Author Archives: John S. Conway

Review of Hans von Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”: Briefe aus Militärgefängnis und Gestapohaft 1943-1945

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review of Hans von Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”: Briefe aus Militärgefängnis und Gestapohaft 1943-1945 (Munich: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 2015), 351 pages, ISBN 9783421047113.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Hans von Dohnanyi was one of the most prominent men in the group of high-ranking German military officers and leading civilians who conspired in the course of the Second World War to overthrow Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. The failure of the attempted assassination plot in July 1944 led to Hitler’s orders to the Gestapo to round up and execute all those suspected of being involved, including Dohnanyi, his brother-in-law Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and two other brothers-in-law who were all put to death in April 1945.

Dohnanyi had been trained as a constitutional lawyer and had held significant posts in the Ministry of Justice. But he had early on become dismayed at the illegal activities and political violence of the Nazi extremists and had in fact drawn up a dossier which documented these misdeeds in full detail. Continue reading →

Review of Gerhard Besier, ed., “Intimately Associated for Many Years”: George K. A. Bell’s and Willem A. Visser’t Hooft’s Common Life-Work in the Service of the Church Universal – Mirrored in Their Correspondence

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Gerhard Besier, ed., “Intimately Associated for Many Years”: George K. A. Bell’s and Willem A. Visser’t Hooft’s Common Life-Work in the Service of the Church Universal – Mirrored in Their Correspondence, Parts 1 and 2 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), ISBN: 978-1-4438-8006-0 and 978-1-4438-8011-4.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Bishop George Bell was the stalwart champion in the Church of England promoting ecumenical relations with the other churches of Europe and North America throughout the nearly thirty years of his episcopate from 1929-1958. He held leading positions in innumerable committees, councils and conferences, and in 1937, during the world meeting in Oxford of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, was a strong advocate for joining with Faith and Order, in order to found a World Council of Churches, which took place in 1938. At the same time it was agreed that this new Council (still in process of formation) should be established in Geneva, and that a young Dutch theologian W.A.Visser ‘t Hooft (Vim), who had served for several years in the Geneva scene as General Secretary of the World Student Christian Federation, should be appointed as General Secretary. Visser ‘t Hooft was far more of a General than a Secretary—I knew him personally—and brought unrivalled resourcefulness and a resolute determination to see his ideas realized, for the best part of thirty years. This was the beginning of a partnership between Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft, who early on struck up a strong and harmonious relationship. They are rightly described in the book’s title as being “intimately associated for many years”.

The exchanges by post or telegrams recorded in these volumes are largely drawn from the Geneva archives of the World Council of Churches or from the voluminous Bell papers, now deposited in the Lambeth Palace library in London. The first volume covers the period up to 1949, and the second the final years of Bell’s life up to 1958. The editing by Gerhard Besier is very helpful, since his footnotes give the biographical details of all persons mentioned, as well as bibliographical references to the many scholarly books relating to their endeavors. (There are, however, aggravating lapses in the proof-reading and printing of the English text.) Besier’s introduction is reproduced from the chapter he contributed to The Church and Humanity: The Life and Work of George Bell, 1883-1958 (p. 169-194), edited in 2012 by Andrew Chandler.

Many of these exchanges have to do with the plans for the various meetings of World Council bodies, and discussions about the membership, the place and date, as well as the content. These documents are however not too informative about the results. Obviously when the two men met at such meetings, they had intense verbal discussions and made significant decisions about the World Council’s operations. But these were not recorded in their correspondence at the time, and so are missing from these volumes. This is particularly noticeable with regard to such highly significant meetings as the First Constituent Assembly held in Amsterdam in 1948, when Bell became Chairman of the WCC’s Central Committee. While these documents discuss at length the preparations for this Assembly in August 1948 (p. 365-428), they provide no indication of the important deliberations and decisions taken on that occasion. The same is true for the Second Assembly, held in 1954 in Evanston, Illinois. Equally regrettable is the absence of documents relating to the important meeting in Stuttgart in October 1945, at which both Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft were present, and at which the famous Declaration of Guilt was issued (p. 287-94). Obviously both Bell and Vim played an active part and had extensive discussions with the German leaders, including Martin Niemöller, for whom they had been praying ever since his first incarceration in 1937. But they left no further record of their deliberations or their conclusions about this conference or its historic significance in their correspondence. An equally striking omission is the exchange between Bell and Vim about Bell’s journey to Sweden in May 1942, his meeting there with Bonhoeffer, and the information he gained about the German resistance, which the Bishop then passed on to the British Foreign Secretary, asking for some public gesture of support be given to the anti-Nazi forces in Germany. Eden’s refusal was conveyed to Visser ‘t Hooft in the notable telegram sent by Bell on July 23, 1942: “Interest undoubted, but deeply regret no reply possible”. (Bell’s message is discussed on p. 158 of W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft, Memoirs (London: SCM Press, 1973).) But this calamitous blow to Bell’s hopes for some gesture of support for the German resistance is not mentioned in Besier’s work. In fact, this first volume is silent for the whole period of November 1941 to August 1942.

It would have been helpful if the editor could have inserted short passages to fill such gaps. He could also have directed the reader to look at both of the biographies of Bell by Canon Jasper (George Bell, Bishop of Chichester (London: Oxford University Press,1967)) and Andrew Chandler (George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), also Visser ‘t Hooft’s Memoirs (1973), as well as such comprehensive histories as A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948 (London: SPCK, 1954), edited by Ruth Rouse and Stephen Neil, and its sequel The Ecumenical Advance: A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1948-1968 (Geneva: WCC, 1986), edited by Harold Fey. Unless these more complete sources are available to be consulted, the usefulness of these two volumes alone will be limited. Libraries may well consider whether the expense is justified.

However, the value of these exchanges is that they fill in the details of the frequent consultations between these church leaders. In particular, they provide information about how the two men dealt with the three principal obstacles they faced in these years. The first was the fear expressed by many churchmen that this new World Council would evolve into a vast ecumenical enterprise which would swallow up the individual entities in some sort of super-church. The second fear, expressed by many more Orthodox leaders, was that this new World Council would produce a new doctrine of Christianity which would override the traditions and individual heritages of these Protestant or Orthodox churches. The third obstacle was the refusal of the largest Christian body, the Roman Catholic Church, to be associated in any way with this new venture. This refusal meant that the vision of a united Christendom, strongly urged by Bell, was thwarted, and still remains incomplete. Not until the Second Vatican Council, i.e. several years after Bell’s death, did the Roman Catholic authorities show a more tolerant and cooperative attitude. But the World Council has yet to overcome the barrier of Rome’s reluctance to belong to this wider ecumenical fraternity.

Nevertheless, it would be true to say that, during the period from 1938 to 1958, i.e. during the fruitful years of cooperation between Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft, the World Council moved from a tentative and provisional beginning to becoming the acknowledged chief instrument and channel of the ecumenical movement. The correspondence contained in the second volume spells out the contexts of these years from 1950 to 1958, including the preparations for the second Assembly meeting in the United States in 1954, at which point Bell resigned his position as Chairman of the Central Committee, and was promoted to Honorary President of the Council. But, as this correspondence shows, he continued to be very actively engaged in the affairs of the Council, even after his retirement in 1958 from the Chichester diocese. In fact he took part in a meeting of the Central Committee in Denmark, and preached a self-critical sermon there only two months before his untimely death in October 1958. The volume concludes with two moving tributes to Bell’s achievements written by Visser ‘t Hooft shortly after Bell’s funeral.

Review of Gerald Hacke, Die Zeugen Jehovahs im Dritten Reich und in der DDR: Feindbild und Verfolgungspraxis

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Gerald Hacke, Die Zeugen Jehovahs im Dritten Reich und in der DDR: Feindbild und Verfolgungspraxis. Schriften des Hannah-Arendt-Instituts fur Totalitarismusforschung, 41 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 457 Pp., ISBN 9783525369173.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a Protestant millenarian sect, who look forward in anticipation to the last days, which they expect will take place very shortly in a catastrophic conflict between good and evil. Founded in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, a small number had already come to Germany before the First World War. But the turbulent, revolutionary political upheavals which took place in Germany after 1918 seemed to confirm their expectations. The Witnesses grew in number, and were reckoned by 1933 to count some 20,000 adherents, who were active as door-to-door preachers in many parts of the country.

Much of the scholarly literature about the Jehovah’s Witnesses has been conditioned by the harassment and persecution which this sect endured during the period of Nazi rule after 1933. Most of the authors have displayed sympathy with the Witnesses’ sufferings and pay tribute to their enduring loyalty to their faith. Gerald Hacke, however, is principally interested in the actions of the state authorities, and the organization of the various methods of repression which took such a toll. Furthermore he has noted that the same kind of repression was carried out in the post-1945 years in what became known at the German Democratic Republic (GDR) under the aegis of the Communist rulers of that part of Germany for the next 40 years. His large-scale account is therefore mainly a comparison of the similarities as well as the differences in the treatment of this minority religious group by the two ideologically opposed dictatorships. In so doing he has delved in to the vast amount of state documentation left behind by both regimes, particularly in their police and judicial records and the files of the various government ministries who attempted to bring the Jehovah’s Witnesses to heel.

Hacke divides his account chronologically, with 200 pages dealing with the Nazi period and the same for the decades of repression in the GDR. These surveys are accompanied by an extensive list of the files consulted and a forty page bibliography. He completes his study with a close examination of the parallels and differences in the forms of repression put in place by the two regimes. In both cases he notes the stubborn refusal of the Witnesses to conform to the states’ requirement of political loyalty. But the subsequent banning of their organizations and activities stirred up a sense of victimization which in fact only strengthened the community. The increasing number of legal challenges, as well as pressure from the U.S. State Department on behalf of the Witnesses, for example in 1934, showed that such repressive policies had disadvantages, even though the wider public, including the mainline churches, showed little or no sympathy. The reintroduction of conscription in 1935 led to the arrest and imprisonment of numerous younger male members of this sect. The same feature was to follow the identical measure taken in the early 1950s in the GDR. But in neither case did the Witnesses abandon their faithful and stubborn commitment to refuse any form of military activity. The Nazi and Communist officials were therefore both forced to recognize the ineffectiveness of such punitive actions, but were adamant in regarding the Witnesses as a political and ideological danger which required drastic treatment.

Hacke avoids drawing any direct link between the repressive forces mobilized by Himmler, allegedly in order to follow Hitler’s call for ”the eradication of this venomous brood”, and those followed twenty years later in the GDR by the Ministry of Security, commonly known as the Stasi. The similarity of tactics is however clear. Both dictatorships sought to imprison the sect’s leading figures, imposing employment bans, and even removing children from their families. During the Nazi period some 10,000 Witnesses were imprisoned, including 2000 sent to concentration camps, where they were identified by wearing purple triangles on their clothes. Moreover, 240 were executed, while up to 1200 lost their lives while incarcerated. No other group of religious prisoners was exposed to the sadism of the Nazis in such a brutal fashion.

To be sure, the Gestapo offered to release these prisoners if they would sign a paper declaring their renunciation of their former views and promise not to associate with their fellow Witnesses. Hacke does not make it clear whether this project was designed to sow dissension in the Witnesses’ ranks, or to relieve the prison and concentration camp system of these unwanted and uncooperative inmates. In any case the tactic failed.

After 1945 and the collapse of the Nazi regime, the surviving Witnesses began to regroup and to resume their activities, though mainly in hiding from the successor authorities. Soon enough they were to meet vehement opposition from the newly-established Communist authorities in the eastern sector of the country, which in 1949 became the German Democratic Republic. This campaign made much of the fact that the Witnesses were founded in the United States, and were therefore seen as agents of American anti-Communist imperialism. The Stasi was characterized by the same fanatical zeal as the Gestapo, and in fact extended their intrusive surveillance to even wider sections of the population. But right up to 1989, the Communist regime justified its repression of the Witnesses with very similar accusations of disloyalty and failure to support the national goals of the Communist party.

Hacke rightly points out that both regimes, despite their different propagandistic justifications, were deliberately seeking to suppress any supposedly deviant groups by very similar methods. The Witnesses, however, were able to mount an effective resistance in part because they had arrived in Germany with the expectation that their dissident beliefs would create conditions in which they would be persecuted. Their long experience of victimization gave them an intense sense of group solidarity, and the faithful adherence to their beliefs was thus built in and maintained throughout the more than fifty years of repression.

