Religion: Political Catholicism

In Nazi Germany’s war on the Roman Catholic Church, Catholicism’s most experienced critic of Nazi ideology is Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich. In practical dealings with Nazis no German prelate is more adroit than the noble Bishop of Münster, the Most Rev. Clemens August Count von Galen. Example: When Bishop Galen lately preached in his cathedral on the Church’s role in the education of youth, a uniformed Nazi leaped up to shout: “How can anybody talk about youth if he himself has neither wife nor child?”

Quick as a flash the bishop thundered: “In this house I will allow no offensive remarks against the Führer!” Good Catholics in the congregation beamed admiration at this neat reference to Bachelor Hitler, and the Nazi flushed, sat down.

Last week Bishop Galen was visiting in Rome. Five days before the Austrian plebiscite (see p. 23), he was drafted by the Holy See to do a diplomatic job of work on a colleague—Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna. Cardinal Innitzer and the Austrian bishops had admonished Austrian Catholics to vote Ja in the plebiscite, had subscribed that admonition with a fervent “Heil Hitler” (TIME, April 11). The Pope summoned Cardinal Innitzer to the Vatican for an explanation.

As the cardinal entrained for Rome, there must have rung in his ears the German words of a broadcast from the powerful Vatican radio station, in which the words “worthlessness and faithlessness” were applied to “shepherds” actions” which greatly resembled his own. Although the Vatican insisted that this broadcast, made by an anonymous Jesuit, happened entirely by coincidence, its observations on “political Catholicism” were pat and pointed. “False political Catholicism” the Jesuit defined as an attitude, either of the “simple faithful or officials in public life,” which consists in “an exaggerated carefulness of tactics and in a weak adaptation to established or foreseen facts. . . . The damage is greatest when constituted guardians of sacred ethics are seized by the spirit of that false Catholicism and bow down before the mighty and successful of the day.”

When Cardinal Innitzer arrived in Rome, no one from the Vatican met him at the station. His first interview, with Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, Papal Secretary of State, was described by well-informed Arnaldo Cortesi of the New York Times as “very stormy.” Cardinal Innitzer rested his case upon oral guarantees made to him by Reichsführer Hitler and Field Marshal Göring. These guarantees were rejected as insufficient by Cardinal Pacelli, who thereupon turned Cardinal Innitzer over to Bishop Galen. So convincing was the Bishop of Münster’s tale of broken Nazi promises that the Viennese was reported “very much impressed” before he arrived at the Holy Father’s door for a two-hour audience.

When Cardinal Innitzer emerged, he virtually retracted the plebiscite statement, declaring in Osservatore Romano that it “did not intend to be an approval of what was, or is, irreconcilable with the law of God and the freedom and rights of the Catholic Church. Besides, that declaration must not be interpreted by the State and by the party as an obligation of conscience, nor must it be employed for propaganda purposes.”

The damage, however, was done. Not a newspaper in Catholic Austria* mentioned the Cardinal’s about-face. And arriving back in Vienna, he had a swastika flag run up on old St. Stephen’s Cathedral—just as he had had its bells rung when Hitler entered the city.

* Statistically, 90% Roman Catholic, with some 7,000,000 souls listed as belonging to the Church. Actually, anticlericalism has made its inroads in Austria. Last week Rev. James Mar tin Gillis, C.S.P., editor of the Catholic World, estimated the population as “50% or 40% good Catholic.”