Author Archives: John S. Conway

Review Article: The Vatican and the United States during the Interwar Era

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Review Article: The Vatican and the United States during the Interwar Era

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Luca Castagna, A Bridge across the Ocean: The United States and the Holy See Between the Two World Wars (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), Pp. xvii + 193, ISBN 978-0-8132-2587-0.

C. Gallacher, D. Kertzer and A. Melloni, eds., Pius XI and America (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012), Pp. 450, ISBN 978-3-643-90146-9.

The Vatican is the world’s oldest diplomatic entity. But in the last two centuries it was confronted with challenges and set-backs which threatened its very survival. In the mid-nineteenth century it was robbed of its long-held territories by the upstart new Kingdom of Italy and reduced to a small sliver of land in the heart of Rome. At the same time Pope Pius IX retreated into a theological obscurantism which led the church in hostility to any modern patterns of thought. The nadir of the Vatican’s diplomatic influence was, quite possibly, the era of the First World War, when a combination of intrigues by the new Italian government and the anti-Catholic obstinacy of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant President Woodrow Wilson barred the Vatican from the Paris peace conference and the Versailles settlement which resulted. At the same time, the United States saw a resurgence of anti-Catholic nativism and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, with its vociferous outbursts against Catholics, Jews and blacks. For its part, the Vatican was engrossed with trying to establish a set of legally-binding agreements or concordats with the numerous new states which had arisen in the wake of the war. These were supposed to secure the position of Catholic institutions and personnel, but, as the case of the German Concordat signed in 1933 was to show, the results were mixed. In fact, almost immediately protests were launched with the German Foreign Ministry about breaches of the agreement, but no satisfaction was ever given.

The situation in the United States did not improve until the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. His campaign for social reform in the New Deal was widely welcomed by the under-class which included many poor, immigrants and Catholics. The Catholic social work community was particularly impressed, and indeed this move paid off handsomely politically when Roosevelt swept many states into the Democratic fold in 1936. This convergence of ideas in the New Deal and the Catholic Church’s social doctrine, as expressed by the National Catholic Welfare Conference, opened the way for a new relationship of mutual collaboration. This also resulted in an unprecedented participation of Catholics in the national sociopolitical context.

In the 1930s, the resurgence of nationalist antagonisms, especially sponsored by the totalitarian powers, was alarming to both Roosevelt and the Vatican. This alignment of views on their common need to preserve the world for peace and to prevent further conflicts brought the two diplomatic entities closer together, as was symbolized by the highly successful visit of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli, (later Pope Pius XII) to the United States in 1936. He was even invited to have a meal with the President at his summer retreat in Hyde Park, where doubtless the two men discussed the looming dangers of hostilities in international affairs.

The principal difficulty in this rapprochement arose from the fact that the United States had no diplomatic representation at the Vatican, since such an arrangement had been abandoned in 1857. Roosevelt was well aware that any attempt to persuade Congress to vote the funds necessary for the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Vatican would likely arouse waves of vehement opposition from the extreme Protestant wing, as well as from Isolationists. It would be seen as part and parcel of his attempt to draw America into the vortex of world conflict, and hence would be strenuously opposed.

Roosevelt therefore delayed any decision, which was made even more hazardous by the events in Europe in 1938, with the annexation by the Nazis of Austria, which was initially greeted with acclaim by the leading Austrian Cardinal, for which he was strongly criticized by the Vatican. Isolationists in the United States were joined by some vociferous Catholics, such as the voluble “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, whose diatribes were undoubtedly followed by many of his followers. On the other hand, the possible outbreak of hostilities in Europe added to Roosevelt’s desire to recruit the aid of the Vatican for the active pursuit of peace. The death of Pope Pius XI in February 1939 and the election of Cardinal Pacelli as the new Pope further held up this process. So it was not until December 1939, after the outbreak of war in Europe, and the conquest of the largely Catholic Poland, that Roosevelt finally turned his long-held desire into reality. He subtly hit on the expedient of not establishing a normal embassy but rather of appointing a Personal Representative of the President, who would have the status but not the title of an Ambassador. His choice fell on the wealthy industrialist Myron Taylor, a Protestant Episcopalian, who arrived in Rome in February 1940, and behaved with impeccable style and astuteness, entirely avoiding any ecclesiastical or theological matters. As such, Roosevelt now had a direct line to the Vatican and readily assented to the vigorous attempts to prevent any escalation of the war’s hostilities, particularly with Italy. Mussolini’s decision in June 1940 to ignore the appeals of Roosevelt and Pius XII and to enter the war with his Nazi partner spelled the failure of these joint efforts to reserve peace and humanity.

Castagna’s excellently researched examination of the diplomatic archives of both the Vatican and the United States for this short period of twenty years provides a useful extension of comparative diplomatic history. He adds in various papal documents as well as notes the contributions of scholars of this subject in various languages. It is only unfortunate that the papers of Pope Pius XII are still unavailable, so that the next stage of the relationship between the Holy See and the United States, particularly where their policies diverged from 1940 onwards, remains to be told. (For these next events, see J. S. Conway, “Myron C. Taylor’s Mission to the Vatican 1940-1950,” Church History 44, no. 1 (March 1976): 1-15.) It can only be hoped that Castagna, who teaches at the University of Salerno, will be among those scholars invited to follow up this valuable study with a sequel, which could then demonstrate how, in the aftermath of 1945, this relationship actually became the bridge across the ocean of his title. The present short study must therefore be regarded as a prelude, describing the early stages of the thaw in Vatican-American relations which was only fulfilled when full diplomatic relations were finally established in 1984.

The collected essays in Pius XI and America, contributed by a variety of international scholars for a 2010 conference at Brown University, provide further evidence of the tangential and episodic relationships between the Vatican under Pope Pius XI and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. It is striking that these scholars limit themselves entirely to the secular realm. There are no papers given on the ecclesiastical, let alone on the theological developments of those years. Instead the articles concentrate on the political and diplomatic aspects of the Vatican’s outreach and how these overlapped with certain American interests. These essays confirm Castagna’s view that relations improved only after Roosevelt’s election in 1932, when the new President believed that the Catholic social and political thought was not far removed from his idealism. So too he came to the conclusion that the Vatican shared his endeavor to maintain peace in Europe and to restrain the vainglorious ambitions of the European dictators.

In their various explorations and elaboration of the papers from the Vatican archive, it is hardly surprising that these authors paint a favorable picture of the Vatican diplomats, especially of Cardinal Pacelli. Rob Ventresca, for example, in his survey of Pius XI, Eugenio Pacelli and the Italian Fascism, agrees with Castagna that Pacelli’s moderating influence was designed to head off any open breach with Mussolini’s aggressive tactics over Abyssinia, and to promote a negotiated settlement of the dispute. The price paid was to mute the Church’s public criticism of the morality of Mussolini’s imperial misadventures, which Ventresca suggests set a pattern to be repeated later with the even more serious breaches of the peace by Hitler. In her essay, Emma Fattorini takes a more critical attitude. She repeats the theme of her book Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican, pointing to the profound differences of position and temperament between Pius XI and Pacelli. Fattorini clearly prefers the irrepressible intransigence of the elderly pontiff. Jacques Kornberg is even more critical, suggesting that both Pius XI and Pius XII failed to conduct themselves according to their own moral standards. The Vatican issued no outraged protests about the Nazis’ November 1938 Crystal Night pogrom because this was seen as not being a threat to Catholic interests. In Kornberg’s view, civic rights, or universal human rights, were not a matter for the papacy’s concern. On the other hand, Fr. Robert Trisco, in recounting the furor over the outspoken criticisms of Hitler and the Nazi regime made by Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago in May 1937, praises Pacelli for castigating privately the malicious invectives and disparagement perpetrated against the Holy See by the Nazi leadership. Trisco also describes the widespread support for Cardinal Mundelein given by different sections of American opinion, including President Roosevelt. Indeed Roosevelt took Mundelein’s advice about the difficult issue of how to restore diplomatic relations between the United States and the Vatican, but otherwise does not feature much in these essays. In all, there are few surprises, since many of the contributors have already had their say elsewhere. But, as Charles Gallacher remarks, there are still unanswered questions, such as why Pius XI sent Pacelli to the United States in 1936, or what topics were covered when Roosevelt and Pacelli met privately at Hyde Park.

These essays provide additional details in support of the overview given in Castagna’s book, and as such are a useful and reliable addition to our knowledge of papal diplomacy in the inter-war period.