After 1989, with the overthrow of the Stasi and its political masters, the Witnesses were no longer subjected to government-sponsored suspicion and surveillance. But as Hacke points out, the decades of defamation and discrimination had left an almost indelible pejorative reputation in the minds of the general public. The Witnesses then campaigned successfully to gain recognition as a public corporation in German law, but the wider issue of prejudice still remains, as can be seen in the active hostility by some of the more established church groups against the proselytizing undertaken by Jehovah’s Witnesses. The search for a new identity in a new Germany still continues.

Book Note: Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Book Note: Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (London: Penguin Books, 2015), Pp. 593, ISBN: 9780713990898.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Kershaw-Hell Despite its theologically-sounding title, this latest work by Ian Kershaw, who is one of Britain’s most distinguished contemporary historians, is a masterly synoptic history of Europe, designed for the general reader. In this work, Kershaw expands on his previous interest in Nazi Germany to cover what he calls Europe’s “era of self-destruction,” which places Nazi Germany in its wider context of a continent-wide series of disasters in the first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless he also includes a short but valuable section on “Christian Churches, Challenge and Continuity”, placing emphasis on the political and social developments affecting the Christian churches within the wider European setting.

Kershaw begins this section by describing how, on the outbreak of the 1914 war, both sides indulged in claims of divine approval for their nationalistic goals. These mutually contradictory and incompatible assertions did little to enhance the morale of the combatants, and in the long run discredited both their advocates and the Christian gospel of peace and brotherly love. In the aftermath, paradoxically, the churches in Britain and France led the movement against militarism and were in favour of reconciliation through such agencies as the League of Nations. But in defeated Germany, the clergy were leaders in maintaining that they should have been victorious, that their nation had been stabbed in the back by disloyal elements, particularly Jews, and that they were being humiliated by the vindictive and oppressive Treaty of Versailles. Such reactionary attitudes did much to prepare the ground for Hitler’s rise to power.

As Kershaw argues, in 1933 one wing of German Protestantism sought to bring the church up to date by jumping on the Nazi bandwagon. But this evoked a backlash from the more conservative wing known as the Confessing Church, which opposed any state interference in church affairs. However, many of these pastors had sympathy with Nazism’s political and military aims. For their part, the German Catholics invoked the aid of the Vatican in 1933, seeking a treaty or Concordat to secure their position in the new Third Reich. But, as Kershaw points out, this Concordat from the beginning was a dead letter, due to the Nazis’ dynamic ideological and nationalistic plans and the anticlerical attitudes of the party leadership. In practice, in both churches, despite attempts to oppose Nazi encroachments, there was general compliance with other spheres of government policy, including the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

The author goes on to explain that similar attitudes prevailed in other countries, such as the Nazi satellite state of Slovakia, where the president happened to be a Catholic priest. Criticisms from the pope were ignored, so that a leading Vatican official could comment in 1942: “Everyone knows that the Holy See cannot bring Hitler to heel. But who will understand that we cannot even control a priest?” In other parts of Europe, the fate of the Jews was largely greeted by churchmen with indifference. Arguments have continued ever since whether more forceful condemnations of Nazi atrocities by the churches would have saved lives, or have led to making the situation in Germany and the occupied territories even worse. In Kershaw’s view the silence of Pope Pius XII on this issue irredeemably harmed his reputation. After the Nazi regime was overthrown, little was done to regret the churches’ support for totalitarian rule or to extend sympathy to its victims. In 1945 only a few voices, such as that of Pastor Niemõller, were found to support a declaration of guilt, while too many churchmen had to come to terms with their previous support of Nazi goals.

In Kershaw’s opinion, apart from the regions that fell under Soviet domination in 1945, the wartime experiences of the churches in Europe did little to impair their standing. Soon afterwards they took energetic steps to reorganize and revitalize themselves. Significant changes would only come about in the 1960s. In his conclusion, Kershaw reverts to his theological interests by asking both about the churches’ responses to the disastrous atrocities of this half-century and about a God who could allow such evils to prevail. In his view such vital questions would only grow, not diminish, as the Second World War receded further into history.

Review of Mary M. Solberg, ed. and trans., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Mary M. Solberg, ed. and trans., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). Pp. 486. ISBN 9781451464726.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Since 1945, Nazism has been universally condemned. Historians have written extensively, but always pejoratively, about its personalities, its politics, its ideology, and particularly its crimes, which culminated in the Holocaust. As a result, less research has been carried out, and always negatively, into the reasons why Nazism gained support from an overwhelming majority of Germans, including many Protestant churchmen and women. Particularly vocal in Nazism’s cause was the minority group pf Protestants known as the German Christian Faith Movement, whose members very actively sought to introduce and popularize Nazi ideas into the liturgical and practical life of their parishes. Mary Solberg has now selected and translated into English a useful collection of this group’s writings, which provide an English-speaking readership with the full range of their ideas. Presumably she feels that the time is not yet ripe, or the audience not yet ready, for any extended analysis of these sources.

Solberg-Church Despite the excellent contributions of such authors as James Zabel, Doris Bergen and Robert Ericksen, Solberg feels that “far too few people in or out of the academy know far too little“ about the conduct of the churches In Hitler’s Germany. But her extended introduction clearly indicates her approach to answering the questions posed by her documents: specifically what role did this German Christian Faith Movement play in the wider picture; how successful or significant were its supporters in the rise and maintenance of Nazism, at least up to 1940; and how should Christians and churches today learn from this example of a church undone? Her skillful translations of the writings of several prominent members of this movement will be of considerable value to those who do not read German, but it would have been helpful to have a biographical note or appendix outlining the careers of these authors. Her conclusion is that this was not a unique episode, that the conflation of political, racist and nationalist ideas with theological witness is a constant temptation, and therefore that the German experience in the 1930s deserves further study by both theologians and historians.

The opening chapter provides us with the original Guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement, written in 1932 by Pastor Joachim Hossenfelder, who went on to become Bishop of Brandenburg in September 1933. He shared the views of many younger clergymen who regarded the leaders of the various provincial Protestant churches as outdated conservatives. They had failed to catch the spirit of renewal needed to bring Protestant witness up-to-date. By contrast, the Nazi Party had caught the imagination of the people and had already affirmed in its platform through its support for “Positive Christianity”. The church could not afford to be left behind, but should rally its supporters behind the values of the German race, ethnicity, and nation, following the lead given by Adolf Hitler. Armed with this kind of “heroic piety”, the German Christian Movement would be ready to take up the struggle against godless Marxism.

The Nazi take-over of power in January 1933 was naturally enthusiastically greeted by the members of the German Christian Movement. They applauded the Nazis’ initial measures against the Jews, such as the law passed in April debarring Jews from public office with the application of the so-called “Aryan Paragraph”. During the summer, church elections saw the supporters of the movement installed in high positions in many church bodies, such as the Synod of the Old Prussian Union Church, which in September resolved to apply the “Aryan Paragraph” to its clergy. But this move aroused vigorous opposition, such as that expressed by Karl Barth, then a professor in Bonn, whose 15-page pamphlet is here reproduced in full.

Together with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose shorter protest is also given, these forceful objections in defence of Protestant orthodoxy stressed the fact that all Christians were joined in a common baptism, and could not be separated on the basis of racial origin. However, they limited these protests on behalf of those converted Jews who had become Christians and did not raise questions about the wider scope of Nazi persecutions. The members of the German Christian Movement were not so reticent. They called for a more complete renunciation of all things Jewish in both church membership and liturgical practice. In a notably violent speech before a large audience of 20,000 supporters in November 1933, one of the radical German Christians, Reinhold Krause, called for a complete alignment of the church with National Socialism, in particular by “liberating itself from the Old Testament with its Jewish rewards and punishment morality and its stories of cattle-dealers and pimps”. German Christians instead must “return to the heroic Jesus” as a “fearless combatant” against the pernicious influence of the Jewish Scribes and Pharisees. But this speech went too far for the majority of Protestant loyalists who then left the movement, and transferred their allegiance to the nucleus demanding church independence, which later coalesced into the Confessing Church.

More effective support for the German Christian Movement came from the theological professors, such as Emanuel Hirsch of Göttingen or Gerhard Kittel of Tübingen, both of whom had distinguished publication records. Hirsch became and remained a “true believer” in National Socialism, even after 1945, since, as he claimed, “God speaks in and to the particular historical situation in which people find themselves – in this case National Socialist Germany”. The church should not isolate itself on the remains of Reformation theology, as did Barth, but instead the church is called to be engaged with the new spirit of national regeneration, and reflect and contribute to the drive for racial purity, which left no room for Jewish Christians. Kittel, the author of the most widely used biblical dictionary, was even more prolific in addressing large audiences up and down the country. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and shortly afterwards wrote a major piece on the Jewish issue, which was a central one for all the members of the German Christian Movement. His purpose, according to one source, was to raise the discussion of the Jewish question above the level of slogans and vulgar racism and give it a moral Christian basis. He claimed that there were four solutions to the Jewish issue: extermination, expulsion, assimilation or a guest status, where Jews would be tolerated so long as they kept to separate ways. He judged the first three solutions to be impractical, so argued fiercely for the fourth. After the war, when he was put on trial for his Nazi sympathies, Kittel tried to argue he had been only a moderate campaigner, but the forcefulness of the extracts printed here suggests otherwise.

Solberg also provides a number of extracts from the speeches or writings of leading members of the German Christian Movement, such as Joachim Hossenfelder, Julius Leutheuser, Siegfried Leffler, and the Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, all written in the early years of Nazi rule. In addition, she provides a thoughtful critique of these views by Professor Paul Althaus of Erlangen, who argued that the conflation of German nationalism, admiration for Hitler, and Christian tradition went far too far by asserting that God’s salvation was being played out in Germany’s history. This, he claimed, was a “bald-faced theological heresy”. But Althaus’ own variant of the “orders of creation” included a positive enthusiasm for National Socialism as a political movement and for an ethno-national Christianity. He utterly rejected any idea that the combination of Nazi politics and the Faith Movement’s version of religion could turn Germany into a world-savior.

It is clear that these divisions within the Protestant churches led to Hitler abandoning any hopes he had held that they would combine under his authority. Instead he increasingly supported the anti-clerical and anti-Christian elements in the Nazi leadership, such as Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Reinhard Heydrich and Joseph Goebbels, who were to institute increasingly severe measures of persecution and repression on the churches. These doomed any chances of the German Christian Movement’s hopes for success. Its leaders made one final bid to win back support in their notable Godesberg Declaration of March 1939, in which they indicated their strong support for the regime’s hostile antisemitic policies and established an Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. The final document in this collection is by Walter Grundmann, the first academic director of the Institute, whose career continue into the German Democratic Republic, where he served for many years as a pastor, publishing widely-used commentaries on the gospels but also working as an informant for the Stasi. There is little evidence that he changed his view that “the content of Jesus’ preaching shapes and determines his work. In Jesus of Nazareth something utterly un-Jewish appears”.

Solberg does not attempt any evaluation of these sources, but her careful and viable translations will be of help to English-speaking students who will now be able to trace the vagaries of this section of German Protestantism during its short but vibrant and mistaken career. It remains to be seen whether the temptations to which these authors gave expression will be repeated in churches elsewhere. She has given us a useful cautionary tale.

Review of Peter Itzen, Streitbare Kirche: Die Church of England vor den Herausforderungen des Wandels 1945-1990

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Peter Itzen, Streitbare Kirche: Die Church of England vor den Herausforderungen des Wandels 1945-1990 (Baden Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2013). Pp. 437. ISBN 9783832966089.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Very few German scholars have recently published works on England, and fewer still on the Church of England. It is therefore a welcome sign that Peter Itzen has now contributed this well-researched and balanced study of the Church England in the second half of the last century, which will undoubtedly be of value to German students and theologians, many of whom usually look with both puzzlement and envy at the church scene across the English Channel.

Itzen-Streitbare This account pays little attention to theology, but instead follows in the footsteps of such authors as Grace Davie and Callum Brown in emphasizing the sociological patterns he discerns in the Church of England’s development during the fifty years following the Second World War. Itzen lays particular stress on the views and the impact of the major church leaders on the political and social life of the nation, and makes extensive use of the archives held in Lambeth Palace, the residence of successive Archbishops of Canterbury. He also appends short but useful biographical details of many church leaders. The result is a well-informed but not uncritical account of the sometimes controversial stances adopted by the church, and the often critical responses by politicians, for instance during the Suez Crisis in the 1950s, or during Margaret Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister in the 1980s.

