Nazis Make Bad Catholics

I'm sure Mr Larson wishes he hadn't had to write this essay as much as I wish I didn't feel compelled to share it, but I do because I've seen the same thing online, i.e., Catholic sympathy for Naziism.

From Crisis

By David Larson

Modern Catholics expressing sympathy for Nazism and its treatment of the Jews are condemned by the words of Pope Pius XI and the actions of Germans Catholics of that era.

It’s hard to tell if the popularity of certain ideas on Catholic podcasts and social media accounts signals the overall popularity of those ideas or just one small corner of the digital realm. I’d like to think that most faithful Catholics are too busy spending time with their families, building their parish communities, doing charity, and engaging in other meaningful offline activities to bother with fringe online movements. Regardless, it’s been hard to ignore the vigorous winking recently from many in the Catholic commentariat toward…well, literal Nazis.

As a politically and religiously conservative Catholic, you can be assured that I’m not using the term Nazi in the way an activist at the local campus would use it. I mean it in the more traditional sense—as in, those who believe Jews are collectively trying to undermine Western civilization through means that are barely perceptible until you join “the noticers”—who unironically use the term “the Jewish problem” to describe this issue; and who believe some fairly extreme measures may be necessary as a final solution to this problem. 

The similar gnostic feel of these “noticers” to “the woke” of the Left is an interesting parallel I’ll leave for someone else to unpack. But both believe themselves to have tuned into the real truths others are too scared, complacent, or brainwashed to admit.

And what exactly is it they are noticing? It’s hard to tell. They may point to somebody who trained to be an Orthodox rabbi (but never became one) who is now a key investor in PornHub, suggesting, falsely, that Orthodox Jews want more pornography in society. Or they may point out that 20th-century Marxist movements often had disproportionate numbers of Jews (this time atheist ones). 

But if this is a conspiracy, it’s a schizophrenic one. They could just as easily notice that the main free market economists—from Ludwig von Mises to Milton Friedman—were frequently Jewish. They could also notice that the National Conservative movement, created to move beyond both classical and progressive liberalism, is run by Yoram Hazony, another member of the tribe. For every Jon Stewart pushing us to the left, there’s a Ben Shapiro pushing us to the right.

Is the point to divide us? Or maybe, as the woke suggest about white people in general, the Jews have a higher-than-usual drive to pursue power and riches at the expense of the outgroup? This assumption, whether by the woke or the noticer, directly contrasts with the Christian view that all human beings, regardless of race, have a tendency toward sin. Making one race uniquely to blame for sin, or for Christ’s crucifixion for that matter, misses the point.

Many of these characters (I’ll avoid directly naming them here) strongly identify themselves as Catholics, placing little Vatican flags in their social media bios to go with their Latin screen names and saint avatars. Some will give themselves a little plausible deniability—showing extreme concern about the exact numbers killed in the Nazi gas chambers rather than justifying the murders outright. Like with the woke, though, they often start by telling you something didn’t happen before strongly insinuating that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it did. 

Unfortunately for them, when it comes to Catholics and Nazis, any support for the latter by the former exposes extreme historical ignorance and a disgraceful betrayal of their fellow Catholics. Nazis simply make very bad Catholics. 
Without getting very deep in the weeds, we can just lay out the very basic facts. The Catholic population of Germany was the main political opposition to the Nazi movement before Hitler took power in 1933. The explicitly Catholic party in Germany, the Catholic Center Party, tried to find a moderate middle between the Marxists and nationalists in the chaotic post-WWI Weimar Republic, and Nazis were seen as New Age thugs, not as natural allies. 

Catholic bishops also believed Nazi leaders when they blasted Christianity, and specifically Catholicism, as being a Jewish philosophy that had weakened the constitutionally strong Germanic peoples. So these bishops banned Catholics from joining or voting for the Nazi Party. There were some clergy who rebelled against this, like Benedictine abbot Albanus Schachleiter, a close supporter and friend of Hitler. But Schachleiter’s stance led to him being prohibited from making further political statements in 1923 and ordered into monastic isolation (which he ignored). 

A map of which regions voted for the Nazis in the 1932 elections—and which did not—reveals as stark a contrast as a map comparing the red Republican heartland and the deep-blue Democrat West Coast. Support for Nazis in Catholic areas of Germany was like Republican support in San Francisco. The American Journal of Political Science studied this election data and concluded, “Our analysis confirms that religion is the single most important empirical predictor of NSDAP [Nazi Party] vote shares.”

When investigating the cause of this clear religious divide in support, AJPS determined, 

In the last phase of the Weimar Republic, nobody of public standing opposed the Nazis more vehemently than the Catholic Church and its dignitaries. We provide direct evidence in support of the idea that the Church’s influence contributed to the resistance of ordinary Catholics.