Review of Rudolf von Thadden, Trieglaff: Balancing Church and Politics in a Pomeranian World, 1807-1948

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Review of Rudolf von Thadden, Trieglaff: Balancing Church and Politics in a Pomeranian World, 1807-1948, translated by Stephen Barlau (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 235 Pp., ISBN 978-0-85745-927-5.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Trieglaff is a small village in rural Pomerania, now in the north-west corner of present-day Poland. Following the Napoleonic wars, it was situated in the kingdom of Prussia and was the seat of the aristocratic family von Thadden, who for a hundred-and-fifty years used the castle and estate as their home base for very active participation in the wider spheres of church and politics. The author of this sympathetic account is a direct descendant in the fifth generation of this remarkable family. He was born and lived in Trieglaff until it was overrun by the advancing Soviet troops in March 1945, bringing to an end this era of Junker ascendancy. His narrative has been drawn from the surviving records, along with personal contacts with relations and tenants, both in Germany and the United States, to give us an attractive and instructive description of Trieglaff and its owners across the years. In contrast to many other books written by Germans exiled from their eastern homelands, Thadden avoids both nostalgia and recriminations, and instead adopts an irenic tone, seeking to stress the virtues of all those involved.

The patriarch, Adolf von Thadden, inherited the estate after Napoleon’s defeat and was greatly influenced by the wave of pietistic fervor which swept across Germany in those years. He turned Trieglaff into a center for revivalist meetings for the whole of Pomerania. This was a strongly conservative faith which maintained an uncritical biblical fundamentalism and often expressed itself in sectarian excesses. But it sought to uphold the witness of the individual believer and to prevent the incursion of rationalist or secular ideas. In particular, the Trieglaffers resented the top-heavy controls exercised over the church by state officials, who obeyed the commands of the monarch King Frederick William III in uniting the Lutheran and Reformed adherents into one United Prussian Church. The result was a clash in the village and the secession of a group true to their former loyalties and calling themselves Old Lutherans. They even built their own church at the other end of the village which still survives today.

This determination to maintain the historic orthodoxy of their faith and to thwart all attempts at modernization for liberal or political reasons remained the hallmark of Trieglaff’s conservatism. It was to be revived again a hundred years later, after the Nazis came to power, when the so-called “German Christians” attempted to change both the doctrine and the practices of the church to accommodate Nazi ideology. The then owner Reinhold von Thadden became a leading figure in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church in the 1930s, and made Trieglaff a bastion in this cause. As a young student he had been attracted by the witness of the World Student Christian Federation and by the theological writings of Karl Barth, which he saw as a call to return to the deep roots of the Christian faith which alone could counter the current crises in the political and international arenas.

But at the same time, the whole Thadden family was imbued with the Prussian tradition of loyalty to the state. In both wars they loyally sought to enlist in the best regiments, and fully accepted Hitler’s justifications for the campaigns against the godless communists of the Soviet Union. In fact, three of the author’s elder brothers lost their lives while fighting against the Soviet troops on the eastern front.

By contrast, Reinhold’s elder sister Elisabeth demonstrated her obstinate conservatism by strongly disdaining the whole Nazi movement. In September 1943, while at a private tea party, she made some incautious remarks for which she was denounced to the Gestapo. This led to her arrest, imprisonment in Ravensbrück, and in September 1944, to her execution. This heart-wrenching news only increased the conflict of loyalties which assailed the whole Thadden family. As Reinhold later meditated, these events forced him to “consider the share contributed by our Christian conservatives, our patriotic classes to the political conceptions and the monstrous repercussions of the former regime, down to our militaristic thinking and acting, in a word, our share in the actual guilt of our people.”

As it happened, Reinhold had served as a senior officer in the German military occupation forces in Belgium and France. But when he returned to Trieglaff he was immediately arrested by the Soviet authorities and taken off to serve time in a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Archangel. Luckily he was released after several months there, and repatriated to Berlin. Only a few days later he was joined by his wife and young son Rudolf, who had been expelled from their home in Trieglaff by the newly arrived Polish authorities. The joy of being reunited was however marred by the awareness that they could never hope as a family to return to Trieglaff again.

In later years, Reinhold dedicated himself to the new venture in German Protestant life, namely the institution of biennial Church Rallies, which drew adherents from all parts of the country, including to begin with East Germans, for a week of discussions about the witness and future commitments of the church. These rallies proved to be highly popular, and indeed still continue. Reinhold’s service in this cause was marked by his determined advocacy of both repentance and reconciliation. He came to be revered as the patron of the now much humbler Protestant church, which sought out ecumenical contacts and adopted policies of social reform in deliberate repudiation of the nationalistic and militaristic attitudes of the past.

His son Rudolf, the author of this book, studied history and theology, and opted to enter academic life. He has since had a distinguished career as a professor of modern European history at Göttingen University. As this reminiscence of his family’s connection with Trieglaff shows, he also wanted to bring his father’s message of reconciliation and international friendship back to the place of his early years. But until 1978 Germans were forbidden to go back across the Oder River and revisit Pomerania. Once that restriction was lifted Rudolf found opportunities to take his wife and family to see his original home and to strike up friendships with the new occupants of the village and estate. Despite the denominational and language barriers, he succeeded in this aim, and returned on a number of occasions in later years. Largely at his initiative, and in memory of all those Germans forcibly expelled in the immediate post-war years, Rudolf arranged for a large-sized bronze plaque to be installed at the entrance of the Old Lutheran, now Catholic Church, which was unveiled in September 2002. The text of the plaque reads, in both Polish and German:

Pax vobis (Peace to you)

In memory of the many generations of German Trieglaffers who lived here and found happiness,

And with all good wishes that things might go well for those

Who make their home in Trieglaff today.

This plaque surely stands as a witness to the power of Trieglaff’s historic traditions to overcome the legacy of domination, conflict, ethnic cleansing and exile, and to build new bridges of hope for the future.

The book has been excellently translated into English by Stephen Barlau, and includes a useful glossary of terms used to describe the structures of the German Protestant Churches.

Review Essay: German Regional Churches Look Back on the Twentieth Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Review Essay: German Regional Churches Look Back on the Twentieth Century

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Stephan Linck, Neue Anfänge? Der Umgang der Evangelischen Kirche mit der NS-Vergangenheit und ihr Verhältnis zum Judentum. Die Landeskirchen in Nordelbien. Band 1: 1945-1965 (Kiel: Lutherische Verlagsgesellschaft, 2013). Pp. 352. ISBN 9783875031676.

Antonia Leugers, ed., Zwischen Revolutionsschock und Schulddebatte. Münchner Katholizismus und Protestantismus im 20. Jahrhundert (Saarbrücken: universaar, 2013). Pp. 310. ISBN 9783862230594.

For the past seventy years, Germans in general, and their churches in particular, have wrestled with how to come to terms with their stances during the Nazi period, and especially with their complicity in the mass murder of their fellow citizens of Jewish origin. A no less troubling situation has been their experience in the post-war period, as the political and personal crises of the Cold War preoccupied the German people and divided them into rival political camps.

The books under review examine the record of two regional churches, the first in the area north of the River Elbe and the second in Bavaria. These are both written or compiled by younger church historians, often aghast at what they now see as the misguided attitudes of their forebears in these churches. Their objective is clearly to try to rectify, and if possible to improve, the premises for future church political and theological attitudes, especially towards Judaism.

In Neue Anfänge? Der Umgang der Evangelischen Kirche mit der NS-Vergangenheit und ihr Verhältnis zum Judentum. Die Landeskirchen in Nordelbien. Band 1: 1945-1965, Stephan Linck analyses the situation in the four Protestant churches which united in 2012 to form the Evangelical Church of North Elbia. He had earlier organized a travelling exhibition which did much to break the silence about these churches’ failures in former years. His central point is that this part of Germany had a long history of extreme nationalism, backed by Lutheran authoritarianism. This made these congregations particularly susceptible to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and encouraged their extremist and anti-communist attitudes, which were only reinforced in this region after 1945, when so many refugees fled to the region to escape the Russian occupation and the subsequent Communist domination of eastern Europe. These churches’ active support of the refugees’ desire to regain their homelands, in Linck’s view, only exacerbated their reactionary political attitudes and entrenched their prejudices.

Linck’s study, of which this is only the first volume covering up to 1965, analyses the primary factors in determining the churches’ political and social stances towards their Nazi past, which can be characterized as evasion and silence. It was only in 1998 that the North Elbian Synod took the first steps to commission Linck to examine the record of their behavior before and after 1945. This was followed in 2001 by a far-reaching declaration which “recognized our errors, admitted our war guilt, opposed all forms of mission to the Jews, supported Christian-Jewish dialogue and respected the difference between us and Judaism”. Similar sentiments were written into the newly-formed united church’s 2012 constitution. But these were all belated steps taken against considerable opposition from the congregations and many of their leading members.