Itzen acknowledges that public support for the Church of England, in terms of participating in its regular weekly worship services, has suffered a marked decline during these years, when compared to the situation of a hundred years ago. Nevertheless, the Church of England, like the monarchy, still remains as a symbol of tradition and continuity. As with the monarchy, there is virtually no support for its abolition or disestablishment. The Church of England has a presence in virtually every village across the realm, although the pattern of religious observances has changed greatly with the recent influx of immigrants from distant lands and other faiths. But in contrast to the countries of continental Europe, England in modern times has never been invaded, nor suffered from being occupied by enemy troops. England’s last political convulsion was four hundred years ago, and its last religious convulsion took place in the sixteenth century. This has given the Church of England a stability and an institutional advantage of inestimable benefit for its political witness. On the other hand, as Itzen repeatedly points out, the situation has changed. The Church of England is no longer “the Tory Party at prayer”, or an automatic supporter of Conservative governments, as some politicians would like it to be. The advance of secularism has meant that the Church of England no longer commands the allegiance of a large proportion of the population, and is not listened to as readily as before when advocating moral guidance on political or social issues. But the fact that its senior bishops have always been, and are still, members of parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, and frequently avail themselves of this opportunity to convey the opinion of church members, presents a very different picture from other countries. They owe their position to the centuries-old process of English history, rather than to any transient political poll. Hence they enjoy the ability to speak for the whole of society, and see themselves as the guardians of their respective diocese’s welfare. To be sure, these church leaders are aware that they can no longer command unquestioning support, or dictate standards of Christian morality to an increasingly skeptical public. Nevertheless their energetic stand against the unbridled individualism of the Thatcher years, gained respect for its vigorous defence of the need for social cohesion, and support for the poorest and weakest in society’s ranks, the so-called “bias for the poor”. This process was also helped by the professionalization of the Church of England’s administrative structures which provided its spokesmen in the House of Lords with more expert political guidance. So too the establishment of such organs as the General Synod and the Board of Social Responsibility provided help in the propagation of responsible church pronouncements. In the many critical debates and conflicts of these years, the Church of England was able to play a moderating role, so that the interventions of the church leaders served to enhance its position as a link between competing political factions.

In more recent years, such as the 1990s, the most pressing issue for the Church of England was the question of the ordination of women. Fortunately, the new Archbishop, George Carey, as an Evangelical, was open to compromises which offered the more stringent Anglo-Catholics an olive branch of friendship. And in any case, the more militant supporters of women’s rights were satisfied with the eventual agreement of the church assemblies, though it took another ten years for women’s ordination to the episcopate to be realized. Far more contentious was the issue of homosexuality, which then spilled over into the term of office of the following Archbishop, Rowan Williams. Williams himself was an advocate of a liberal and tolerant stance for the Church of England on this question. But as Archbishop of Canterbury he was also the leader of the world-wide Anglican Communion. He faced intransigent opposition to any such toleration from the majority of African bishops. He thus found himself in an insoluble impasse which threatened to break open the ranks of the Communion, and make impossible the show of Anglican unity as previously displayed at the decennial Lambeth Conferences. This situation remains unresolved. No less problematical remains the issue of Britain’s multi-cultural and multi-religious identity. But the readiness of the Church’s leaders to issue constructive appeals for national and social harmony indicates a willingness to bring the influence of this heritage to bear, and to mobilize its supporters to proclaim its ethical and historical relevance to the problems of the 21^st century

Itzen’s conclusion is therefore a positive one for the future of the Church of England’s political and social witness. He takes issue with the teleological views of such secularists as Richard Dawkins, who sees all religious activities as survivals of bygone superstition, or the modernists, who regard the Church of England as an outdated institution which is due shortly to fade away. Instead he believes that, despite all the manifold difficulties of its political and social engagement, the Church will continue to play an unrivalled and positive, though not undisputed, role in the nation’s life as the spiritual advisor to successive political regimes.

Review of Lucian N. Leustean, The Ecumenical Movement & the Making of the European Community

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Lucian N. Leustean, The Ecumenical Movement & the Making of the European Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Pp. 286. ISBN 9780198714569.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Lucian Leustean, who teaches Political Science at Aston University, Birmingham, England, begins his study with the distinctly odd claim that two events are at the core of the relationship between the ecumenical movement and the European Community. He asserts, firstly, that a member of the German resistance movement, Adam von Trott, who was executed by the Nazis in August 1944 a month after the failure of the plot to assassinate Hitler, left a legacy indicating that not all prominent Germans backed the Nazi regime, that his Christian faith inspired churchmen to resist occupation, and that he had a vision of a federal post-war Europe with close relations between East and West. Very much the same role was played by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is mentioned by Leustean only in passing. But in fact, Trott is now virtually forgotten whereas Bonhoeffer’s theology has steadily grown in influence. It is dubious, however, that either of them had much influence on the making of the European Community.

Leustean’s second claim is even more doubtful. He suggests that the creation of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), established in 1946, was of significance to the making of the European Community. This highly elitist body was led by an Englishman, Kenneth Grubb, and an American, Frederick Nolde, and was designed to draw the American churches into the debates about the post-war world, and subsequently about the Cold War. But Grubb was skeptical about Britain’s association with any European political reconstruction, since he saw Britain’s future in terms of its overseas possessions in the Commonwealth. And as Leustean admits, the CCIA failed to give any lead or engage in the process of European integration. It was thus years before the Protestant and Anglican churches adopted a coherent position towards the European Community, or even agreed what Europe was.

Leustean-Ecumenical To be sure the tasks of European reconstruction and reconciliation were formidable for politicians and churchmen alike. Priority had to be given to the immense task of caring for the vast millions of bombed-out, brutalized, and displaced populations. Most churches were still tied to their own national affairs and regarded plans for European integration as lying outside their spiritual domain. However a few of the survivors of the pre-war ecumenical bodies, led by the valiant and dynamic personality of the Dutch Calvinist, Visser ‘t Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, recognized the importance of seeking closer relations with those politicians involved in European reconstruction. The World Council, which achieved its long-delayed inauguration in 1948, almost immediately suffered a grievous, if not unexpected, blow by the rejection of its invitation to the Vatican to have Roman Catholics as full members. The initiative in European affairs was therefore left to the Anglicans, the Protestant leaders of northern Europe, and a handful of Orthodox churchmen in Eastern Europe. So too, those politicians who had expected that the legacy of unbridled nationalism under Hitler would lead to a willingness to cooperate more closely in pan-European revival were soon to be disappointed by the brusque refusal of the Soviet government to entertain any such measures for the areas of Eastern Europe under its military control. In both the political and religious fields, therefore, expectations had to be cut down, and prognoses for European integration modified, often drastically.

Leustean’s account examines the role of political and religious contacts with a direct impact on European institutions. He records how a number of Protestant churchmen saw their duty as Christians to go beyond furthering the local piety of their congregations. These men of vision believed that European cooperation was a mission for the wider Christian constituency. This witness became especially relevant in 1948, when the Berlin blockade made the threat of Soviet military power all too evident, and seemingly doomed the hopes for a peaceful cooperation throughout the continent. Leustean pays particular attention to the Ecumenical Commission on European Cooperation, founded in 1950, since some of its members went on to fulfill high administrative positions in the European Community’s structures. These included Gustav Heinemann, later President of the Federal Republic of (West) Germany, and Jean Rey, who became President of the European Commission. These men were not dreamy idealists, but practical executives, who believed that their project could and should deserve the moral guidance of the churches.

However, since most of the western European countries who founded the European Community had large Catholic populations, and since its founding leaders came from Catholic backgrounds, it was hardly surprising that relations with the Protestant ecumenists were at first marked by tensions. Later, however, after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, a new spirit of interdenominational cooperation was to be seen.

The European Community can be said to begin in 1950 with the plan put forward by the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schumann, for the amalgamation of industrial resources in the European Coal and Steel Community. But this initial success was overshadowed by the tensions resulting from the Cold War, by the proposals to rearm West Germans to play their part in defending their homeland, and by the reluctance of some idealists to encourage any step which would divide the nations of Western and Eastern Europe from each other. Many leading German churchmen campaigned for a unified and neutral Germany. Many British churchmen still adhered to their former attachment to the Commonwealth and were skeptical about any form of European cooperation. Many others adopted the traditional view that politics and religion should act in separate spheres. The cause of European unity therefore faced an uphill battle. The most that could be hoped for was “unity in diversity” which was finally acknowledged as the motto of the European Union in May 2000.

After the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the European Common Market among the six western European nations was founded in 1960. However the attention of the ecumenical fraternity was more attuned to the project for a pan-European Conference of European Churches, which held its first meeting in 1959. But the obvious Soviet propaganda and control of the churches in Eastern Europe meant that the CEC was a rather dubious venture. On the other hand, in the early 1960s, the British Government had a change of heart and applied to join the Common Market. But when its application was rejected by De Gaulle in 1963, this paradoxically stirred up interest among the British churches, and eventually led to a more positive approach to western European cooperation. Yet, at the same time the same French government’s refusal to accept the proposal, put forward by the Vatican, to appoint a diplomatic envoy to the European Commission in Brussels, delayed the establishment of formal relations with Europe’s largest religious community until 1970.

In the 1970s the economic successes of the Common Market were notable. With the Soviet military threat contained behind the Iron Curtain, the western European economies flourished. Living standards rose rapidly. New integrative measures were started such as the European Parliament, the adoption of a single currency, and after the dissolution of the Soviet empire, the abolition of border controls and customs offices in many parts of Europe. These developments owed little to any church initiatives, nor even to representatives of the Ecumenical Movement. As one observer commented, this lack of ecumenical mobilization was in part due to the European Community being regarded as a purely economic and political project in which religious communities could not find a theological basis for participation. Also national churches, which saw themselves as the preservers of their country’s past, were unwilling to take up the cause of others with whom they had no common heritage or language.

In fact, the Ecumenical Movement concentrated more on the personal and pastoral witness amongst the ever growing number of international bureaucrats at the European Community’s offices in Brussels. The hopes of some leading Eurocrats that the churches would take a lead in calling the young and creative forces in Europe to unite behind a common vision were never realized. British churchmen, for instance, remained skeptical about the influence of supra-national technocrats, who were not directly responsible to any national government. The ideal of political integration between different parts of Western Europe therefore remained a nonstarter, since it threatened to curtail relations with Eastern Europe or the developing world outside Europe.. As a result, no common ‘European’ consciousness appeared, transcending national loyalties.

Leustean takes his account up to 1978, but in a concluding chapter is obliged to note the dramatic changes in later years, especially after the overthrow of the Soviet empire in 1989-90. Many churchmen have since sought to engage in dialogue in order to understand the role of religion in the new Europe. Over these years countless committees, councils, conferences, and gatherings have been established or re-established with a bewildering array of alphabetical abbreviations, for which there is fortunately an appended index. But essentially the complex scale and scope of what is now the European Union defies easy or synoptic description.. It was left up to a retiring President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, to call in 1990 for an attempt to give Europe a soul through a spiritual and intellectual debate in which the Churches should participate actively. It was a brave but mistaken view that the Churches, or other faith communities, could find enough common ground to overcome their mutual and historic differences, which are likely to remain prevailing in the foreseeable future.

Leustean’s conclusion is therefore that a fragmented, interrupted vision of Europe at both the political and religious levels, which had impacted the attempts to bring unity and integration to at least Western Europe, was the major factor why the dreams of idealists such as his hero von Trott were never realized.

Review of Robert Beaken, The Church of England and the Home Front 1914-1918

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Robert Beaken, The Church of England and the Home Front 1914-1918 (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2015). Pp. 272. ISBN: 9781783270514.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Colchester, fifty two miles north-east of London, has been a garrison town since the days of the Romans. During the First World War its military establishment was vastly expanded, including four major army hospitals where the casualties from the battlefields in France were treated. The impact of the war was immediate and very visible. Colchester’s Church of England parishes were quickly and significantly involved, as is described in Beaken’s insightful and well researched account of these critical years.

