Was the Catholic church to blame for Nazism?



The article excerpted below says so but is greatly unbalanced. It is certainly true that ALL Christian churches propagated antisemitism for a long time. Luther's diatribe against the Jews is well-known. But by the 19th century, that had waned to a low rumble in most of the world and one of the most furious antisemites of the 19th century was in fact KARL MARX! Antisemitism has always been strong in France but both the French revolutionaries in the late 1700s and Napoleon in the early 1800s gave some emancipation to the Jews -- and Prussia legally emancipated the Jews in 1812. And Britain, of course, had a Jewish Prime Minister for much of the late 19th century. So while the Catholic church certainly had a role in setting up antisemitism, it was a Europe-wide but generally low-key attitude by the 20th century. Even the British Prime Minister who declared war on Hitler (Neville Chamberlain -- Yes: it WAS Neville Chamberlain) was an antisemite of sorts. And FDR had no time for the Jews either.

When it comes to the relationship between Hitler and the church, however, what we read below is very selective. For a start, he totally overlooks the persecution of Catholic clergy by Hitler and has obviously never read "Mit brennender Sorge", the prewar Papal encyclical that was actually written in German (encyclicals are normally written in Latin) to reach the widest possible German audience. It was deeply critical of the Nazis and infuriated Hitler.

And the way Pius XII quietly rescued threatened Jews on a large scale also seems to be unknown to the writer


Gabriel Wilensky’s first book, “Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Teachings About the Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust” traces the history of the Christian church (and specifically the Vatican) to plausible causes of the Holocaust.

“The silence of the church is deafening,” Wilensky says. “[The clergy] hid information from the public. Pope Pius XII held the interest of the Church first, and the Church never saw fit to publicly denounce the Holocaust, never called Nazis murderers and never mentioned that the Jews were victims. This pattern of silence began long before.” [That is a complete lie. Pacelli (Later Pius XII) wrote "Mit Brennender Sorge"]

Wilensky says the silence of the Church was not as bad as its support for the Nazi party. He says the clergy had many chances to prevent the events that eventually led to the holocaust.

“The Church materially helped the Nazis from the 1930s on, providing them with baptismal records — needed in Germany because Jews there dressed and spoke like everyone else — which showed who was a Christian, and by exclusion who was not,” Wilensky says.


Wilensky, who was born in Uruguay, came to the U.S. more than 20 years ago to work in the computer software industry, but he says the Holocaust has always fascinated him.

The final product tells the story of the Church and its relationship with the Jews chronologically from the time of Jesus’ crucifixion to the end of World War II, with legal analysis of crimes committed by clergy before, during and after the Holocaust. The final section details recommendations for the future.

“Anti-Semitism has a way of morphing itself into many different forms,” Wilensky says. “The religious, racial form [of anti-Semitism] in the 19th century has grown into the new anti-Semitism, which is political and manifests itself as anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism.

Many people in academia and in Europe in particular express their anti- Jewish feelings in the form of anti-Israel feelings, but they don’t understand why they are so inclined to protest everything that Israel does. People have suppressed the anti-Semitism for so many years and have found a way to express it in a way that is politically correct. I hope my book will raise awareness to this problem and show that something very wrong was done, and that it’s manifesting itself now in other ways.”

Wilensky explains that he does not intend to argue that all Christians hate Jews, or that all Christians during the Holocaust went along with Church teachings in silence. “There were many thousands of Christian individuals who helped the Jews, including those who risked their lives to save the Jews…by hiding them or providing shelter in some way, or helping in any way they could,” he says.

Wilensky notes the best example of Christians acting as righteous gentiles was the reaction of the Danish Lutheran Church during World War II. The church created a campaign to defend Jews, writing sermons and reading them from every pulpit in every church in the country. “They taught [church goers] that killing Jews was wrong and they needed to do everything in their power to help,” Wilensky says. The king of Denmark even made all citizens wear a yellow star so Nazis couldn’t identify which people were the Jews.

“There was a general mobilization of the country instigated by the Church,” Wilensky says. “The end result was that many Jews were transported to neutral Sweden, and a very large percentage of Denmark’s Jews survived the war.”

Through his research, Wilensky has found that all genocides include certain components, which other factions of the Church helped to facilitate through their negative teachings about Jews.

“[In genocide] there needs to be a prejudice or a preconceived idea about the victims that is widespread and that everybody shares,” Wilensky says. “There also has to be a participation or a promotion of genocide from the government. Without approval by the government, genocide does not really happen, so at the very least these two things need to be present. In the case of the Holocaust, the hatred had been there for almost two millennia, but [the Nazis] only needed to light the match.”

More HERE

3 comments:

  1. This article misrepresents what I said in the interview quoted here and what I express in my book “Six Million Crucifixions”. I do not have the space to make a point by point rebuttal here, but I will say a few things: first, I never said the Catholic Church was to blame for Nazism, although I do say that Christian (Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox) teachings about Jews and Judaism poisoned the minds of millions of Catholics through almost two millennia of systematic vilification and opprobrium, which predisposed millions of people to create, propagate, and act upon the racial and eliminationist antisemitism of the 19th century and then of the Nazis. Second, Nazi persecution of Catholic clergy is completely irrelevant to the discussion. The fact that the Nazis persecuted gays and gypsies, as well as anyone that opposed them is irrelevant too. In no case can anyone make a parallel between Nazi oppression (including incarceration and murder) of people they considered opposition, and their mass extermination of Jews. That’s simply obscene. Third, “Mit brennender Sorge” is a lengthy complaint of Nazi treatment of Catholic interests in Germany, with just a few lines in which Pacelli bemoaned about how wrong racism was. The writer accuses me of lying when I said “[The clergy] hid information from the public. Pope Pius XII held the interest of the Church first, and the Church never saw fit to publicly denounce the Holocaust, never called Nazis murderers and never mentioned that the Jews were victims. This pattern of silence began long before”, but I stand firm by my words, and I challenge him to prove that those are lies. “Mit brennender Sorge” does not show this to be incorrect in any way. I find it ironic the writer of the article accuses me of not having read the encyclical, when it’s obvious it’s the other way around.

    Gabriel Wilensky

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  2. Just one quote from "Brennender"

    Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

    If that's not a slap in the face for Nazism, what would be?

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  3. You are correct in thinking that that passage is a powerful indictment of Nazism, JR, but that was not the point you or me were making earlier. First, because as I said, it makes very little criticism of racism per se, and the rest of the encyclical is about those things in Nazism that were anathema to Catholicism, or complaints of Nazi anti-clerical behavior and, second, because also as I said neither this passage nor anything else in this entire encyclical makes a specific criticism of "antisemitism", or that the persecuted were "Jews", or that the persecutors were called "Nazis".

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