Linck’s aim is clearly to overcome the legacy of the past in order to combat the ultra-nationalist and xenophobic attitudes of many North Elbian Christians. He is encouraged by the evidence that these attitudes have receded since 1965, and plans to provide a further analysis in his second volume for the period up to 1989. In the major sections of this present volume, Linck describes in full detail, and with increasing exasperation, the mentalities and the policies adopted by the leaders of these churches, both clerical and lay, in the immediate post-war years. He quotes, as the basic stance taken by many pastors and their congregations, the view that “Never before has a people who have survived a lost war been so humiliated and placed in a hopeless position as we have today.” Indeed, during these traumatic years, many churchmen’s attitudes were marked by their refusal to acknowledge their complicity in Germany’s war crimes, their total lack of sympathy for the victims apart from themselves, their unwillingness to face up to the enormity of the mass murder of the Jews, or their widespread complaints about the mistreatments allegedly being imposed by the vindictive Allied occupation forces. Among the North Elbian church hierarchies, there was widespread reluctance to admit Germany’s war guilt, along with the evasion of personal responsibility and the white-washing of many leaders’ pro-Nazi activities. These were challenged by only a handful of isolated and prophetic voices. At the insistence of the Allies’ investigating commissions, all active Nazi Party members were to be dismissed from their posts. But the churches were allowed to denazify their own structures. This in fact led to a lenient and self-interested defence of those pastors who had been strident supporters of the former regime, and who were merely invited to take early retirement, lest they suffer worse penalties. In many cases these men were reinstated after a few years, apparently with the full approval of their congregations. Another problem was the widespread negative feelings towards the members of the German Resistance movement. The only pastor in the north German region who was arrested and subsequently executed by the Gestapo was regarded after the war not as a hero but as an embarrassing maverick, then forgotten. The reforming initiatives taken by other branches of the Protestant Church were either sidelined or ignored. Only in a few isolated and exceptional cases were pastors willing to take steps to encourage a spirit of reconciliation and repentance for the past.

These same features were on display in the Bavarian Protestant Church, too. They are the subject of Björn Mensing’s chapter in the collection of essays edited by Antonia Leugers, entitled Zwischen Revolutionsschock und Schulddebatte. Münchner Katholizismus und Protestantismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Mensing also comments acerbically on the apologetic and self-serving accounts of Bavarian Protestantism written by survivors, which excused the early and enthusiastic support given to Adolf Hitler as stemming from a desire to prevent a victory for Communism and as a sign of the “rechristianising” of a war-torn Germany. Those few voices calling for a more critical and less self-justifying account of the Nazi years were quickly sidelined. So too those who had been involved in the 1944 plot to overthrow Hitler and had been executed as a result, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were regarded by the majority of the Bavarian Protestant leaders as “traitors to the national cause”. Mensing, who is now the Pastor of the Church of Reconciliation erected in the former concentration camp at Dachau, recounts with some bitterness the opposition to the building of this chapel by the former pro-Nazi pastor of the neighboring parish, clearly backed by the majority of his parishioners. It was only after the generation of participants in the Nazi years had all passed from the scene that a more fitting recognition of the church’s failures and a new sense of repentance could be encouraged. Mensing blames the continuing influence of the conservative leadership in the Bavarian Protestant Church for the slowness with which a greater sense of repentance and reconciliation has at last been adopted. But in view of the entrenched national conservatism of most Bavarian Protestants, Mensing believes there is still a long way to go before the deficiencies of the past can be finally laid to rest.

Other essays in this collection deal with the experience of Catholics in Bavaria from 1919 onwards. The editor, Antonia Leugers, is a junior member of the Catholic Faculty of Theology at Tübingen University, where once Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and the intrepid scholar Hans Kung both taught. Leugers’ own essay provides more insights about the attitudes in 1918-9 of the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich, Michael von Faulhaber, drawn from his recently opened diaries for this period. These sources confirm the already established view that Faulhaber’s deeply conservative and monarchist sympathies were shattered by the events in Munich in those revolutionary months. Not surprisingly, he saw these alarming events as a deliberate challenge to his vision of a Christian-led authority, and readily enough accepted the stereotypes of “the barbarous Bolshevik hordes” whose attempts to overthrow the existing order were at least partly inspired by the fact that many were Jewish communists inspired by the revolutionary successes in the Soviet Union. Faulhaber’s subsequent political views were, in Leugers’s opinion, largely influenced by his experiences in those traumatic days.

In a second article, Leugers follows Faulhaber’s mixed utterances during the 1920s on the subject of international peace. On the one hand he called on Catholics to support world peace efforts, but on the other he deplored the actions of the victorious allies in imposing on Germany the unjustifiably vindictive terms of the Versailles Treaty. He also took issue with the decision of the French government to station black African troops in their zone of occupation in the Rhineland, which aroused enormous hostility, and led to a campaign against the so-called “Rhineland bastards”. Such racially-based resentments only played directly into the hands of the newly-formed Nazi Party. Indeed, Adolf Hitler frequently quoted Faulhaber’s views, which probably was the basis for his later cordial meeting with the Cardinal in November 1936, when both agreed on their common hostility to Communism.

A parallel article by Axel Töllner describes the very similar reactions of the Bavarian Protestant press, which equally mourned the loss of the monarchy, deplored the moves made by the new Education Minister to sever the links with the churches and remove all church subsidies, and welcomed the forcible restoration of a conservative government in May 1919. At the same time, these press organs gave little or no support to the democratic impulses in the Weimar Republic, but clearly preferred authoritarian governance. Hence they were already susceptible to the kind of propaganda shortly to be launched by the Nazi Party in Bavaria with ever increasing success.

In a second article, Töllner describes the perverse influence during this period of Erich and Matthilde Ludendorff. Ludendorff had been one of Germany’s leading general during the war but was subsequently misled by his wife to break with his Protestant upbringing and to establish the Tannenberg League as a centre for the propagation of belief in a German God, combined with radical nationalism. Ludendorff used his considerable prestige to wage a violent anti-Christian and anti-Semitic campaign, which included the assertion that Germany’s defeat in 1918 and its subsequent enslavement had been due to an unholy alliance of Jesuits, Freemasons and Jews. Despite the similarity of views with those of the more radical Nazis, the Ludendorffs openly criticized Hitler for his “capitulation” to the Vatican in signing the 1933 Concordat. That same year, the Tanneberg League was prohibited. A reconciliation only followed when Ludendorff died in 1937 and Hitler ordered him to be given a state funeral. The churches demonstrated their loyalty to the Führer by having their buildings fly the swastika national flag. In the 1940s, the Nazis’ prohibition was thrown out and Matthilde Ludendorff resumed her sectarian campaigns. At the time of her death if 1966, her group had apparently some 400 adherents.

Thomas Forstner provides a useful overview of German Catholic attitudes since 1945 about their experiences under the Nazi regime. To begin with, their leaders depicted the Catholics as being resolutely opposed to Nazism, a view conveniently also adopted by the Western Allies. The bishops’ early pastoral letters talked of Catholics being the victims of a clique of criminals who had seized power and inflicted their anti-Christian views on the nation. Where Catholics had collaborated, this was due to their feelings of loyalty and to their innocence in political affairs. Any accusation of collective guilt had therefore to be rejected. Such an idealization of the recent past left no room for a more critical examination of Catholic complicity in the Nazis’ crimes, and so it was passed over in silence. It also gave opportunities for favourable treatment of former Nazis, especially if they rejoined the Catholic ranks. Priests only too readily provided letters of exculpation, which then served to consolidate the conservative forces dedicated to averting the dangers of communism or socialism in post-war Germany. The victims of Nazi crimes and injustices were largely forgotten or ignored.

This favourable view of the Catholic Church’s record during the Nazi years was later supported by the large-scale academic productions of the Catholic Commission for Contemporary History. In the 1960s, however, such apologetic accounts were challenged, most strikingly by the 1963 production of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy, which accused the then Pope Pius XII and by implication the entire Catholic hierarchy of failing to stand by the Nazis’ victims, and of being interested solely in preserving the church’s own institutional life. Such protests were frequently regarded by leading Catholics as designed to weaken the political hold of conservative Catholicism, as established since 1949 under the Catholic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Left-wing Catholics in West Germany had continually to contend with accusations that they were sympathetic to the Communists in East Germany. The collapse of the latter regime in 1989 was taken as an indication of the correctness and validity of conservative and nationalistic Catholicism.

In the most recent years, in Forstner’s view, there has been a tendency to compensate for the lack of support for the Jews during the Holocaust by stressing the religious commemoration of Catholic converts such as Edith Stein, murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 and declared a saint nearly sixty years later. Similar attempts to canonize Pope Pius XII have so far not succeeded. In Forstner’s opinion, such encouragement of martyrology rather than accurate history-writing is a mistake and will not increase the credibility or reputation of the Catholic Church in a now largely secularized world.