Beaken-Church Colchester’s social elite, which was well represented in the Church of England parishes, was conservative, nationalist and hierarchical. Its members supported the British government’s decision to go to war in August 1914 for moral as well as political reasons. They joined in the widespread campaign urging young men to join the armed forces, until conscription was introduced in 1916, rendering such appeals superfluous. Thereafter the leading men set an example by supporting campaigns for contributions to the War Savings Bonds, while the church ladies were very active in ministering to the troops training in Colchester and to the wounded. Church people were assiduous in providing hospitality to the troops, and at least thirty five social clubs were established where recreational facilities and food were supplied, often at little cost. In part such provision was seen as a Christian virtue, but, as Beaken notes, in part it was inspired by the desire to keep the soldiers out of public houses, and so to keep prostitution and its attendant problems at bay.

The clergy’s position was more problematic. At first many of the younger clergy had felt drawn to join their parishioners by volunteering to serve in the ranks, which they believed would be a means of getting to know their fellow men better. But the bishops soon asserted that such notions were incompatible with their ordination vows. Instead they were to remain in their parishes where their services, because of the shortage of army chaplains and the extra requirements caused by the war, would be all the more demanding. In fact, in Colchester, both clergy and laity soon recognized the need for extra pastoral witness to the many thousands of young men passing through the garrison on their way to the western front, or to those returned to Colchester for treatment in the hospitals. They were also called to officiate at the funerals of those who died from their wounds, and to comfort their surviving families. After the initial euphoria of the early months was replaced by the grim horror of the devastating and depressing stalemate of the Flanders trench-warfare, the clergy’s often self-imposed role in support of the war effort became more dubious, and even counter-productive. Since it was they who often had to bring the dreaded news to the families of men killed in action, their pastoral skills were increasingly honed to the presence of disaster and death.

In the aftermath of the war, particularly in the 1930s, there was a widespread revulsion against all those, including a few prominent clergymen, who had so eagerly preached militant sermons in favour of the war effort. And inevitably such skepticism and resentment was turned against the religion these clergymen were upholding. The contradiction between the slaughter of so many of “the flower of the nation’s youth”, and the message of love and peace as contained in the Christian gospels was too glaring to be easily overcome. Understandably, Beaken does not try to answer the question posed by almost everyone at some point during the war: “Why does the Christian God allow such a devastating catastrophe to take place?” Instead he takes issue with some of the post-war writers, particularly those who misrepresented what actually happened and instead promoted their own interpretations for anti-war or pacifist reasons. For example, he dismisses the view that the ordinary workingman, who had volunteered for army service, had been seduced by bloodthirsty clergymen and subsequently was misled by glory-seeking and incompetent army leaders. So too the charge that the Church of England chaplains were too cowardly to go up to the front line needs to be refuted by the fact that such postings were forbidden by the military leaders. It is certainly true, as Beaken admits, that, despite the almost universal support of the war effort at the time, in later years many people came to feel that the senseless and degrading conflict in the Flanders mud had made the proclamation of the Christian gospel irrelevant. But the evidence here produced for the war-time conditions in Colchester would seem to prove the opposite. Church attendance remained almost the same throughout the war years, as did the number of confirmations. The overwhelming support given to the erection of war memorials, and the sincere participation at Armistice or Remembrance Day services for the remainder of the century and beyond, would seem to disprove the contention that the Church of England had a ‘bad’ First World War. Beaken disputes the myth that things were never the same after 1918. He points to the fact that in the vast majority of parishes the Church’s witness with its emphasis on Mattins on Sunday morning remained unchanged for a further fifty years. But he agrees that, in Colchester, as elsewhere, when the fabric if the city’s close-knit, inter-dependent society came apart, so the Church of England came to occupy a peripheral position. But this does not contradict Beaken’s central argument that the Church of England fared significantly better during the First World War than has been understood or acknowledged for much of the past century.

Book Note: Hartmut Ludwig, Suddenly Jews

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Book Note: Hartmut Ludwig, Suddenly Jews: The Story of Christians whom the Nazi racial laws classified as Jews, and of the Good Samaritans who came to their aid (the Bureau Grüber), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Berkeley: Duplex Press, 2015). ISBN: 1517109914.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

This translation of Ludwig’s larger account An der Seite der Entrechteten und Schwachen, reviewed in CCHQ in June 2013, now makes more easily available in an English translation the same story of a small and heroic group of German Protestants, mainly of Jewish origin, who managed to rescue a tiny proportion of those caught up in the Nazi Holocaust. It has been capably translated, but omits all the footnotes and the bibliography, presumably in order to reach a much wider constituency of English-speaking readers.

Ludwig-Suddenly When Hitler came to power in 1933, the majority of German Protestants loyally supported him, believing his promises to restore Germany’s place in the world, and to save them from the danger of Communist revolution. His rabble-rousing attacks on the Jews were dismissed as mere propaganda, which would be abandoned once the regime settled into power. But in fact the Nazis only increased their anti-Semitic campaigns, both by executive decree and by legislation, leading to the vicious outbursts of November 1938, known as the Kristallnacht. Grievously affected were those in the Protestant churches who now found they were classified as Jews on racial grounds, regardless of the fact that they or their parents had converted to Christianity in earlier years. They could expect no help from the pro-Nazi authorities in the majority of Protestant churches. Only in the minority Confessing Church were to be found some men and women who rallied to their support. In the crucial circumstances in later 1938, the Provisional Leadership of the Confessing Church selected a Berlin pastor, Heinrich Grüber, to organize relief efforts for these Protestants of Jewish origin throughout the country. He set up his own independent office, and immediately began to search out opportunities for those affected to emigrate. At the same time, he sought to provide assistance to those who could not or were not willing to leave the country. But in 1940 this assistance was halted by the Gestapo. Grüber’s chief assistant was murdered, along with fourteen other helpers deported to extermination camps. Fortunately, Grüber himself survived and continued his ministry in post-war Berlin.

Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 2015), 326 Pp. ISBN 978-2-8254-1656-3.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Keith Clements is a British theological scholar who served for many years as General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches, thus becoming well aware of the churches’ modern ecumenical dimensions. He has previously written a number of shorter works about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but in this more substantial study concentrates on Bonhoeffer’s connections to and involvement with the ecumenical church bodies of the 1930s. Drawing largely on the Collected Works, now fortunately all translated into English, Clements seeks to show that this was the most continuous thread of his life and activity, but one which has been rather neglected in earlier biographies which have concentrated on Bonhoeffer’s theology or his role in the German Church Struggle.

Clements-Dietrich In fact, Bonhoeffer’s participation in ecumenical affairs started immediately after his return in September 1931 from his visit to the United States. He was sent as a German youth delegate to a meeting in Cambridge of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches. This body had originally been established in 1914, but had to suspend its activities during the war, and had only been resuscitated in 1920. Its support came from influential lay and clerical leaders, particularly in the democratic countries of Western Europe and North America. They recognized the need for programs of reconciliation and peace activities in order to bind up the wounds caused by the destructive violence of the recent war. It was here that Bonhoeffer met with such leading figures as the Anglican Bishop George Bell of Chichester, with whom he was to collaborate for the next decade.In fact, Bonhoeffer made such an impact that he was forthwith appointed as an Honorary Youth Secretary and given responsibility for the World Alliance’s youth work in central Europe. This was a challenge he could hardly refuse, and one to which he brought his newly-minted skills in theological advocacy and his energetic support of the World Alliance’s aims.

As Clements makes clear, however, Bonhoeffer soon saw that the whole ecumenical endeavour was sadly lacking an adequate theology. Passing high-minded resolutions at conferences or engaging in moralistic wishful thinking about the need for peace was not enough. With all the brashness of a twenty-eight-year-old—Clements calls it boldness—Bonhoeffer set out to remedy this deficiency. At the World Alliance’s next major conference held in Denmark in 1934, he advanced the argument that what was needed was for a great ecumenical council of churches to be convened which would commit all its members to non-violence and abjure all forms of militarism. The cause of peace demanded a universal approach and was not a matter just for individuals, or even for local or national churches. In the absence of any such body, the World Alliance meeting should dare to act as that council.

It was therefore especially necessary to attack those theological ideas about “the orders of creation” which German theologians were using to justify their nationalistic sentiments. Against this, Bonhoeffer argued for an order of preservation which would obey God’s commandment to witness to truth and justice, and prepare the way for the reception of the gospel of Christ. But in fact the ecumenical community was not yet ready for this precocious and prophetic vision of Christian witness. And Bonhoeffer himself became fully occupied with the onset of the Church Struggle within Germany, following Hitler’s take-over of power in 1933. He was now taken up with combatting the eager support given to the Nazi Party, particularly by his contemporaries amongst the younger pastors who so eagerly began to spread Nazi militaristic, nationalistic and antisemitic ideas in the fallacious belief that this would bring ordinary people back to the church.

Bonhoeffer’s move to England in October 1933 brought him into more frequent contact with Bishop Bell, who indeed came to rely on Bonhoeffer’s valuable guidance about the hectic developments in the German Evangelical Church. On the other hand, Bonhoeffer was unsuccessful in persuading any of these ecumenical bodies to sever their connections with the now nazified official church structures, and to regard the Confessing Church as the only true vehicle for Christian witness in Germany. The tensions this dispute caused led to the result that no one from the German Evangelical Church was allowed to attend the significant ecumenical conferences which took place in Britain in 1937, or to participate in the discussions in 1938 which resulted in the founding of the World Council of Churches.

By this time, however, Bonhoeffer had returned to Germany to lead the Confessing Church’s seminary at Finkenwalde in the remotest part of east Pomerania. This necessarily cut down on his opportunities to be in contact with his ecumenical partners. But, as Clements points out, Bonhoeffer was insistent that “The German Church Struggle is the second great stage in the history of the ecumenical movement and will be decisive for its future. It is not an ideal which has been set up but a commandment and a promise—it is not high-handed implementation of one’s own goals that is required but obedience. The question has been posed.” But in this idealistic vision Bonhoeffer was to be disappointed.

Clements does not elucidate how far this set-back induced Bonhoeffer to be drawn increasingly into the ranks of those who now sought to oppose Nazism and Hitler by some form of resistance or revolt. But as the war clouds increasingly gathered in the late 1930s, and as the Nazi ambitions became ever clearer, the hopes of the peace party were doomed to disillusionment and frustration. To be sure, it was largely due to his ecumenical friends in the United States, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Lehmann and Henry Leiper, that Bonhoeffer was offered an escape route from the risk of being conscripted for military service by accepting offers from New York to return to the United States in the summer of 1939. Yet, shortly after his arrival, Bonhoeffer realized he had made a mistake. As he explained in the well-known letter to Niebuhr, it was not the call of family, or of his church, but of his nation which led to his decision to return to Germany:

I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people…. Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.

Clements rightly comments that in speaking of “Christian civilization” Bonhoeffer recognized the threat posed by the Nazis not just to Germany but to the wider Christian community. He saw himself engaged in the struggle for the widest goals of Christian witness which now required him to go back and face this ”terrible alternative”. It was all part of the costly discipleship to which he was committed.

After the outbreak of war, and his recruitment as an agent of the Military Intelligence Service, Bonhoeffer found that the hostilities virtually paralyzed the activities of the ecumenical movement and forced its supporters to find new ways of upholding their sense of community and mutuality. Clements argues that in these circumstances Bonhoeffer’s commitment to ecumenism became still more pronounced even though carried out in a conspiratorial manner. Thanks to his connections he was able to travel abroad, twice to Switzerland, where he contacted both Karl Barth and Visser’t Hooft, now the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (in process of formation), and told them about the discussions for post-war renewal going on in the resistance circles in Germany

Bonhoeffer’s most significant journey came in April 1942 to Sigtuna, Sweden, where he met once again with Bishop Bell. Bonhoeffer’s objective was to persuade Bell to urge the British Government to make a public declaration of support for the German Resistance in the hope that any such declaration would provide evidence that, when Germany was defeated, she would not have to suffer an even more vindictive settlement than in 1919. To this end, Bonhoeffer revealed to Bell the names of the leading members of the anti-Hitler conspiracy, and eagerly looked forward to his nation’s eventual defeat, since Germany deserved punishment and ought to express repentance for the crimes committed in the nation’s name. But, in fact, when Bell fulfilled his mission on his return to London, the result was a disappointing rejection. Clements clearly admires Bonhoeffer’s dangerous venture as an example of ecumenism in practice. But other historians are more skeptical, pointing out that this plan was more the product of these churchmen’s wishful thinking than any realistic awareness of the international political scene, or the realities of choices facing the British authorities at the time.

