GERMANY: Open Warfare

The Rt. Rev. the Bishop of Mainz, Ludwig Hugo, stated last week that within his diocese:

1) No Catholic shall become or remain a member of the National Socialist (Fascist) Party of Adolf Hitler upon pain of being denied Holy Communion.

2) No member of the Hitler party shall be allowed to participate in Catholic funerals or other services of the Church.

Various German editors applied to these prohibitions various epithets: “. . . Medieval ukase . . . savor of the Dark Ages . . . quite logical . . . Catholicism has been for some time in open warfare with the Hitlerites.”

Bishop Christian Schreiber of Berlin commented: “So far I see no reason why I should take such action. . . . It is very likely that the National Socialists in the diocese of Mainz have been particularly aggressive against the Catholic Church.”

When Herr Hitler’s bludgeon-swinging Nazis (National Socialists) were showing power at Munich several years ago, the Archbishop of Munich, Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, denounced the German Fascist movement on three religious counts:

1) Its bitter nationalism is diametrically opposed to that benign internationalism focused in Pope Pius XI, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church.

2) The cult of Wodan and the “Old Gods” of Germany supported by the General Erich Ludendorff, once an active Hitlerite, is of course a detestable heresy against God Almighty which every Catholic must resist. True, the Hitlerites of today are not Wodanites, but they are tainted with a suspicion of Wodanism in the ecclesiastic mind.

3) Without specifically particularizing the charge, Cardinal Faulhaber declared that “National Socialism is absolutely incompatible with the ethics of the Catholic Church.”