Review of Edward Madigan, Faith under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Edward Madigan, Faith under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Ix+296 Pp. ISBN 978-0-230-23745-2.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The first casualty of the Great War, beginning in August 1914, was the wave of patriotic enthusiasm, which led thousands of men, in all European countries, to volunteer for active combat. They expected that the conflict would be short, sharp and victorious, and that they would be home by Christmas. They had also been led to believe that victory would be theirs because God was on their side. But when the fighting began in the muddy fields of Flanders, the resulting death and devastation was disillusioning both militarily and spiritually. For many, if not for most of these eager recruits, one of the salient consequences was that the credibility of the Christian gospel, as preached by the army chaplains, was tested and often found wanting.

Edward Madigan’s valuable study begins with a comprehensive survey of the literature about chaplains and their war-time contributions, some written by chaplains themselves, such a Ernest Raymond’s Tell England, or the far more influential novel by Robert Graves, Goodbye to all That. Many of these books presented a largely negative picture of the war records of these chaplains, finding that they were generally not respected by either officers or men, being considered inadequate to the tasks they faced.

Such critical, or even cynical, assessments in the post-war period only accelerated the decline in the fortunes of the Church of England, which has since proved irreversible. Madigan’s book seeks to examine more closely how far these pejorative judgments are supported by the surviving archival sources.

In his view, the Anglican chaplaincy service was handicapped from the beginning by serious obstacles, both civilian and military. The War Office, to be sure, had an establishment of a Chaplain-General–a Presbyterian–with a limited staff of regular army officers. But the Army High Command thought in terms of a short, mobile professional-conducted campaign, and were therefore reluctant to have the services of any non-combatants anywhere near the front lines. They were unwelcoming of the large number of civilian clergy–and amateur soldiers–who now offered their services as volunteer chaplains. As such, they would have to be given officer status, which meant that each would have to be provided with a servant, a horse, a groom, and space for extra luggage, not to mention basic food and shelter, but none of whom would actually do any shooting. As such they were seen as an unaffordable luxury whose number were best kept to a minimum.

At the same time, the Church of England bishops were reluctant to release men from their parish duties to undertake military activities, for which, despite their eagerness, they had no training. The bishops held that participation in front-line fighting contradicted not only the Ten Commandments but also their ordination vows. Very obviously, none of these potential chaplains had any pastoral experience of war-time conditions, and most had lost touch with the generation of young men, especially from the working classes. Their status as officers, and their clerical training mostly as university graduates, created social barriers which limited their effectiveness. Furthermore, the Army’s reluctance to let them get anywhere near the front lines was a cause for resentment among the troops. They were often relegated to rear echelons or hospitals, and were often suspected of being too lily-livered to actually fight. In these same rear areas, these clergymen were often confronted with restless, sex-starved soldiers, who were eager enough to sample the military-established or at least-tolerated brothels as a relief from the deadly dangers of the trenches. The chaplains’ pious exhortations to maintain standards of decency often fell on deaf, mocking ears.

Only slowly did the War Office realize the value of the chaplains’ contributions to building and maintaining morale, or appreciate their pastoral care for the wounded or the dying. But the chaplains themselves often felt they remained outsiders. Their high hopes that the Church’s witness to the troops, and its evident support for the war effort, would lead to a large-scale return to church worship and attendance were to be sadly disappointed. The example set by many chaplains of diligent and inspiring service was not enough to staunch the post-war ebbing away of the Church’s following, or to reverse the war-induced skepticism about the Church’s message.

As Madigan makes clear, many of the chaplains themselves entertained unrealistic expectations. They had had no previous exposure to the dehumanizing effects of battle combat, so their idealistic optimism was easily shattered. They were unprepared to meet the difficult circumstances in which their religious ministrations were often rejected or regarded as irrelevant. The majority of the troops demonstrated apathy, indifference or even hostility to organized religion. The army’s compulsory church parades were particularly resented. There was little or no sign of any spiritual revival. Such conditions presented an acute challenge which few chaplains were able to deal with successfully.

The result was often loneliness and isolation, making it hard for the chaplains to get alongside the men in the ranks. The situation was only reinforced by the lack of training for service among men under intense moral and physical stress. Only in the later stages of the war were these defects overcome, but they did little to tackle the wider questions about the incompatibility of war itself with the Christian gospel.

Madigan does his best to amend the pejorative views of the chaplains’ services as expressed in later memoirs. He produces the evidence of laudatory testimonies from their superior officers, and points to the number of chaplain decorated for their war-time accomplishments. But he is obliged to note that while many chaplains were respected and well-liked, this was in spite of, not because of their status as priests and representatives of the Established Church. He also notes that their hard-hewn skills at providing comfort and inspiring courage in front-line troops were qualities not much in demand in post-war Britain.

The fact was that the horrors, tensions and bloodshed on the battlefields destroyed faith in a beneficent God for many men, including chaplains. They were overcome by the atmosphere of death and devastation, and adopted a grim fatalism, which made more bearable the impotence and insignificance of the individual soldier. And yet, Madigan points to the unspoken, virtually unrecognized fact that many soldiers adhered to an “essential” or “unconscious” Christianity and to deep-seated beliefs in the goodness of man. It was these manifestations of self-sacrifice, fraternity, charity and humility which enabled them to cope with the strains of trench warfare. It was a vague but real faith.

After the Armistice, the veterans returned home and were treated as heroes. But Britain was far from being a place fit for heroes to live in. The reforms in both church and state which many chaplains longed for never came. There was much disillusionment. But, in his final chapter, Madigan describes some of the more progressive initiatives arising from the chaplains’ war experiences. Dick Sheppard at St Martin’s-in–the-Field in Trafalgar Square, “Tubby” Clayton and his Toc H fraternity, Studdert Kennedy and his Industrial Christian Fellowship, and William Temple and the Life and Liberty Movement, evoked new and reforming images of the serving church. These post-war social service organizations owed much to the former chaplains’ charisma, and were testimony of their founders’ determination to improve the lot of their fellow combatants. They now had the advantage of a much improved familiarity with working-class men, and an enhanced sympathy for their interests and welfare. These contributions were not therefore just to the Church but to society as a whole.

In Madigan’s view, the negative representations of chaplains in post-war literature seem unwarranted and biased. His book will undoubtedly help to dispel the myth of insincere or cowardly parsons, who indulged in un-Christian demonization or preached hatred of the enemy. Instead he tells the story of chaplains who ministered effectively to men in extreme conditions, and who drew from these experiences the strength to serve both church and state in their post-war careers.

Review of Rainer Bucher, Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Rainer Bucher, Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion (London: Continuum Books 2011), Xx+ 140 Pp., ISBN PB 978-1-4411-4179-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Rainer Bucher is Professor of Pastoral Theology at Graz University in Austria. As a young seminarian, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, he was curious about and later dismayed by the stance of his older colleagues in the priesthood towards the Nazi regime, and subsequently by their reluctance or even refusal to come to terms with their failure to protest or resist the crimes and cruelties of Hitler’s regime. Two chapters of this book deal with the responses of the Catholic Church and the measures that need to be taken to avoid any repetition of these omissions, which Bucher largely attributes to the fascination exercised by Hitler’s flamboyant and seductive personality and ideas.

Bucher-Hitler The bulk of the book, which is written in a somewhat convoluted Germanic style, but competently translated into English by Rebecca Pohl, is based on a thorough examination of all of Hitler’s surviving speeches and writings. Bucher’s main contention is that Hitler’s worldview was far more than just an ideology adopted for tactical reasons in order to gain political support. Rather, in Bucher’s view, Hitler’s ideas constituted a theology, even though it was an intellectually crude and merciless construct, and based on an abominable racism. Bucher is well aware that speaking of Hitler’s theology is provocative because it seems to associate what Christians believe with one of the worst criminals of our era. So he is careful to ensure that he cannot be accused of trying to undertake any kind of vindication. His task is therefore one of explanation rather than condemnation, let alone approbation. In this he succeeds with consummate skill.

Bucher seeks to determine the characteristics of Hitler’s creed which brought him such strong and long-lasting support from the German elites, as well as from broad sections of the wider population. It is not enough, he argues, to claim that Hitler’s fascination was due to his charismatic personality or to his undoubted rhetorical skills. Nor is it enough to suggest that Hitler’s hold was based on his political successes, since it is clear that many of his followers remained dedicated to his ideas even after his defeat and death. Instead Bucher argues that it was Hitler’s use of theological concepts, drawn from Christian traditions, but interpreted in a racialist setting, which appealed to many Catholics, and indeed to other Germans.

