Cardinal Sins

Cardinal Faulhaber, mentioned in Prof Feuchtwanger’s review of Hitlers Pope (Dec issue, p41) was a covert racist and antisemite. A German Nationalist, he had closely identified Christianity with Germanism already in the 1914 War. After 1918, as Archbishop of Munich, he evinced strongly anti-liberal and anti-democratic sentiments. In a pastoral letter of 1920 he attacked the Weimar constitution and in 1924 he clashed publicly with Konrad Adenauer, consequently, a large part of the clergy and the Catholic press found themselves on the same side as the Volkische (ethno-racists) and other enemies of the fledgling German democracy. During the early Nazi period, the priest Alois Wurm, among other clergy, protested about Catholic silence in the face of the persecution of the Jews, Faulhaber rejoined that “the Church had occupy itself with more important questions than to plead for them “. On the conclusion of the Concordat, in July 1933 he wrote to Hitler “that which the old parliament and parties failed to do, your farsighted statesmanship achieved in six months”. While in his fifth advent sermon on 31st December 1933 he had preached, that the love of one’s own race … should never turn into hate of other people, he confirmed in the preceding words that “from the standpoint of the Church, “‘there was no objection to any truthful race research”. Nor was there any objection to ”the aim of keeping the nature (sic!) of a people as pure as possible, nor to the notion of a community of blood, to deepen the sense of nationhood.” In the same series of sermons, Faulhaber defended most (!) of the “Old” Testament as divine revelation, but made a distinction between the Jews of biblical times and those of his day: ” We must not let our dislike of the (present-day) Jew affect the importance we attach to the books of the “Old” Testament”. Theologically, he decried the Jewish religion in these sermons: “after the crucifixion of our saviour, God handed the Jewish people a bill of divorce.” During the war, Faulhaber had church bells rung whenever a Nazi victory was announced, no matter how large the cost in human lives and suffering and even when the defeated countries were Catholic Poland and France. After Hitler survived the attempt on his life in June 1944, Faulhaber sent him a letter of congratulation and recited a Te Deum in thanksgiving for his survival in the Church of our Lady at Munich. Faulhaber did not protest about the early crimes of the Nazis, nor about Kristallnacht, nor about the deportation and murder of the Jews. In 1943 when Dr Alfons Hiidebrand, a German officer, reported to Faulhaber what he had seen at Minsk, Faulhaber remained silent. He did protest, however – and successfully – when the Nazis ordered the removal of crosses from classroom walls in Bavarian schools during the war.