Religion: Political Debasement

When the German Government gave the Jews a final turn of the screw last winter, many an observer predicted that the Roman Catholic Church would be next on the rack—put there by Nazis covetous of its big German properties. Up to last week, however, Adolf Hitler was too busy on other fronts to pay much attention either to the Catholic or to the German State Protestant churches. Meanwhile Nazis continued locally to close down religious schools and chivy the clergy. Vexatiously chivied last week was the Archbishop of Salzburg, onetime confessor to Emperor Charles of Austria-Hungary. The State elbowed the Archbishop out of his government-owned palace and the municipality ordered him to leave the local chapter house where he had taken refuge.

Other skirmishes of State and Church:

>The State-supported German Evangelical Church issued a new declaration of principles: “Every supranational or international churchdom of Roman Catholic or world-Protestant stamp is a political debasement of Christianity. . . . The Christian faith is the unbridgeable religious opposition to Jewry. . . . [National Socialism’s fight] is on the philosopho-political side the continuance and completion of the work which the German reformer Martin Luther began. . . .”

> The Schwarze Korps (SS newspaper) expressed horror that ten out of 17 graduates of a school in Westphalia planned to study theology. The paper complained of parents who “drive their children like a herd of sheep to the spiritual slaughterhouse of the clergy and thus, only by this ‘sacrifice’ that doesn’t hurt them at all, try to secure a place in heaven at the expense of other people.”