Hitler’s theology was not orthodox in any dogmatic or academic sense. But it was expressed in a politically decisive fashion, and provided the legitimization of his political creed of racism. It also adopted an apocalyptic dimension. As such, it attracted the support of a few of Germany’s more “progressive” Catholic theologians, such as Karl Adam, Joseph Lortz, and Michael Schmaus, who were eagerly looking for some new approach to modern society and found the teachings of the Catholic hierarchy to be irrelevant to the problems and issues of post-war Germany. In a bastardized form, the same attraction for Hitler’s ideas was found among the more politicized sections of German Protestantism, especially in the ranks of the so-called “German Christians”.

In fact, one reason for this fascination was the symbolic power of Hitler’s frequent references to a higher transcendent reality. But it was also due, as Ian Kershaw pointed out, to the “quasi-messianic commitment to a set of beliefs which were undeniably simple, internally consistent and comprehensive”. The essential characteristic of such beliefs was Hitler’s sharply racist anti-universalism. His appeal to his fellow-countrymen rested on his unshakable belief in the superiority of the German Volksgemeinschaft. He saw his mission as safeguarding this community, and expelling all those of inferior character, especially the Jews.

Why did this project receive such wide support? In part, it was undoubtedly due to the disillusionment caused by the disasters of the First World War. It was also due to the irrelevancy of much of the Church’s preaching, especially in the Catholic ranks, where any accommodation with modernism had been strongly suppressed by the Vatican. But in part it was due to Hitler’s confident and unchallenged proclamation of his faith in Germany and by the cultic mediation of his ideas in mass rallies, and what Bucher calls “collective experiential orgies” with their striking and impressive staging.

What did Hitler himself believe? In Bucher’s view, Hitler’s world-view was deeply influenced by his Catholic upbringing. He not only admired the Catholic Church as a successful organization which lad lasted for centuries, but was a model for the inculcation of religious loyalty and devotion. The Catholic Church was to be followed by its adoption of infallibility in its theories, and rejection of dangerous rivals, such as the Jews. Whereas political ideologies were liable to engage in compromises, Hitler’s version of National Socialism was exclusive and transformative. It could therefore follow Christianity’s record of intolerance, and single-mindedly fulfill its destiny for the German Volksgemeinschaft.

Bucher rightly suggests that it was this heritage which led Hitler to reject the kind of völkisch religiosity proposed by some of his followers. He quickly realized that the obscurantism and fake religiosity of neo-paganism would never be able to attract the majority of Germans. The ideas of such men as Alfred Rosenberg or the cultic fantasies of the Ludendorffs were therefore rejected as incompatible with his racist politics and political objectives. As early as 1922 Hitler was denouncing the völkisch movement as “a hotbed of well-meaning fools”. He continued to pour scorn on such fantasies, even when supported by leaders of his own party such as Heinrich Himmler, on the grounds that these concepts had lost touch with the scientific basis of modernity.

Hitler’s world-view clearly and consistently included a supra-natural dimension. Almost all of his speeches made use of the concept of Providence, which, as Bucher rightly points out, was cleverly positioned between traditional Christian language and general religious vocabulary. From Mein Kampf onwards Hitler used the idea of Providence to legitimate the National Socialist project, and later on he applied it to his own career. After 1933, Hitler frequently claimed that “Heaven and Providence has blessed our efforts”. This vindication of the Nazi struggle, indeed, became a stereotype in Hitler’s speeches “allowing our plans to ripen fully and visibly blessing their fruits”. Thus Hitler was able to attribute the failure of the assassination attempt in July 1944 to the protection of Providence, whose “warning finger tells me that I must continue my work”. With the help of this notion, Hitler’s concrete political actions were inserted into a divine project, through which God was enacting his plans.

So too, in Hitler’s view, National Socialism served to maintain a decisive work in fulfilment of a divine will. Its duty was to carry out God’s intention to make the German race the dominant force in the world and thus secure forever its eternal destiny. “The man who carries out this path will in the end receive the blessings of Providence”. It was through the use of such ideas that Hitler was able to define himself not as a mere power politician but as the executor of a divine will. By such means, he gave his aggressive nationalist racist concepts a quasi-religious legitimization. And the tragedy was that many people in Germany accepted such a creed, seeing Hitler as a religious savior, a divine messenger, or a prophet. Such was the impact of Hitler’s theology.

Review of Arne Hassing, Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Arne Hassing, Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2014), Xx + 384 Pp. ISBN 978-0-295-99308-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Arne Hassing’s achievement is to write the first comprehensive account in English of the Church Struggle in Norway, concentrating on the period following the invasion and occupation of the country by German troops in April 1940. Although news about conditions in Norway, and particularly about its churches, was printed in England during the war as a means of war-time propaganda, Hassing’s more complete study based on the official archives and several decades of secondary sources will undoubtedly become the authoritative account. As such, it is a valuable addition to scholarly learning. As he correctly remarks, church historians of this period have neglected the struggles of smaller nations such as Norway or Holland, and have concentrated on Germany where the complications and complexities of the churches’ relationships to the Nazi state have been intensively studied. But Hassing’s illuminative account of the conditions in Norway has much to offer, particularly in terms of the solidarity of church members against the imposition of an alien ideology and their resistance to any unwanted divergence from the national traditions. Although the main outlines of this resistance, and particularly the special role of the chief bishop, Eivind Berggrav of Oslo, have been known earlier, this book’s detailed analysis will undoubtedly be a major resource for future treatments of European church-state relations during the early twentieth century.

hassing-church He begins with an account of the Norwegian reception of the German Church Struggle in the pre-1940 period, since he rightly notes that both nations had Lutheranism as their official Protestant state religion and as their traditional focus of loyalty. The challenge of Nazi ideology and its attempt to corrupt Luther’s teachings was therefore immediately recognized. Hassing pays tribute to the skilful manner in which Bishop Berggrav differentiated the Norwegian understanding of Luther from that held by many theologians in Germany. He also notes the skill with which the Norwegian church leaders were able to forge an alliance amongst themselves and resolve long-held theological antagonisms, in order to oppose the invaders and their supporters in Norway.

At the same time, he does accept the fact that this Church Struggle in Norway never reached the kind of intensity as for example in Poland. This was due not so much to the firm adherence by Norwegians to Christian doctrine but more to the reluctance of the German governor, Josef Terboven, to engage in an open and costly Church Struggle. Still, Christian resistance of a more passive kind could be seen in the refusal to join the ranks of the pro-Nazi clergy, who followed the line adopted by the chief pro-Nazi Norwegian, Vidkun Quisling. The overwhelming proportion of the Norwegian church members, clergy as well as laity, refused to participate in services which the few pro-Nazi clergy tried to organize. Hassing makes good use of the available statistics to show the bankruptcy of this attempt to create a Nazified Norwegian church.

On the other hand, he also evaluates the somewhat unheroic stand of the Church of Norway in the matter of the persecuted Jews, and points to the lack of any timely mobilization of protest on humanitarian grounds. Even though the number of victims was small, the belated recognition of this issue by Norwegian church leaders has to be acknowledged.

Hassing’s book concludes with a valuable epilogue, pointing out that the defeat of Nazi Germany and the restoration of the pre-war church polity in Norway did not lead to any revival or intensification of church life. In the end, the church struggle reinforced the conservative and pietistic character of the Church of Norway but was insufficient to deflect the social developments led by the socialist and largely secular governments of the post-war period.

My only criticism of this work would be that more should be said about the role of the laity. Hassing’s concentration on the small number of anti-Nazi bishops and clergy, who constituted the essence of church resistance, does not tell us enough about how this lead was followed by the people in the pew, whose attitudes are surely recorded in parish records or personal memoirs. The title of the work would suggest a much broader participation by Christians, but we are not given the evidence, even in retrospect.

Hassing’s excellent command of the large number of secondary sources and his systematic exploitation of the archival records, especially those dealing with the German side of the Norwegians’ church affairs, is commendable in every respect. His esteem for his original homeland shines through, but at the same time, his study gives us a balanced and not uncritical account of the turbulent events of seventy years ago in a country too little recognized as one in which the popular barriers to Nazi ideas were effectively raised and maintained.

