at least to indignant disavowal, if
they had had St. Paul's experience; if it had been said to
them in a vision, "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest". To a
German statesman, it would be no news.

It is as if the mantle of the centuries had slipped away,
and Christendom were faced with the prospect of converting
the world afresh. May we be found worthy of the task; it is
no light one.


PRINTED BY PURNELL AND SONS, LTD., PAULTON (SOMERSET) AND
LONDON


MACMILLAN WAR PAMPHLETS

1. LET THERE BE LIBERTY
A. P. HERBERT

2. WAR WITH HONOUR
A. A. MILNE

3. NORDIC TWILIGHT
E. M. FORSTER

4. THE CROOKED CROSS
THE DEAN OF CHICHESTER

5. NAZI AND NAZARENE
RONALD KNOX

6. WHEN I REMEMBER...
J. R. CLYNES

7. FOR CIVILIZATION
C. E. M. JOAD

8. THE RIGHTS OF MAN
HAROLD J. LASKI




Transcriber's note:

The edition used as base for this book contained the
following errors, which have been corrected:

    Page 6 footnote: _Hitler et la Christianisme_
    => _Hitler et le Christianisme__

    Page 30: the partizans of a democratic revolution
    => the partisans of a democratic revolution


[End of _Nazi and Nazarene_ by Ronald Knox]