In April 1943 Bonhoeffer was arrested and taken to Tegel prison on the outskirts of Berlin. He was never to regain his freedom. But from the letters, essays and poems smuggled out by a friendly warder, we have the evidence that his dedication to the ecumenical cause remained as before. As Clements shows, he used the opportunity to explore the dimensions of Christian discipleship in the service of the world when the church takes upon itself the needs of the world before God. We have one final glimpse of his ecumenical commitment from the day before he was murdered in April 1945. Together with a group of other notable prisoners, including a British P.O.W., Captain Payne Best, whom Bonhoeffer had discovered was acquainted with Bishop Bell, they were spending the night in a Bavarian schoolhouse. It was the Sunday after Easter, and Bonhoeffer was persuaded to hold a short service for them all. He had hardly finished when two SS policemen entered, and called out “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us”. He had just time to give a message for Best to pass on to Bishop Bell. “Tell him, Bonhoeffer said, that this is the end but for me the beginning of life. With him I believe in the principle of the Universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests, and that our victory is certain”. Then he was led away, taken back to Flossenbürg concentration camp, placed in front of a summary court martial, condemned to die, and on the following morning, 9 April, executed in the prison yard.

Clements’ final chapter describes the post-war reception of Bonhoeffer’s fame and ideas, beginning with the heartfelt tribute paid by Bishop Bell at a memorial service held in a large London church in July 1945, which was broadcast by the BBC’s German service and heard by members of Bonhoeffer’s family. It was the first intimation they had that he was no longer alive. It was the beginning of the process which Victoria Barnett has rightly called “the making of an ecumenical saint”, and culminated in the placing of Bonhoeffer’s statue on the front portal of Westminster Abbey in London, together with other Christian martyrs of the twentieth century. He was seen as a suffering Christian witness and defender of the faith. The emphasis was on his unconquerable piety and his unyielding trust in God.

But in fact, there were also contrasting reactions which Clements does not mention. In post-war Germany, not a few of the more conservative members of the Evangelical Church, including those in the ranks of the Confessing Church, took a much more hostile view of Bonhoeffer’s past. To many of these men, Bonhoeffer was not a Christian martyr but a national traitor. It was inconceivable to them that a pastor should have been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the head of state, should have openly refused to pray for Germany’s military victories, or should have welcomed the prospect of his nation’s downfall and defeat. It took some twenty years before Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s closest friend and biographer, was able to overcome these prejudices. Another and more favourable reception came in the 1950s in Britain and North America with the English translation of Letters and Papers from Prison and the revelations about Bonhoeffer’s political activism and participation in the anti-Nazi struggle. At the same time, these letters aroused a tremendous excitement, especially in the younger generation, because of the stimulating critique of existing church doctrines and the enigmatic assertions about the “world come of age”, the call for a “religion-less Christianity”, or the necessity of being “the church for others”. These were the themes which gave, and still give, Bonhoeffer an enormous appeal as a major source of inspiration and guidance.

Fortunately, in so praising Bonhoeffer’s legacy, Clements has avoided the distortions and omissions which have marked the recent American biographies by Metaxas and Marsh. Instead he points to Bonhoeffer’s posthumous appeal and influence, which have established his reputation far beyond his native German Lutheran home. Indeed, Clements can claim that in view of Bonhoeffer’s response to Nazism and the Holocaust, he has also become a significant figure for Christian-Jewish dialogue. In so doing, Bonhoeffer belongs internationally and irrevocably to the ecumenical scene. His witness to this cause remains his most lasting memorial and is one which still commands respect. We can therefore be grateful to Keith Clements for so fully and convincingly outlining Bonhoeffer’s contributions to the ecumenical world view to which he was so seriously committed and in which he believed so passionately.

Review of Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden, eds., Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the Twentieth century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden, eds., Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the Twentieth Century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal, Studies in Modern British Religious History, Vol. 31 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2014), 325 Pp. ISBN 978-1-84383-911-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

For nearly five centuries, the Church of England has prided itself on its comprehensive character, and has refused to allow any single uniformity to be imposed on its doctrinal, liturgical or political expressions. Evangelicalism has thus remained one of the main pillars of English religious life, drawing on the legacy of the Puritans in the seventeenth century, the pietistic impetus of the Wesley brothers in the eighteenth century, and the social and missionary zeal of men like Wilberforce in the nineteenth. These collected essays, written by a group of scholars from within this tradition, now provide a survey of Evangelicalism in the twentieth century, analyzing its struggles for reform, resistance and renewal over the past hundred years. Readers should be aware that, although two of the contributors are based in the United States, apart from David Cerl Jones’ short chapter on Wales, almost no mention is made of conditions in other English-speaking countries, and no attempt is made to place English Evangelicalism in its wider setting of world Protestantism.

Atherstone-Maiden The opening chapter, written by two Oxford scholars, examines the taxonomy of recent English Evangelicalism, describing the various strands within this spectrum of belief, which share common features in their adherence to the key truths of justification by faith alone and the supreme authority of Holy Scripture as the word of God. Nevertheless each of these strands places its emphasis on different aspects of the faith. Conservative Evangelicals stress the inerrancy of the Bible and refuse to accept the scientific evidence for evolution. More “open” Evangelicals have accepted both the modern theories about the world’s origins and many of the findings of biblical criticism, while most recently the contribution of the charismatic movement, drawn from Pentecostalism, and found in such London churches as Holy Trinity, Brompton or St Paul’s, Onslow Square, has reinvigorated and popularized Evangelicalism among young people. The rivalries—and sometimes the acerbic criticisms of these groups of each other—have meant that English evangelicalism often seems to have been in a constant process of reconfiguration.

Nevertheless, there are many signs of lively renewal, and we can be grateful to these scholars for analyzing both the successes and the failures of these movements during the course of the last century. Undoubtedly the twentieth century has been more testing for all branches of the English Church than was the nineteenth. The catastrophic effects of two world wars and the consequent loss of confidence in God’s benevolent providence eroded Christian faith in wide sections of the population, while more recently the impact of secularism, the sexual revolution, feminism, and political radicalization, have poised challenges which Evangelicals have sought to meet using the resources of their rich and vibrant traditions of personal faith. In some circumstances, Evangelicals have mobilized resistance to social changes, such as the toleration of homosexuality, but in other cases, such as the ordination of women priests and even bishops, they have welcomed the abandonment of long-standing Anglican traditions as a sign of faith-induced reform and renewal. The tension between institutional loyalty and biblical truth has been an ongoing preoccupation.

Within the Church of England’s witness, the Evangelical party has undoubtedly lost ground. For example, a hundred years ago, the usual Sunday morning worship consisted of Mattins, with a heavy emphasis on preaching, while the Holy Communion was an occasional, if prized, event. (In Queen Victoria’s court, Holy Communion was celebrated only twice a year, after considerable personal preparation). But in recent decades, the Holy Communion, along with an enhanced view of the importance of sacraments, has become the normal Sunday service, while Mattins has been relegated to a few odd Sundays in the month. So too, the Evangelical adherence to the doctrine of penal substitution has been softened, as has their resistance to the claims of Roman Catholicism. Leading Evangelicals have led the way in arguing against the kind of biblical fundamentalism or doctrinal rigidity which still prevails in some of their United States counterparts. On the other hand, Evangelicals have sought to play a more constructive role in national affairs, and have placed much more emphasis on the role of the laity in parish leadership. These signs of renewal mean that Evangelicals are no longer content to embrace the kind of reserved personal piety of their elders, but are engaged in social reforming movements of many kinds at many different levels. In the view of these authors, Evangelicalism in the Church of England is now much more diverse, no longer tied to its former rigidity of doctrine or to its defensiveness towards other branches of the church.

Subsequent chapters, written by various authors, give us brief histories of Evangelical groupings in England throughout the century, many of which demonstrated buoyant ambitions but disappointing results. The conservative wing of English Evangelicalism was successful in recruiting younger members through such organizations as the Oxford and Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Unions, but its more liberal counterpart suffered from a certain diffuseness of theological proclamation and a theology which appeared to many as “vague, ephemeral and unsatisfactory”. There was a constant and recurring tension between adaptation to changing circumstances and fidelity to traditional evangelical faithfulness.

Readers unfamiliar with the details of developments in the Church of England and its Evangelical sections over the past hundred years will learn a lot. A great many names of prominent clergymen are dropped, which leads to considerable repetition in successive chapters. Fortunately the contributors avoid self-congratulatory tendencies, and adopt a suitably critical approach both to the subject and its practitioners. Their evaluations are balanced and well researched. In the latter half of the century, as John Maiden notes, younger evangelical leaders, such as John Stott of All Souls, Langham Place in central London, or Jim Packer of Larimer College, Oxford, demonstrated a greater openness to dialogue and liturgical flexibility. Packer called on evangelicals to renounce obscurantism, isolationism, pessimism and party spirit, and to adopt a warmer relationship with other branches of the church. They were horrified by the extremism of their so-called Protestant brethren in Northern Ireland. As Packer wrote in 1981, “It is a fact and a happy one, that within the past thirty years the previously felt convictional and kerygmatic gap between the more conservative evangelicals and the more conservative anglo-catholics has shrunk.” At the same time, there were also evangelicals who felt that they continued to be treated with reserve by the Church of England hierarchy, and passed over for suitable preferment. John Stott was never offered a bishopric, and Jim Packer left to join the new evangelical Regent College in Vancouver. Tom Wright, although appointed in 2003 to the prestigious See of Durham, only stayed for seven years before retreating to a much less conspicuous professorship at a Scottish university.

The final chapter, by Alister Chapman, looks at how much Evangelicals in England learned from the world in recent decades. The answer is: not much. This chapter is more introspective than outward-looking, but reveals the limited extent to which English evangelicals responded to outside influences. For example, the early Billy Graham crusades met with considerable resentment to the idea that English evangelicals had much to learn from such brash American presentations, even if well-organized. So too with the loss of the British Empire, the very considerable evangelical engagement in colonial missions faded away and was not brought back to England’s shores. Evangelicals continued to think of themselves going abroad to teach, rather than learn, so the reverse flow was minimal. Or, as in the case of evangelicals in Australia, the influence was perceptibly reactionary. To be sure, the sources of the charismatic movement among evangelicals came from abroad, but had to be suitably “anglified” by such groups as Michael Harper’s Fountain Trust before becoming popular. The original Pentecostals from the Caribbean too often found that they were rejected in local white churches, and so founded their own black assemblies. Their spiritual influence was therefore handicapped by English social conservatism. As Chapman remarks, old habits die hard. And it is doubtful that they are dead, even in this post-imperial generation.

It is a pity that no one was found to give a forecast of Evangelicalism’s place in the twenty-first century. In view of the massive changes in Britain’s social composition with the arrival of so many immigrants from Asia, Africa and the non-Protestant parts of Europe, the impact on all branches of the Church of England has to be far-reaching, and the priorities for evangelism very different. Attempts to integrate and assimilate these newcomers have found strict barriers against religious proselytism. Most of these communities have brought their own religious leaders with them, hampering social intercourse. For the first time in English history, violence and riots have broken out in English towns, spurred on by religious and racial antagonisms.

Evangelicals are therefore confronted with new and often demanding assignations. But these will have to be left for future analysis in a subsequent volume.

Review of Timothy Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England 1857-1957

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Timothy Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England 1857-1957 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Pp 218. ISBN 978-0-19-965510-6.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

In the 1960s the Church of England suffered a striking decline in the number of supporters in many parishes across the country. Some commentators attributed this to the prevalence of science-backed secularism. Others held it was the result of the church’s uncritical support of militaristic nationalism in two world wars. But in 2000 Callum Brown advanced the controversial thesis that this decline was due to the impact of the feminist sexual revolution of those years which exploded traditional sexual morality and led to the radical challenge to the established patterns of behaviour in the church’s constituency. In particular, Brown claimed that it was women’s rejection of Victorian narratives of femininity and subordination which brought about a wholly new set of allegiances amongst church members and introduced new challenges from various women’s movements, especially those urging the right of women to be ordained to the priesthood, and even to the episcopate.