Review of Robert Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Robert Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), ISBN 978-1789763552, Pp. xix + 300.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

In his biographer’s view, the reputation of Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 to 1942, has suffered unfairly in the seventy years since his death. He was attacked for being “proud, pompous and prelatical” and is often remembered only for the critical public speech he made during King Edward VIII’s abdication crisis in 1936. This seemed to lack any sign of Christian charity towards the monarch he had earlier sworn to serve loyally. But Robert Beaken presents a more favourable picture, based on a full examination of Lang’s papers in the Lambeth Palace library. He portrays a church leader faced with complex and difficult situations, both ecclesiastical and national, whose temperament was elitist but not cavalier, and who held together the divergent segments of the Church of England with considerable adroitness. That said, Lang lacked both the theological scholarship and the charismatic personality of his successor, William Temple. And in the changed atmosphere of the post-1945 world, he appeared to be a devotee of the past and the top-heavy establishment of the Church of England. In Beaken’s view, however, Lang deserves the credit for holding the Church together during the Second World War without reproach, maintaining the morale of the public and helping the Church to adjust to a variety of thorny political situations.

beaken-lang Lang was born in Scotland, the son of a distinguished Presbyterian minister. When he came to study in Oxford, he switched allegiance to a moderate high Anglicanism and opted to be ordained in the Church of England. His gifts were obvious and he quickly gained preferment. In fact, in 1890, at the age of 36, he became a suffragan or assistant bishop, and at the age of 44 was selected to be Archbishop of York, the second highest appointment in the English hierarchy. He spent twenty years there, before being moved to Canterbury in 1928. In Beaken’s view, it was hardly his fault that he was appointed to York too early and to Canterbury too late in life. He was a loner and a workaholic, and a bachelor who had difficulty in relating to others even of his own class and complexion. As a result, he never established any personal associations and had no following to uphold his legacy. This biography will, however, serve to record his achievements and gives a sympathetic analysis of Lang’s actions during the difficult and traumatic years of the 1930s.

Beaken admits that Lang was ambitious and a snob, and even speculates whether his keen desire to attain high office may have stemmed from a need to justify his conversion to and ordination in Anglicanism. His greatest gift was to be an administrator, getting on with the daily grind of an archbishop. This made for an uneventful career, broken twice by major crises, one ecclesiastical and one political.

The first of these arose in the 1920s over plans to issue a new Book of Common Prayer for the Church of England, to update the 1662 liturgies, which had survived largely unchanged since Cranmer’s days four centuries earlier. After the shock of the Great War, such reforms were held to be necessary for revitalizing church life. The reformers, especially in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the church, sought a liturgy more inclusive of their desires for more colourful and prayerful services. But evangelicals viewed such ideas as an attack on the Reformation heritage of their church, and as a dangerous precedent for “creeping Romanism”. By law all such changes had to be approved by Parliament. But when the new Prayer Book was presented in 1927, it was twice defeated in the House of Commons, due to the mobilization of those MPs who were fearful of any innovations, especially if derived from Roman Catholic practices. Following this setback, the then Archbishop Davidson resigned, and Lang was left to pick up the pieces and to try and heal the obvious disagreements about churchmanship.The two major issues were: first, who held the lawful authority to alter the Book of Common Prayer and its rituals; and second, what changes, if any, were desirable or acceptable to the majority of the Church of England? Beaken regards Lang’s actions as insufficient and tepid. Certainly he appointed a high-level commission, but it took seven years to produce a report, and then recommended keeping the status quo. On the second point, there was no agreement, so confusion reigned. Different parishes, even adjacent ones, could and did provide wholly different liturgies, and the situation still remains unresolved. It was not, in Beaken’s view, Lang’s finest hour.

On the matter of King Edward VIII’s abdication, the second of Lang’s crises, Beaken claims that Lang played a much more decisive part. He acquits him on the charge of organizing a “plot”, along with Prime Minister Baldwin, to force the king to abdicate. But he does suggest that quite early on Lang recognized Edward’s unwillingness to maintain the role of a dedicated Christian monarch upholding traditional values, as had his father before him or his niece after him. Lang saw the monarchy in sacramental rather than merely political terms. But Beaken is critical of the speech made shortly after the abdication which scolded the former king for not upholding the ideals of the Church on Christian marriage, and for associating with those “whose standards and ways of life are alien to all the best instincts of his people”. At the time Lang was attacked for being smugly sanctimonious—and not only by the king’s supporters. At the time, too, most people in Britain blamed the king’s mistress, Mrs. Simpson, the twice divorced American, for causing the catastrophe. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now share Lang’s view of Edward’s unsuitability, and can be thankful that his successor was quickly able to restore the aura of the monarch, as could be seen in the splendid ceremonies of the 1937 coronation, over which Lang presided.

Lang’s leadership of the church and nation as the war clouds regathered over Europe earns Beaken’s praise. He had learnt the lessons of the earlier war, and avoided any claims of divine guidance or approval of Britain’s war efforts. Most of his time was spent in keeping the administration and pastoral witness of the Church of England going. It was not glamourous, but rather a humdrum necessity. Lang did, however, lead in denouncing the Nazi victimization of the Jews, and guided the country during national days of prayer. Even though he was outspoken in opposing the Nazi regime, he also warned against any spirit of vindictiveness or hatred towards the enemy. He joined his colleague Bishop Bell in condemning the blanket bombing of German cities and gave his support to the pacifists’ desire for conscientious exemption from military service. He also gave leadership to discussions for future post-war plans, but soon the added strains of war-time, including the bombing of Lambeth Palace, led him to recognize that he should retire. A younger man would, in any case, be needed to take up the burden of post-war reconstruction. So, in March 1942 he resigned and was replaced by William Temple.

In summary, Beaken believes that Lang left the Church of England in better shape after his fourteen years in office. At the same time, he notes a certain sadness about Lang’s character. “He sat at the top of an ecclesiastical pyramid, the focus of all sorts of unrealistic hopes and expectations, trying to hold together and to guide his Church, and coping with an unenviable workload. … As Archbishop of Canterbury, Lang simply kept going, doing his best for long hours, day by day, filled with an almost Calvinistic sense of duty and obligation” (238-239). He had inherited a ramshackle church government, and struggled under a heavy burden of office without adequate support. Still, his vision for a Christian England was upheld and in many ways is still in place.

Review of Clifford Green and Guy Carter, eds., Interpreting Bonhoeffer

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Review of Clifford Green and Guy Carter, eds., Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Historical Perspectives/Emerging Issues (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), Pp. xvi + 258, ISBN 978-4514-6541-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The time has come, the editors said, for a synopsis of Bonhoeffer’s theology and witness. So Clifford Green and Guy Carter invited an international gathering of theologians, translators and historians for a conference at the Union Theological Seminary in New York in November 2011. The papers from that meeting have now been published in this book. But since they were presumably prepared in advance, it is not clear how much resulted from this meeting. The reader is left to make his or her own synopsis.

greencarter-interpretingbonhoeffer The tone is of course laudatory, rather than critical. But at least these papers help to set the boundaries within which Bonhoeffer scholarship can flourish today, and thus exclude some of the more exaggerated theories. For example, in recent years, Bonhoeffer has been characterized as a revolutionary, an assassin and an American Evangelical. None of these authors was invited. On the other hand, it is also clear that the theologians and the historians are not always talking on the same wave-length. The latter’s approach is empirical, concrete and historical, whereas the former seem often to engage in highly theoretical, even metaphysical interpretations, which rarely touch down on the solid earth of Nazi Germany. So this book should help to encourage some cross-fertilization in the debates about Bonhoeffer’s legacy.

Victoria Barnett leads off for the historians, along with three other members of our CCHQ team. She has been the general editor of the English translations of the sixteen volumes of Bonhoeffer’s papers, but still feels that this is only a work-in-progress. And just because the epoch in which he lived is gone, so the challenge is to try and understand the church and faith which shaped him and his students. In the thousands of pages which survived–his biographer Bethge collected everything–it is easy to get lost in the forest and not to see the trees. His life and work remain fragmentary and unfinished. And, as he himself admitted, he was never completely clear about his motives. Barnett rightly states that, contrary to his later fame, Bonhoeffer was a marginal figure in the German Church and the Resistance Movement. For the most part, as he himself admitted, he was amongst those who were “silent witnesses to evil deeds.” His life was cruelly cut short at an early age. His theological enterprise was barely begun. Yet his contribution–at a time when European Christianity suffered drastic blows–was an authentic witness to a world come of age.