Any modern Nazi sympathizers in the Catholic online discourse would have found themselves far outside the mainstream of German Catholics, both the clergy and the laity, who would have seen them as traitors to the Church and sympathizers with violent pagan occultists. And these were not soft, felt-banner fans overcome by the spirit of Vatican II. These were strict German Catholics of the interwar period. Planting their flag in the center territory between Marxism and nationalism was not a compromise with evil but a principled stand against two bloodthirsty secular movements that had many commonalities, including their hatred of traditional Christianity and promotion of authoritarian state power. 

It’s true that after the Nazis took over Germany in 1933, the Catholic Church made a series of concessions to Germany’s new chancellor. In the famous “concordat,” Pope Pius XI agreed that Catholics in Germany would refrain from political activity in exchange for protection of their schools and properties. This is frequently criticized, but the reality was that the Catholic Center Party had already been forced to disband earlier in the year, as all opposition to the Nazi government was outlawed by the Malicious Practices Act. The concordat was, in this sense, an attempt to protect Catholic people and properties in Germany by a strategically defeated Catholic Church. 

Hitler almost immediately began breaking this agreement; and by 1937, Pope Pius XI wrote a (very rare) non-Latin encyclical. The German-language Mit Brennender Sorge returned the Church to a position of direct opposition with the Nazis. The encyclical protested violations of the concordat and accused the Nazi government of creating “a chorus urging people to leave the Church…intended to create the impression that this infidelity to Christ the King constitutes a signal and meritorious act of loyalty to the modern State.” Catholic schools and seminaries were being shut down, property seized, and Catholics who complained were being arrested.  

But the encyclical wasn’t only a self-interested protest against Nazis making it difficult to practice the faith. It also denounced the Nazis’ philosophy of racial supremacy as well. It’s important to note that this came before Kristallnacht, which is considered the beginning of the racialized genocide of the Holocaust (although, sadly, after many discriminatory laws against Jewish participation in public life). In multiple places in the document, Mit Brennender Sorge accuses Nazis of making an idol of nation and state, and of race and blood:

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State…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:

None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are “as a drop of a bucket.”

These were no mere musings and groveling suggestions. The pope finished the letter with the strong words, 

We have no greater desire than to see in Germany the restoration of a true peace between Church and State. But if, without any fault of Ours, this peace is not to come, then the Church of God will defend her rights and her freedom in the name of the Almighty whose arm has not shortened.

This encyclical was then read from Catholic pulpits across Germany. Hitler, unsurprisingly, took this as a direct threat to his regime. He raided parishes across the country to seize copies, shut down printing presses, and arrested priests. With the tense concordat peace over, Hitler began a full violent suppression of German Catholicism.

In Paul Berben’s meticulous documentation of the Dachau death camp, he found that of the 2,720 held in the clergy barracks, 95 percent were Roman Catholic. The Polish priests were especially marked for torment, including leaving them exposed to harsh winters and disproportionately selecting them for cruel medical experimentation.

But the Church did not simply go into self-preservation mode. For his part, Pope Pius XII (who took over from Pope Pius XI) shared intelligence with the Allies and instructed clergy to hide Europe’s Jews from the death camps, with the pope himself doing so in the Vatican and in his own summer home. Historian Dr. Michael Hesemann said the pope “did more to save Jews and to stop the killings, than any politician or religious leader of his time.”

In the period since the war, the Vatican (while getting some criticism for the pre-war concordat period) released multiple documents defending the Jewish people and denouncing anti-Semitism.

There is really no way for a Catholic to defend the project of Hitler and his henchmen without opposing the efforts of the Church and disgracing its thousands of brave martyrs. If you share memes mocking the Holocaust (or calling for a new one) or selectively “noticing” specks in a Jewish eye while ignoring logs in your own, you are lining up across the battlefield from your fellow Catholics. 

You are winking at soldiers shutting down parochial schools and forcibly sending Catholic children to government indoctrination camps. You are nodding in approval at thousands of priests being subjected to years of torture and experimentation. You are “hitting like” at the idea of saints like Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe—along with millions of Jews (yes, millions)—being executed in cold blood. 

As Pope Pius XI said in Mit Brennender Sorge, this makes you a superficial mind, idolizing race and the state, far from true faith in God—which is to say, not a very good Catholic.

Editor's note: Those curious about Catholics who believe in global Jewish conspiracies, downplay the Holocaust, and promote other views typical of Nazis, can research Nick Fuentes and the "Groypers" as a prime example. This movement has been very active in online Catholic discourse and has influenced some more mainstream Catholics.