Jones-Sexual Timothy Jones follows this lead by undertaking a study of the major changes in gender politics in the Church of England from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He focusses on six episodes during this period which, he claims, demonstrated the often reluctant posture of the church leaders when challenged to take a stand on matters affecting gender or sexual politics. Over the course of this hundred year span, English society evolved rapidly and adopted a much more liberal stance, which was often reflected in parliamentary debates, and found its way into progressive legislation. The result was a frequent clash of interest with the more conservative and traditional sectors of opinion, including those of the Church of England. Jones begins his survey with the debates about marriage in the mid-1850s and concludes with the heated controversies about consensual homosexuality in the 1950s. Rather than indulging in detailing the reactionary attitudes of some Church of England leaders, Jones skillfully weaves into his account the variety of positions taken over the years, and displays a commendable sympathy for most of the participants in this on-going search for new understandings amongst church members about gender and sexual politics.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, the long established pattern of Anglican marriage and gender politics was disrupted by a series of secular legislative reforms, such as women’s suffrage, the official acceptance of birth control, the call for women’s equality in employment (including positions within the ordained ministry), and the pressure for more relaxed acceptance of homosexuality in later years. None of these movements originated from within the Church, but public opinion, including that of church members, was so strongly affected that the Church was obliged to recast its regulations or guidance principles in order to accommodate the changed climate. The most significant change was brought about by the suffrage movement at the turn of the century, which resulted in women being granted the vote, first in 1918 and more fully in 1928. In Jones’ view, this step radicalized Anglican discussions about gender. It brought the politics of equality into the heart of the Church’s discussions, and profoundly unsettled the balance of forces in the various parts of the community. It is not difficult to see the connection between this step and the decision of the Lambeth Conference in 1930 to amend the marriage service to stress equality between men and women, as also to accept the findings of modern medicine and to remove the previous prohibition against contraception. The arguments of the conservative opponents of such steps were usually based on either the Bible or tradition. But by the 1920s already the biblical injunctions of the New Testament were seen to be completely compatible with gender equality, while the arguments from tradition were increasingly regarded as outmoded. Women’s political emancipation was most prominent in a series of legislative changes which marked a significant cultural shift from a hierarchic to an egalitarian understanding of the sexes. Anglo-Catholics, in particular, had difficulties with such egalitarianism, since in their view, the position of a priest represented the authority of a male God and a male Christ. Both social and metaphysical order would be upset if the previous patriarchal system were overthrown.

On the other hand, Anglo-Catholics applauded the efforts of women to establish their own sisterhoods and nunneries since these reinforced the ideals of spiritualized femininity and service. Certainly the spread of such communities in the later nineteenth century provided middle-class women with much more effective and fulfilling opportunities than the life of an unmarried spinster. But the twentieth century’s opening of many more professions to women inevitably led to alternative and possibly more attractive occupations. The devotion and piety of these sisters was much praised, but did not encourage those women who might have hoped that this would lead to future ordination to the priesthood.

The campaign for the ordination of women engrossed the Church of England throughout the twentieth century, and has only now come to a completion after many adherents have abandoned their loyalty to the Church of their birth. It brought the Anglican Church to the limits of its capacity to imagine sexual equality. When it was first proposed at the 1920 Lambeth Conference, it was greeted with shock and almost universal incomprehension. In the 1920s and 1930s a series of reports struggled to find an ideological basis for such opposition, but fell back on the traditional defence that the Church was not ready for such a revolutionary move. The question was forcefully raised by the movement’s advocates as to why the priesthood merited the maintenance of the sex-bar in contrast to other professions. They never received a satisfactory answer. In 1935 the Archbishops’ Commission could still say “We believe the general mind of the Church is still in accord with the continuous tradition of a male priesthood … based on the will of God”. Such sexual double standards were naturally rejected by the supporters of women’s ordination, who argued persuasively that gender and sex were not theologically relevant to ordination. But nevertheless in this period the leading minds of the Church were unable to frame a persuasive and broadly acceptable theological argument for any change. Such a view asserted that there was a natural divinely ordained gender order which involved women’s subordination to men, though not implying women’s inferiority. Women priests were hence seen to invert a hierarchy of spiritual and domestic authority which stretched all the way to the Godhead. The male priest as symbol of religious authority had many centuries of unbroken tradition behind it, not only in the Christian version. Such considerations were only overcome after the 1960s when the impact of the so-called secular sexual revolution led to a much more open and generous realization of the contributions that women priests could offer.

Jones’ final chapter deals with the question of the Church’s attitudes towards celibacy and homosexuality. Remarkably enough, it was the Church of England which took a lead in 1952 in promoting homosexual law reform, and urging the decriminalization of homosexual acts. He argues that the Church’s negotiation of new understandings of sexual identity led to a striking level of institutional accommodation and acceptance of homosexuality. The change in the 1930s saw an abandonment of moralistic condemnation and an acceptance of medico-psychological theories about sexual preferences. In 1954 the Church of England Moral Welfare Council produced a report “The Problem of Homosexuality” which was written in almost exclusively medical terms and proved to be highly influential. Homosexuals were no longer to be regarded as perverts but to sublimate their urges into positive social roles. Nevertheless the ambiguity about the morality of homosexuality still remains widespread throughout the Church of England.

The writing of church history has traditionally focused on theological or political matters. Jones’ survey of what might be described as the undercurrent in gender and sexual politics therefore fills a vacant segment in this historiography. As of last year, 2014, with the appointment of the first female bishop, and with now a generation’s experience of women priests serving in numerous parishes across the country, we may hope that it not be long before a historian will be coming forward to comment on the repercussions of this significant change in the otherwise staid history of the Church as it approaches the five hundredth anniversary of its establishment in England.

Review of Rainer Stuhlmann, Zwischen den Stühlen: Alltagsnotizen eines Christen in Israel und Palästina

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Rainer Stuhlmann, Zwischen den Stühlen: Alltagsnotizen eines Christen in Israel und Palästina

(Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag 2015), 155 Pp. ISBN 978-3-7615-6179-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

After serving for thirty years as a pastor in the Rhineland Evangelical Church, Rainer Stuhlmann is spending part of his retirement as Director of Studies at Nes Ammim, a Christian centre in northern Israel. Nes Ammim was established fifty years ago by a Dutch Reformed couple, who were convinced of the need to have a visible sign in the newly-established state of Israel of the Christian desire for reconciliation and repentance for Christian complicity in the Holocaust. They believed the best way to do this would be to follow the example of the Zionist pioneers, and build a farming community in order to contribute both practically and spiritually to building new relationships. For many years they grew roses, which were picked, packed and sent every day to the Frankfurt flower market. Some years ago, when this venture no longer proved viable, they switched to running a guest hotel, staffed mainly by young Christian volunteers from Germany, Holland and Switzerland. Pastor Stuhlmann helped to organize their free time with programs enabling them to study more of present conditions in Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. This book is essentially a record of these encounters, written as a series of snapshots from the perspective of a keenly involved observer doing what he can to enhance the growth of communal friendship and harmonious relationships.

Stuhlmann-Zwischen The Holy Land is of course full of holy history, also of holy geography. Stuhlmann sees his job as motivating his young guests from Europe to understand the dimensions of both these features and to encourage a courageous encounter with the many history-laced dilemmas which are met in so many corners of the “promised” land. He is clearly against the kind of religious tourism which brings Christian visitors to Israel, but seeks to isolate them in the first century without ever meeting with Israel’s present-day inhabitants or their troubles. He is equally opposed to the kind of narrow eschatological proclamation of certain Christian groups, especially some American evangelicals, or to the equally one-sided Jewish extremists who wage a continual battle against their Palestinian neighbours. He is grateful for the fact that he and his younger colleagues from Germany are now looked on as representatives of the “new Germany”, and that the horrors of the Holocaust, though loudly trumpeted in state-controlled media, are not attributed to the younger generation or to him personally. Likewise he is encouraged by the friendliness of the Palestinians who see these visitors from Europe as a hopeful sign that their cause is not being forgotten by the rest of the world. And he draws hope from the fact that there are many signs of confidence building between young Jews and Arabs, not least those established at Nes Ammim itself.

Anyone visiting Israel/Palestine cannot fail to be impressed, even intimidated, by the weight of history which pervades every corner of this Holy Land. Even more forceful is the evidence on all sides of the many centuries of nation building and the equally obvious evidence of these attempts’ downfall. Stuhlmann would like to be optimistic, but is obliged to recognize that the forces of national bigotry and self-preservation have a long start. Every time he takes parties of students to Jerusalem, they are confronted with the most recent evidence of the endemic hostility between Israelis and Palestinians, namely the so-called Separation Wall around the city, which was constructed a few years ago. This was built as a barrier against terrorist attacks but has since been extended to expropriate large sections of Palestinian land holdings and vineyards, which he sees as a most brutal robbery by the Israeli state. This Wall in fact forbids the inhabitants from the Palestinian side crossing into Jerusalem without control, and hence denies the opportunity to have social contact or conversations. This is exactly the contrary to Nes Ammin, where such relationships are deliberately encouraged. It all points to the fact that, in the ancient capital, where three religions have existed in rivalry for centuries, and every stone witnesses to unresolved conflicts, the atmosphere is much sharper and confrontational than in northern Galilee. But given the escalation of conflict in all the surrounding countries, the hope that Israel will maintain a precarious peace and allow more positive steps for creative relationship between the inhabitants must be seen as an exercise in faith.

Stuhlmann is well aware that the history and the land of Israel have been and still are full of promises. Some are extravagant, some are unfulfillable, but all contain at least the hint of conflict. For this reason he avoids giving support to any of the limiting or exclusivist claims, whether political or religious, which are put forward to back one or other of the opposing sides. But to act as a reconciler, it is necessary to face both ways. Praying with the Psalmist for the peace of Jerusalem may seem a lost cause, but for Stuhlmann it is the only and most heroic stance to adopt in the midst of the present Middle Eastern strife. He places his hopes in what Nes Ammim has always done best, which is to bring together young people from both or all sides, and hope that their personal contacts will allay hostilities and rivalries, and that they will then go on to work for a resolution, or at least the alleviation of the tensions so visibly shared by the inhabitants of this Holy Land. He is sustained by the memory of how, in Germany, for forty years from 1950 onwards, two sides across the Iron Curtain adopted the same kind of biased and obstinate prejudices, and refused any kind of personal interaction across the well-defined and defended border. But then in 1989 all barriers were broken down, and humanity reigned again.

But in Israel, the separation has now lasted for fifty years. And a very deliberate policy of “Boycott, Disengagement and Sanctions” has only increased the suspicions and hostility on both sides. While there are those on the Jewish side who recognize that the occupation of the West Bank and oppression of the Palestinians is a catastrophe for their vision of Zionism, their advocacy of a two-nation solution has achieved nothing, and indeed still raises doubts about its viability. Equally there are those on the Palestinian side who refuse any contact with Jews. Stuhlmann naturally deplores such intransigence or the unwillingness to enter into dialogue even on a personal level. He realizes how difficult a task it remains to be supportive of the Palestinians without becoming an opponent of the Israelis. But he also deplores the widespread anti-Muslim and anti-Arab animosity stirred up in many western countries. Above all, he rejects the continued use of Israeli force to humiliate the Palestinian population under its control and to deny the destructive impact of their land confiscations or the malignant policies of establishing more settlements in the West Bank territories. He is convinced that such tactics seriously damage the Israeli cause, and he knows how offensive such policies are to the many Jewish friends he has found in Israel. The quest for both security for Israel and freedom for Palestine remains elusive and seemingly distressingly distant. The human toll is incalculable.