Doris Bergen takes up the question of why the churches made so few protests against the Nazis’ crimes. Their silence in face of the Nazi persecutions and outrages has been a charge frequently leveled against Christianity. The question, she thinks, is inadequate. It is not the silence, but the noisy and enthusiastic support for the Nazi regime which concerns her most. Much more pertinent would be to question why the churches so readily backed the Nazi state. Why did they engage in pro-Nazi ceremonies, lend their religious support to Hitler’s wars of aggression, indulge in antisemitic propaganda, and even expel Jewish-Christian members from their parishes? She gives numerous and shocking examples of how the majority of churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, subordinated or distorted Christian teachings in order to provide ringing and voluntary endorsements as loyal Germans, and genuine Nazis. This was the very opposite of silence. She clearly does not have much time for those who were later to argue that churchmen were intimidated by the ruthless police state tactics of the regime, and were fearful lest they be taken off to be imprisoned in one or other concentration camp. As she rightly points out, silence or martyrdom were not the hallmarks of the majority of German Christians, though all honour is due to those who chose this latter path. But she might have considered more fully the principal reason for what seems to us now as widespread apostasy. In my view, the root cause lies in the churches’ shattering loss of credibility in the years after 1918 when their strident preaching of an imminent German victory with God’s blessing was proved false, and their proclamation of God’s beneficence had to come to terms with the millions of corpses lying in Flanders Fields. In the subsequent years, the attempt to regain the allegiance of those they had so grievously misled was their principal concern. Enthusiastic support for a popular political movement seemed to be the avenue to make the church relevant again. For Catholics, who had for so long been regarded as second-class citizens, the opportunity to upgrade their status by joining the Nazi bandwagon seemed to secure their institutional position in the wider society. Protestants too were eager to celebrate their national loyalties and to swallow their reservations about the tactics employed by their new rulers. Their complicity in the regime’s crimes cannot be doubted, even if many of them deluded themselves as to its true nature or intentions. The silence of the churches after 1945 was all the more obvious when, for the most part, they showed no remorse or repentance.

Bob Ericksen echoes the same themes in his short chapter, in which he too strongly criticizes the readiness of so many church people to concur with Nazism, including the majority of the Confessing Church, at least on national grounds. Bonhoeffer was one of the very few pastors of his generation who differed from the majority. This only led to his isolation both during his life, and even more so afterwards. For many years after 1945 the majority of nationally-minded churchmen took exception to his political or to his theological views, or to both. It was at least twenty years before the impact of his “new theology” and the prodigious efforts of his biographer, Eberhard Bethge, paid off. Ericksen has more recently written extensively about the complicity of both the pastors and the professors in serving the Nazi regime, mainly for nationalistic reasons. In this essay he correctly criticizes the churches’ readiness to praise Hitler’s brutal imposition of repressive measures, especially against the Jews, for whom churchmen showed relatively little or no empathy, and all too readily accepted the Nazi propaganda that the Jews were a threat to German values. Their predisposition to anti-Judaic theological biases rendered them, even Bonhoeffer, incapable of changing to a much more positive evaluation of their Jewish heritage.

Matthew Hockenos gives an excellent summary of how the Protestant churches eventually came to terms with this deficient legacy. He rightly questions the extent to which Bonhoeffer himself changed his theology about the Jews, since we lack any substantial evidence after his very tradition-bound statement of supersessionist theology from 1933. Hockenos points out that the leaders of the Evangelical Church after 1945 were all survivors of the Confessing Church struggle, and still politically and theologically nationalistic. When it came to addressing the church’ share of responsibility for the policies of the Third Reich, these leaders “demonstrated more trepidation than courage, more equivocation than clarity, and more obstruction than determination.” Most of them were shocked by Bonhoeffer’s readiness to take part in the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler and regarded him as a national traitor not a Christian martyr. They stressed the post-war indignities and sufferings of their own people at the hands of the occupying powers, rather than the far greater sufferings their countrymen had imposed on so many other nations and peoples. It took years before Bonhoeffer’s reforming ideas could take hold. Similarly, years were to pass before a new climate of repentance for Christian prejudice against the Jews could emerge. Hockenos provides a notable if brief description of the slow and often reluctant process of “metanoia” in the Evangelical Churches on the subject of attitudes towards the Jews, and contrasts this with the much more vibrant contributions of such Catholics as John Oesterreicher and Gertrud Luckner, whose pioneer efforts were to find fruition in the Second Vatican Council. But thanks to Bonhoeffer’s biographer, Eberhard Bethge, the same route was finally taken by the German Protestants too.

Keith Clements’ fine contribution focuses on Bonhoeffer’s postwar reception in Britain, which was much more friendly and sympathetic than in his homeland. This was largely due to the friendships he had established with the ecumenically-minded community during his earlier visits to England. Principally it was the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, with whom Bonhoeffer had collaborated in the Life and Work Movement, and who warmly welcomed him on his arrival to look after the German-speaking churches in London. Bell found Bonhoeffer a most valuable source of information about the German Evangelical Church, and resolutely backed the Confessing Church in its struggle to block the Nazi plans. It was also Bell, who most courageously defied public opinion and organized the first memorial service for Bonhoeffer–a dead German–in a large London church in July 1945. So too Bonhoeffer found an ally in Joe Oldham, one of the chief architects of the future World Council of Churches, and in Ronald Gregor Smith, the Editor of the Student Christian Movement Press, which was the first to publish Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison in English translation. Its impact caused sensational reactions in the early 1950s. All of these men had a deep sense of the crisis facing Western Civilization, and the need for new visions, not just for the church, but for the world and humanity. Bonhoeffer’s message from his prison cell exactly matched their hopes, and gave a pragmatic concreteness to their witness in those years.

Other essays in this collection explore the impact of Bonhoeffer’s theology in such far distant societies as Japan and Brazil, thus giving a world-wide dimension to his legacy. Of course, this global appearance of his ideas and life-story owed much to the successes of his translators, especially into English. Several papers in this book show how this task was undertaken, and how the translators had to wrestle with Bonhoeffer’s cultivated, upper-class, but somewhat dated German, and to find up-to-date and more colloquial expressions in English for his much wider audiences. A very good instance of their dilemmas comes in trying to translate the well-known poem Christen und Heiden. They were also perplexed by Bonhoeffer’s continual use of masculine pronouns for “God” or “Man”, and wondered how appropriate it would be to turn these gendered expressions into some more modern form of inclusive language. It was a delicate course to steer between the Scylla of Bonhoeffer the proto-feminist and the Charybdis of Bonhoeffer the hopeless chauvinist.

The theologians’ contributions focus very largely on Bonhoeffer’s ideas about “public ministry” and are drawn from close studies of his Ethics. As the epoch of European-centered Christianity is increasingly replaced by global diversification, and as his homeland Germany, like other parts of historic Christian Europe, becomes more and more pluralistic in its religious allegiances, so Bonhoeffer’s insights will undoubtedly continue to be of value in guiding us forward in fashioning new forms of discipleship for the years ahead.

Review of Alister Chapman, Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Review of Alister Chapman, Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 222 Pp., ISBN 978-0-19-977357-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

John Stott was one of the most prominent leaders of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England during the second half of the last century. This sympathetic but not uncritical biography records his achievements and places him in the long tradition of English Evangelicals stretching back to the days of the first Queen Elisabeth, and sustained by the faithful witness of such men as John and Charles Wesley, Charles Simeon, and William Wilberforce.

chapman-godlyambition John Stott was born in 1921 in a well-to-do professional family and, as was the custom, went to one of England’s most prestigious private (i.e. “public”) schools, Rugby, where his talents led to his appointment as Head Boy. At the age of seventeen, he had a classic evangelical conversion experience and invited Jesus Christ into his life. This was largely due to the influence of an itinerant Anglican clergyman named Eric Nash, whose mission it was to attract young public school leaders and lead them to a life of Christian witness and service . Nash remained Stott’s mentor for many years and undoubtedly encouraged him to seek ordination as a Church of England priest. This decision was to be a great disappointment to Stott’s family, as was (even more so) his resolve not to be conscripted to do military service at the very moment when the Second World War broke out in 1939. Stott took advantage of the loop-hole which allowed students in training for the ministry to be exempt from military service. He was thus one of the few young men taking his war-time undergraduate degree at Trinity College, Cambridge, after which he moved on to the nearby theological college, Ridley Hall, which resolutely maintained the evangelical tradition of those martyrs burnt at the stake by Queen Mary four centuries earlier.

After his ordination, Stott served as curate at his home parish in central London, but his initial fame came through his series of university “missions” which he conducted in several British universities during the first post-war decade. These were aimed directly at the intellectual elite. He avoided the kind of approach adopted by earlier Evangelicals which stressed an emotional “hell-fire” approach. Criticism of American evangelists and their “enthusiastic” tactics was widespread. So Stott carefully argued along traditional lines for a reasoned defence of the faith, aiming for a broad social influence among his peers. Student interest was also built up through the writings of T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis, who argued for a rational form of proclamation of Christian truths. Such views only strengthened the desire for a responsible and conservative social order which prevailed in post-war Britain. The ceremonies of the 1953 Coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II gave full expression to this sentiment. Stott was amongst those who looked for a renewed sense of a Christian moral order for which both church and state would collaborate.

