Religion: Cologne & Paderborn Speak

For a church which has been at the mercy of an anticlerical state, the Roman Catholic Church in Germany has been outspoken. Last week two Catholic leaders in Germany kept the church’s flag flying.

Archbishop Joseph Frings of Cologne and Bishop Laurenz Jaeger of Paderborn in Westphalia issued a pastoral letter warning their faithful against the Hitlerian campaign for more babies through forced marriages, or even no marriage at all. Noting a growth of free love, adultery and divorce, the prelates flatly denied the Nazi theory that virginity is “treason to the race,” and attacked the Nazi teaching that “denies a great difference between men and animals.”

Wrote the prelates: “The introduction of force into the most personal and delicate point of private life and of human personality would be a trampling without conscience on one of the most highly prized ideals of universal humanity. . . . Whoever places legitimate and illegitimate motherhood on the same level places a burden on the ideal of motherhood and the value of woman. …”

In an earlier pastoral letter the Archbishop of Cologne had got off a direct and public attack on Naziism: “The doctrine of the superman will not bring happiness and prosperity to men.” It went unanswered. This week he joined with the Bishop of Paderborn in a denunciation of Nazi morality.

Meantime Heinrich Himmler’s organ, Das Schwarze Korps, editorialized: “We have need of children [to] compensate for war losses [and to] permit us to send Germans into all countries whose occupation is necessary. … A decline in births for some years would be a national catastrophe.”