Zwischen den Stühlen is chiefly directed to his German audience in the hope of inducing a more balanced presentation of Middle Eastern politics. He cannot avoid the feeling that the widespread sympathy for the Palestinians will be interpreted, by some Jews at least, as a replay of the anti-Semitic attitudes shared by many Germans in previous decades. And the call in some western cities for a boycott of Israeli-produced goods evokes a reminder of the similar boycott organized by Josef Goebbels in April 1933. On the other hand, those Germans who loudly profess themselves to be Friends of Israel are seemingly willing to overlook the gross injustices inflicted on the Palestinian population in what they refer to as their “Nakba” or catastrophe. Similarly Stuhlmann regrets the enthusiastic support given to Israeli policies by the right-wing Evangelical Christian Zionists, eagerly awaiting the return of the Messiah. In his view, all such confrontational attitudes can only be harmful for the cause of peace. But at the same time, he greets enthusiastically all demonstrations against anti-Semitism, which must be resolutely opposed. Part of the problem is that both sides like to portray themselves as victims. Israelis harp on their status as survivors of the Holocaust of seventy years ago, and Palestinians see themselves as the victims of a hundred years of Zionist aggression. Both sides justify their defensive measures accordingly, which successfully prevent the growth of any climate of accommodation or agreement. Nevertheless Stuhlmann and his team of expatriate volunteers remain dedicated to their aim of reconciliation and mutual understanding.

Nes Ammim is situated near Acre. As a Christian centre, it stakes a claim to be a place of peaceful encounter for all faiths. But in 2013, it was itself the near-target of rockets fired from somewhere across the Lebanese border. Neither the aggressors nor the reasons for the attack were discernible. But the Israeli defence shield saved it from further damage. The paradox of being protected by the military power he has so readily criticized for its mistreatment of its Palestinian population did not escape Stuhlmann, and only heightened his awareness of the difficulties of trying to face both ways. Steering such a course in the often polarized climate in Germany makes Stuhlmann’s message of reconciliation and inter-faith dialogue even more hazardous, but equally even more necessary. He is in fact attempting to express solidarity with both Israelis and Palestinians without attempting to judge or condemn either side. This short book will undoubtedly assist those who look for the spirit of Nes Ammim to be vindicated in the troubled circumstances of the Holy Land today.

Review Article: The Vatican’s response to the Nazi persecution of the Jews

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Review Article: The Vatican’s response to the Nazi persecution of the Jews

Susan Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands during the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013). 277 Pp., ISBN 9780233008414.

Paul O’Shea, A Cross too Heavy: Eugenio Pacelli, Politics and the Jews of Europe 1917-1943 (Kenthurst, NSW: Rosenberg Publishing, 2008). 392 Pp., ISBN 9781877058714.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Two recent books have again stirred up the long-standing debate about the policies of Pope Pius XII and the Vatican in the face of the genocidal slaughter of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War. This controversy has now flourished for more than fifty years, and shows little sign of having reached any acceptable consensus. It has often been conducted more with political partisanship or religious loyalty than with a detailed examination of the evidence. Moreover this debate has suffered from the long delay in opening the most important sources held by the Vatican. Nevertheless most commentators express the confident hope that, when eventually the archives are revealed, their hypotheses will be found to be accurate. They therefore demonstrate a commendable integrity in allowing their findings to speak for themselves even where they differ in their interpretations. They show that there are still new aspects of the church’s rescue efforts on behalf of the persecuted Jews which deserve fuller consideration. These books will undoubtedly add to the wider corpus of scholarship which continues to be of interest to scholars of modern diplomacy and statecraft.

zucotti-pere Susan Zuccotti is an established American scholar who has written a number of studies of the Holocaust, particularly dealing with events in France and Italy. Her latest contribution provides us with a well-researched biography of a little-known French Capuchin friar, Fr. Marie-Benoît, who was to play a significant role in rescuing Jews first in Marseilles in 1942 and then in Rome in 1943-4. Although he was to live for several decades after the war, his exploits were only recorded in French and remained largely unnoticed in remote French archives. Zuccotti was able to interview him in 1988 shortly before he died, but he was clearly a reticent witness, and it has taken her another twenty-five years to piece together his full story and to explore the determining factors which led him to play such an active role in assisting the Jewish refugees and victims of Nazi tyranny. The result is a portrait of a valiant and courageous priest whose witness in the cause of Christian-Jewish relations deserves to be better known to an English-speaking audience. So we can be grateful to Zuccotti for this helpful addition to the debate about how much (or how little) was done by various sectors of the Catholic Church to assist the Jewish victims of Nazism.

Fr. Marie-Benoît was born the son of a country miller in that part of western France which saw violent persecution of faithful Catholics in defense of the ancient regime by agents of the Revolution in the 1790s. Zuccotti suggests that this may have been the source of his opposition to any state-directed persecution of religious minorities. In fact he wanted to join the Capuchins, a branch of the Franciscan order, but was called up in 1914 and served throughout the war at the front. Later he was called to Rome and taught at the Capuchin seminary there until 1940. He returned to France just as his nation was defeated and divided into the German-occupied north and the Vichy-led unoccupied south. It was here in Marseilles that he first became involved with helping refugees, particularly foreign-born Jews, fleeing from the Nazis. He was able to help some to escape to Switzerland or Spain, or to move to the safer area of the Italian-controlled region around Nice. He established good relations with Jewish organizers of relief efforts, and continued these after he was recalled back to Rome in early 1943. The situation grew far more perilous after Mussolini was overthrown in July 1943 and when the German army took control of Italy’s civil government in September. It was at this point that Fr. Marie-Benoît and his Jewish backers had the idea of using his presence in Rome to seek an audience with Pope Pius XII. As recorded in the printed Vatican documents, he was able to present the Pope with requests to help these foreign Jewish refugees, even though nothing came of his grander scheme to have these foreign Jews evacuated to North Africa. But, as he recorded later in his own memoirs, he successfully managed to help these stranded Jews by supplying them with forged identity documents, forged permissions to reside in Rome, and forged ration cards.

The few months between September 1943 and the liberation of Rome in June 1944 were particularly dangerous, and eventually forced Fr. Marie-Benoît himself into hiding. In October there followed the infamous round-up of the Roman Jews from Trastevere, when more than a thousand were deported to Auschwitz and only sixteen survived. As word spread through the foreign refugees’ ranks, the need for secure hiding places grew more urgent. Fr. Marie-Benoît was active in seeking assistance from various convents and monasteries, despite being warned of the danger that these institutions could well be searched by German agents.

Zuccotti deals succinctly with the question, addressed in her earlier books and articles, about the extent to which the Vatican and its officials—including the Pope—knew about these clandestine relief efforts. She concludes that the Pope and other Vatican officials were certainly aware of these developments, even if they did not know the extent or the details. She rightly denies the claims made afterwards by eager papal supporters that the Pope had issued explicit directions or had directed Vatican funds for such efforts. As Fr. Marie-Benoît himself testified, he never thought of himself as carrying out the Vatican’s instructions let alone receiving financial help. In fact the Vatican documents print some of the reservations felt towards Fr. Marie-Benoît on the grounds that his illegal activities endangered the Vatican’s carefully guarded stance of neutrality. One official who repeatedly urged him to be more prudent was recorded as being gravely disappointed by the Capuchin’s reckless readiness to engage in what he called his mission of mercy. Particularly grim was the fact that in these final weeks under German domination, several of Fr Marie-Benoît’s protégés were victims of informers, playing along with the Germans. At the same time, though, he and his partners amongst the Jewish community were aware of the broad support they enjoyed from much of the non-Jewish population. Zuccotti’s conclusion is that together they saved the lives of at least twenty-five hundred men, women and children, most of them refugees without resources in a nation controlled by Nazis determined to destroy them.

Rob Ventresca’s authoritative essay on the same subject, recently published in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations lends support to the same conclusions. (“’The Vatican was for us like a mountain’: Reassessing the Vatican’s Role in Jewish Relief and Rescue during the Holocaust. Settled Questions and New Directions in Research,” SCJR 9, no. 1 (2014): http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/scjr/article/view/5601/4957). In his view the Vatican’s response to the plight of so many million Jewish victims of Nazism conformed to a familiar pattern of self-imposed restraint and self-serving resignation. While on the one hand, the Pope and his advisors consistently avoided the explicit papal condemnations being requested, yet Catholic rescuers on the ground, such as Fr. Marie-Benoît, might count on some modest measure of papal support, usually moral rather than financial. Such moves hardly amounted to a policy or a directive for Jewish rescue and could be curtailed if the results seemed to increase the likelihood of reprisals or damaging repercussions for papal diplomacy.

The limitations placed on the Vatican’s efforts to support Jewish victims of Nazism have long since been recognized. Direct protests to the German authorities were never answered. Requests to friendly governments, such as Brazil, to provide entry visas for Catholic converted Jews were ignored or only reluctantly accepted. Nevertheless the Pope’s clear preference was to continue his diplomatic representations as a means of exercising the Vatican’s leverage, limited as it might be, for the longer term issue of securing an eventual peace settlement.

It is within this envelope of diplomatic caution and restraint that the Vatican’s efforts to assist Jewish refugees, such as those supported by Fr. Marie-Benoît, have to be judged. But undoubtedly the supplies of food and other material goods given to these people were approved by the Vatican’s higher officials, and benefitted the numerous Jewish refugees hidden in Catholic institutions. But to date, no written order from the Pope has been discovered, let alone a “secret plan” as propounded recently in a journalistic account by a British writer. Yet Fr. Marie-Benoît’s activities were not prohibited by his superiors, despite the urging of certain officials to be more cautious. He emerged as the main contact with the Jewish organization DELASEM and as such paved the way for a new and much more positive relationship in the post-war years. It was in this new climate that the Vatican subsequently tried to claim that much more aid had been given, and that Fr. Marie-Benoît was supported by their instructions. This led the good friar, as Zuccotti notes, to deny any such approval or assistance. As he recorded in his memoir: “I received no mission from the Vatican, because I was unknown there…. The Vatican was for us like a mountain. We were in a hurry.” The only sum described in the Vatican published documents refers to a small amount dedicated for the support of converted Jews, but it is clear that the ingenuity of Fr. Marie-Benoît and his DELASEM colleagues enabled them to access other sources of financial support for which they did not need explicit Vatican approval. By such methods the Vatican did not appear to be engaging in questionable or possibly illegal financial activities, even if such aid was designed to assist poverty-stricken refugees.

In the post-war period, Fr. Marie-Benoit became one of the foremost champions of a new relationship between Christians and Jews. But Pius XII clearly had other priorities. It was only after two decades that these ideas found a new and much more favorable reception at the time of the Second Vatican Council, and in particular in its noteworthy statement Nostra Aetate of 1965. Fortunately Fr. Marie-Benoît was still alive at this time, and rejoiced. But there is no evidence that his war-time services played any part in the theological repudiation of Catholic antisemitism or anti-Judaism. He was never again to play any significant role even in his own Capuchin order. He died in 1991 at the age of 95.

Paul O’Shea is one of the small group of Australian scholars who have become interested in the Catholic response to the traumatic events of the twentieth century, and particularly in the career of Pope Pius XII, as he sought to deal with the crises brought on by the totalitarian regimes of Europe. Like all of his predecessors, O’Shea suffers the handicap that many of the relevant documents have yet to be released from the Vatican archives, so despite his assiduous survey of Pius’ earlier life as a Vatican diplomat and later as Cardinal Secretary of State, we still have to acknowledge the tentative evaluation of all hypotheses about his war-time policies, and especially about his so-called “silence” concerning the victimization of the Jews of Europe.

O’Shea, like his fellow biographer, Robert A. Ventresca (see my review of Soldiers of Christ. The Life of Pope Pius XII in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65, no. 1 (January 2014): 230-1) lays great emphasis on Eugenio Pacelli’s integration and identification with the corporate Catholic community of the later nineteenth century. But he fails to stress the fact that, under both Pope Pius IX and Pius X, the Vatican was going through a highly conservative, even reactionary, phase, as could be seen in the vicious attacks on Catholic Modernism. O’Shea believes that there can be little doubt that Pacelli was affected by the affair. “But the fact that he remained an exceptional favourite through the crisis … and continued to be promoted while others were cast aside, tells us much about his discretion, his resilience and his survival skills” (P. 144), though also about his deeply conservative mentality. The fact is that by 1914 the Vatican had reached a nadir in its theological and political influence. Its hostility to the modern world was well known. And although new Pope Benedict XV wisely decided to adopt a policy of neutral impartiality during the First World War, the Vatican was pointedly excluded from the peace process in Paris in 1919. The 1920s saw vigorous efforts to reach legally binding treaties, known as Concordats, with many of the European states in order to safeguard the Catholic Church’s interests. Pacelli was in the forefront of such attempts, which however revealed the limits, obstacles and frustrations in dealing with such powers as the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy. The experience can hardly be said to have led Pacelli to a more liberal view of his fellows. He remained convinced of the superiority of the Catholic vision and of the need for centralized control over its affairs through cautious diplomacy, which would avoid confrontation but would harness the Vatican’s limited influence at a time of turmoil.

