It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.
The German churches’ resistance to Hitler was amazingly meager. They were exclusively concerned with individualistic personal faith, traditional submission to the state, and a conservative outlook that rejected all left-wing proposals for social and political reform and enabled them to accept the Nazis’ claim to be the only alternative to Communism.
Reklam
Pius XI drafted the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (“With Deep Anxiety”). It was the first major church document to criticize Nazism. Smuggled into Germany, it was read on Palm Sunday from every Catholic pulpit—before a single copy had fallen into Nazi hands. As Richard Pierard explains, the encyclical protested the oppression of the church and called on Catholics to resist the idolatrous cult of race and state, to stand against the perversion of Christian doctrines and morality, and to maintain their loyalty to Christ, his church, and Rome. Hitler reacted furiously at first, but then decided to avoid a break with Rome by treating the encyclical with silence. Knowing that he had the support of the German Catholic laypeople, Hitler simply stepped up the pressure on the churches to eliminate the possibility of organized resistance.
Harassed by the Gestapo and repudiated by most Protestant leaders, the Confessing Church led a perilous existence. In 1935 no fewer than seven hundred Confessing Church pastors were arrested. The movement’s presence was an embarrassment to the Nazis, and its witness to Christ’s lordship over the world implicitly challenged Hitler’s totalitarianism.
When it was obvious that Hitler’s friend Ludwig Müller had failed to unite the Protestant churches, the Führer turned more and more to his anti-Christian Nazis, who claimed that Nazism represented the true fulfillment of Christianity. In 1935 the Nazis created their own Ministry of Church Affairs under a Nazi lawyer, Hanns Kerrl. When Kerrl met resistance from churchmen, he declared, “National Socialism is the doing of God’s will. God’s will reveals itself in German blood. True Christianity is represented by the party.”
Catholics, who had been strong in the German republic during the 1920s, endorsed the new Nazi government and supported the agreement ( concordat ) the Führer signed with the pope in 1933 guaranteeing the freedom to practice the Catholic religion. The concordat was an important milestone for Hitler. It greatly increased his prestige, and it successfully excluded Catholics from German politics. Hitler, however, had no intention of keeping his part of the bargain.
The prime example of sin in society, according to the preachers of the social gospel, was the capitalist system and what the profit motive did to create inhumane conditions for laborers. Man’s salvation, they said, was impossible as long as that system remained unchanged. Social Gospelers differed among themselves over how much change was necessary for the regeneration of the American system, but they agreed the kingdom of God could not come without it.
Reklam
Reklam