When Pius was elected Pope in March 1939, the war clouds were ominously threatening. Pius was horrified by the idea of the blood-bath of twenty-five years earlier being repeated. The Church’s duty was to serve the cause of peace. And for his first six months, Pius engaged in a ferment of diplomatic activity to this end. In vain. By September, he was forced to recognize not only the Vatican’s impotence, but also the impossibility of calling Catholics to a higher ethos than national loyalty. He therefore retreated to the same stance of neutral impartiality as advocated by his predecessor Benedict XV. He continued to hope, or possibly to indulge his illusions, that the Vatican’s mediation would eventually be required at the point when both warring sides recognized the need to halt hostilities and seek a truce or even a peace settlement. As Europe’s most experienced diplomat, Pius believed that his services would be vital at such a moment. No steps should therefore be taken, or seen to be underway, which would prevent such an efficacious intervention from taking place. Hence the strenuous efforts to preserve the Vatican’s neutrality throughout the course of the war, especially during the traumatic years 1943 and 1944 when the Vatican was surrounded by three changes of political-military regime. Despite all the pressures and pleas on behalf of the war’s victims, including the Jews, Pius consistently believed that unwise and intemperate language would only make matters worse. In O’Shea’s view, this was a leadership of reaction.

It is clear that Pius was deeply affected by the daily reports that flowed into the Vatican about the murderous practices of the Nazis, especially against the Jews. He agonized long and fervently about what he might say or do, but was continually restrained by the fear that such action would invite reprisals which would make matters worse. In a remarkably frank letter to his friend and colleague the Bishop of Berlin in April 1943, Pius expressed both his horror and frustration. “The seemingly limitless cruelty of the war machines makes the thought of a long drawn-out period of mutual slaughter unbearable. And what we have heard, day in and day out, of atrocities that are far beyond anything which could be ascribed to the necessities of war is even more horrifying and shocking.” The frustration of not being able to decide which course of action would be less damaging to the cause of peace was an unavoidable and recurrent challenge, and lay constantly upon the Pope’s conscience. It is small wonder that he concludes his letter to the Bishop of Berlin with the words: “In constantly striving to find the right balance between the mutually contradictory claims of his pastoral office, the path ahead for the representative of Christ is becoming daily more overgrown, beset with difficulties and full of thorns” (Actes et Documents du Saint Siege, Vol. 2, document 105, letter of 30 April 1943).

But to O’Shea this conscientious and pain-ridden policy of public neutrality and personal sympathy was not enough. To be sure, he acknowledges that as the war went on, we have a profoundly moving picture of the Vicar of Christ wanting to share the sufferings of the persecuted. But in the case of the Jews O’Shea suspects that Pius was the inheritor of a long and ancient tradition of suspicion and contempt towards a religion deemed “superseded”. The Jews were thus among the “lesser victims” for whom no especially dangerous actions or pronouncements were called for. For O’Shea the turning point came in October 1943, when the Germans rounded up the Jews of Rome and transported 1000 to their deaths in Auschwitz. The fact that the Pope did not protest in clear words which could not be misunderstood was an unforgivable moral failure. He believes that Pius did not speak out because he did not want to. His actions and words up to this Nazi atrocity in October 1943 are defensible. After October 1943, they are not. For this reason O’Shea closes his narrative at this point.

Review of James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Review of James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). Xii + 362 Pp., ISBN 9780801419888.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Jozef Tiso was the only Catholic priest ever to become the head of a modern European state, namely the short-lived and ill-fated Republic of Slovakia during the turbulent and violently destructive years of the Second World War. Installed as President in 1939, he served until the final months of the war, when he was forced to flee to Germany and take refuge in a Benedictine monastery. Taken prisoner by American occupation troops, he was extradited back to Czechoslovakia, placed on trial as a war criminal, sentenced to death, and executed in April 1947. Branded as a fascist collaborator by his political enemies, he was mourned by faithful Catholics as a martyr to his faith. Fifty years later, when Slovakia regained its status as an independent country, the arguments about Tiso and his legacy still continued. We can therefore be grateful to James Ward for the first comprehensive treatment in English of this controversial figure, which most capably examines the rival views for and against this priest-politician and his convoluted policies in which religion and nationalism overlapped and often collided.

ward-priest When Tiso was born in 1887, Slovakia was an outlying rural part of the Hungarian kingdom, an enclave of conservative Catholicism staunchly resisting the approach of modernity, particularly in the commercial field. His education and spiritual formation as a young priest were in the highly reactionary tradition espoused by Pope Pius X. But at the same time, he welcomed the emphasis on social action, and the need for Catholics to promote a vibrant corporate life, along with engagement in corporate Catholic politics. He became the editor of a local Slovak newspaper, stressing the Catholic values of solidarity and modesty and attacking both the free-thinking Socialists and the rapacious capitalists, especially the Jews.

The downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 and the revolutionary events which followed only increased Tiso’s involvement in the political affairs of his community. He especially deplored the Communist revolution in Hungary, led by Bela Kun, a Jew, which only encouraged Tiso to throw his support behind the newly created nation of Czechoslovakia, and particularly to give allegiance to the Slovak People’s Party, led by another priest, Hlinka. As Ward puts it, Tiso was reborn as a nationalist, recast as a politician and redirected onto a Czechoslovak path. But in this new nation, Catholic Slovaks found themselves as a backward minority. The Czechs were more numerous, better educated and more progressive. During the 1920s Tiso’s role was therefore one of promoting Catholic and Slovak autonomy, and resisting any lessening of Catholic influence, especially in the schools where progressives argued forcibly in favor of secularization. As the champion of a religious minority in a highly fractured multinational state, Tiso found plenty of scope for his political activism.

In the 1930s Europe was overwhelmed by political extremism, revolutionary violence and totalitarian regimes. Czechoslovakia was threatened by its rapacious neighbors, Germany, Hungary and Poland, each seeking to claim parts of its territory. When Hitler launched his campaign to regain the Sudetenland in 1938, the resulting turmoil led to a large-scale international crisis, which led in turn within a few months to the dissolution of the Czechoslovak state. This presented the opportunity for Tiso and his allies in Slovakia to advance their claim to independent sovereignty, and Tiso promoted himself first as prime minister and then as president, despite the well-publicized remonstrance of Pope Pius XII, who objected to any priest holding such a partisan political position. Tiso ignored the Vatican, and instead rallied his followers around the new opportunities now available to Slovakians.

In fact, his options were few. German predominance in central Europe was made clear when he was summoned to Berlin in March 1939. In Ward’s view these meetings were the most decisive in his life. Hitler proved to be cordial, and offered his help in advancing Slovakian nationalism under German auspices. He accepted this offer of protection even without the approval of his own legislature or executive, as the best way of heading off the Hungarian or Polish claims on Slovakian territory. But the price was to be paid later when Slovakia was drawn into the German attack on Poland, and later on the Soviet Union. This agreement also strengthened Tiso’s hand against the intrigues and rivalries of his compatriots, some of whom were more radical in pursuit of a system patterned on the Nazi example. But Tiso, as a priest, was also aware that his dream of a Catholic corporate life was threatened by the Nazis’ clear antipathy to the church in Germany. He was therefore obliged to adopt a balancing and flexible course, which enabled him to dissemble about his ultimate intentions. While voicing public admiration for Hitler’s leadership, privately he expressed misgivings. His public image as a priest hid his capacity for outflanking his opponents but earned him the respect of his compatriots. In the view of one of the German envoys, Tiso was “without doubt the craftiest, most powerful and most level-headed politician in Slovakia”. But a more critical view was taken by the newly-appointed papal Apostolic Delegate, Giuseppe Burzio, who reported to his superiors in the Vatican: “The question is how long Tiso’s political convictions and especially his conscience as a priest let him march hand in hand with his National Socialist masters”.

One aspect of his policy which was to arouse much controversy concerned his treatment of the Jewish minority. In Ward’s view, Tiso was not motivated by religious prejudice or racial paranoia, but by more pragmatic grounds. He sought to recapture the wealth which he believed Jews had extracted from the Slovak people, and was prepared to grant exemptions for those Jews considered indispensable such as doctors. In early 1941 Tiso supported measures to “Aryanize” businesses when thousands of Jewish firms were transferred to “Christian hands”. There were then squabbles over the spoils, even corruption in the bureaucracy. These steps escalated in March 1942 when the Slovaks signed an agreement with the Nazi authorities to deport young Jews to work in labour camps in German-occupied Poland. In April the first transports took several thousand Jews out of Slovakia. There is no evidence that Tiso objected to the patently cruel enforcement measures. On the other hand, protests were aroused by numerous Slovak dignitaries, including the bishops, and above all the Vatican. The Slovak representative there was summoned by the Cardinal Secretary of State himself and Slovak’s inhuman policies were soundly berated. From Bratislava the Apostolic Delegate reported that “the proposed deportation of 80,000 Jews would condemn the great majority to certain death”. But these representations were not enough to overcome Tiso’s prevarications or the radical measures implemented by his subordinates. The Vatican’s impotence aroused not merely feelings of frustration but of betrayal. As one of the senior Vatican officials commented in July 1942: “It is a great misfortune that the President of Slovakia is a priest. Everyone knows that the Holy See cannot bring Hitler to heel. But who would understand that we cannot even control a priest”. Nevertheless these cumulative protests from the Catholic bishops denouncing the inhuman deportation measures did have an effect. From mid-1942 until August 1944 deportations ceased.

By the end of 1943 it was clear that Germany was not going to win the war. Tiso tried to save his Slovak state in the face of the impending German defeat, but his record of collaboration doomed both his government and his attempt to build a Catholic political entity. The war was increasingly unpopular and Tiso’s prestige sank rapidly. In 1944 Slovakian insurgents tried to overthrow his regime, but this led to an immediate escalation of the German military presence, and the eventual suppression of the revolt. But the advance of the Red Army from the east proved unstoppable. In March 1945 Tiso’s government collapsed, and he was forced to seek refuge in a monastery in Germany. But his plea for asylum in the Vatican was refused. And in July he arrested by American occupation troops and extradited back to Slovakia in shackles. His subsequent trial as a war criminal before a court staffed by Communist or pro-Czech advocates was an opportunity to denounce him and his policies. The verdict was never in doubt. He was able to make a last appeal to his Slovak nation before he was taken to the gallows in April 1947. But with his execution, Tiso became a symbol of war-time complicity or alternatively a Slovak martyr.

Ward devotes his final chapter to describing the historiographical and political battles over Tiso’s legacy. Condemned as a clerical fascist collaborator by Czechoslovakia’s new rulers, it was left up to émigrés to celebrate him as a staunch Catholic and anti-Communist. It was only in the 1990s that a few historians in the now independent Slovakia began to seek a more balanced verdict. The first Slovakian biographer described him as a talented advocate for Slovak autonomy but found his participation in the Holocaust inexcusable. Subsequent evaluations were equally ambivalent. But with Slovakia’s admission to the European Union, and with the advocacy of Pope John Paul II, the arguments for a renewed commitment to Catholic or Christian values in Europe’s constitution echoed many of Tiso’s concerns. The battle for the soul of Europe still continues. But for many observers in the post-communist era, the Slovak hierarchy’s defense of Tiso compromised the church and dissipated the moral capital built up by years of Communist persecution. In Ward’s opinion, Tiso’s personality was constantly caught up in contradictions. His attempt to combine his loyalties to his church and his nation tore him apart but were part of his heritage from the era of the Hapsburgs. He was, in Ward’s view, a “Christian National Socialist” in whom three theologies struggled for supremacy. The first was a traditional Catholic belief in which God sets the agenda, and in which priests function as moral experts. The second was a more nationalist understanding of social values, while the third is the more current evaluation of individual human rights which sees the Holocaust as the epitome of evil and excoriates any priest or politician who collaborated in such disasters. Tiso will likely remain a figure of controversy so long as the future of central Europe and its values continue to be unresolved. But we can be grateful to J. M. Ward for his penetrating analysis and detailed exploration of his mainly Slovakian sources.