But it was not to be. In the 1960s British popular culture moved rather rapidly away from the establishment conservatism which John Stott embodied and sought to inculcate. These were the years of the Beatles generation. Britain had lost its empire and was unsure of any future direction. The moral seriousness and sense of national destiny that the empire had encouraged faded away. Church attendance declined strikingly. Increasing numbers of the population no longer saw adherence to Christian beliefs as relevant to their lives. To be sure, there were parishes, especially evangelical ones, which flourished. Among them was All Souls, Langham Place, in the heart of London’s prestigious shopping district. In 1950 John Stott was promoted and appointed its Rector, or senior clergyman. But the change in climate only led to these outposts of evangelical fervour to be regarded with even more skepticism, and their spiritual ministries were disdained by the surrounding population. Still, Stott served for twenty years and upheld thoughtfully and tenaciously the central core of evangelical beliefs, such as a strong devotion to the Bible and the importance of a personal devotion to Christ. At the same time, his focus was not fixed on the past. He began to recognize that the church’s witness had to be not solely spiritual but also social, not just local, but also—taking advantage of the new means of communication—world-wide. Even though some of his parishioners grumbled at his frequent absence on preaching tours in different parts of the globe, Stott earned good marks for bringing the gospel to new audiences and new converts in a sober and dignified but also enthusiastic manner.

Stott’s priority was always evangelism and the equipping of his congregants to join him in reaching out to reach new converts with the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ. But Stott’s witness and manner combined a definitive message with an openness which made All Souls a comfortable and appealing place for all classes. Given the high mobility and transience of the local population, this was a recipe which needed to be stressed. Rigid adherence to Anglican formulaic traditions was abandoned in favour of a more open invitation to any and all to attend and take part in the services. This made All Souls particularly welcoming to students and international visitors and reproduced a sense of Christian universalism which Stott was only too glad to encourage. Stott never married, apparently in order to dedicate himself to his ministry. This of course gave him greater freedom to fulfill his world-wide evangelism.

This latter interest was in part driven by the fact that All Souls remained a stubbornly middle-class enclave. The hoped–for converts from the masses never materialized, despite his training of lay evangelists for door-to-door visiting. The social diversity of the parish was elusive, and was only strengthened when the rise of the welfare state severed many of the traditional charitable links between the churches and the working classes. To the latter, All Souls and its Rector appeared patronizing and elitist. All Souls was a parish for the well-educated who appreciated Stott’s learned preaching, his impeccable accent, and the refined music. But even with these devoted followers, the longed-for revival of English Christianity did not occur.

In 1970, after twenty-five years of pastoral ministry in the same parish, Stott believed he had said his piece. He was disappointed with the results, and tired of the minutiae of parish life. However his ambition drove him to believe that in other places, particularly overseas, new opportunities for evangelism were to be found with more receptive audiences. Stott was a life-long Anglican, but he now began to look beyond the established church, and to seek out occasions where his kind of evangelism could be the vehicle for a wider Christian unity. Although the Church of England had the advantage of a church in practically every town and village, often inherited from the Middle Ages, Stott was worried about the fact that it had too few evangelical clergy. After the 1958 meeting of the world’s Anglican bishops at Lambeth Palace, Stott took the initiative in founding the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion in order “to bear witness with courage and clarity to the great Biblical and Reformation principles.” One of the results was his leadership in the campaign to maintain Parliament’s control over the form of services as enacted in the Book of Common Prayer, which had remained unchanged since 1662. Three hundred years later, both the Archbishops of Canterbury and York had petitioned to have the right to institute more flexible and timely changes to the Church of England liturgy, but Stott and his faction saw this as a dangerous move to increase the influence of Anglo-Catholics in their national church . Naturally the Archbishops were incensed at such opposition, but were relieved when Parliament allowed their petition with hardly any murmur. All this meant that the long-standing identification of the national destiny with evangelical Protestantism was no longer valid. Stott and his friends were dismayed. They were fearful of a Catholic drift in the Church of England and were determined to challenge it. By this time, his position of leadership in this cause, and his years of faithful service, naturally led him to believe that he might be in line for promotion to a bishopric, where his influence would be greatly increased. But in fact this never happened. Chapman gives no reason for this lack of preferment, but possibly it was because his outspokenness was too rebarbative for his superiors among the clergy. On the other hand, Stott was not tempted to join in any move away from the national church and kept his faction of Evangelicals loyal to the traditional establishment.

The challenge for Stott and his less rigid colleagues was to try and hold together Evangelicals of different persuasions with no power other than that offered by loyalty, persuasion and success. At the same time, he was aware that approaches for dialogue with other branches of the church might raise alarms among the staunchest Evangelicals. But as he explained, when accepting an invitation to the World Council of Churches Assembly in 1968: “our desire for dialogue does not mean we think all points of view are equally valid, or all theological and ecclesiastical systems equally pleasing to God”. This balancing act between a willingness to learn from others, and a resolve to hold on to the rightness of evangelical faith, was not easy and at times led to misunderstandings. But it was one he sought to implement in a variety of settings around the world. Agreement among Evangelicals, Chapman suggests, is made all the harder because of their individualistic streak, coupled with a tradition-bound rigidity of outlook, which still looked back to the Reformation and was suspicious of any possible infiltration of Catholic ideas or practices.

Evangelicals have often been tempted to focus on their own holiness rather than on social righteousness. But Stott had seen enough of the social problems in London to recognize that the Church’s witness needed to reach out to those who did not or had not aspired to personal salvation. And his many trips abroad widened his horizons. He began to see that the world’s concerns needed a Christian response. Social action to relieve suffering in an unjust world was to become his insistent theme. As he opened his eyes to global poverty, he was ready to hear the critique of Western capitalism that non-Western Christians were making. In Chapman’s opinion, from being a young preacher with little time for social problems, he became a major advocate for Christian social action.

Increasingly Stott’s sphere of action became world-wide. He readily accepted invitations from numerous countries, and made use of the new intercontinental air travel services, so that, for many, he became a new type of evangelical hero for the jet age. His favourite audiences were students, but his wider fame was seen at the notable Lausanne International Conference on World Evangelism in 1974, where he was the principal speaker and chair of the committee writing the conference report. But Lausanne, which had been funded by Billy Graham’s organization, and supported by most of the American evangelical leadership, saw itself as the rival of the World Council of Churches, and therefore downplayed the emphasis on the social gospel and theological modernism, which characterized the WCC. Stott had a hard task in trying to convince the Americans that his view of social responsibility had to be built into any talk of world evangelism. This was an uphill battle, and in Chapman’s view, it largely failed. But that did not stop Stott from pursuing his hopes for the world without apology.

In summary, Stott was a missionary with a world-wide parish. His ministry was to show that evangelicals could present an intelligent witness based on more than just enthusiasm. His numerous books enjoyed a wide circulation, and, although not original, presented orthodox Christianity with verve, and hence were justifiably influential especially among students. He successfully opened the minds of many followers beyond the engrained rigidity of evangelical fundamentalism, and thus restored the intellectual credibility of his message. He showed evangelicals that it was possible to be devout and intellectually creative as well as politically conservative. In this manner he was able to fulfil his godly ambitions.

Book Note: Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary Men. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters against Hitler in Church and State

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Book Note: Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary Men. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters against Hitler in Church and State (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), Pp. 157, ISBN 978-1-59017-681-3.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The latest addition to the Bonhoeffer corpus of writings is a double-headed tribute to both Dietrich and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, written by Fritz Stern, a distinguished historian of Germany at Columbia University, New York, and by Elisabeth Sifton, the daughter of the noted American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. Their aim, in this short book, is to refresh and uphold the heroic picture of these men’s lives and tragic deaths as already formulated seventy years ago by British and American liberal churchmen, such as Bishop George Bell and Reinhold Niebuhr. According to this interpretation, their participation in the resistance movement in Germany was motivated by their high ethical ideals and by their moral revulsion against the Nazis’ aggressive and violent persecution of their opponents, particularly the Jews. Their account of the careers of both Bonhoeffer and von Dohnanyi clearly follows that given by Eberhard Bethge, since they too later got to know the surviving members of both families. In essence, however, they bring no new insights to the political or theological controversies about the resistance movement, its motives or tactics. Instead they repeat the now familiar themes of earlier biographies. They honour the inherent decency and courage of these intrepid witnesses to a “better” Germany. They deplore the readiness of other Germans, even years afterwards, to regard these men as traitors to the nation for seeking to overthrow the established government. They still regret the British government’s refusal to offer the resisters any gestures of support. They are dismayed at the leniency extended to former Nazis in post-war West Germany. In short, although well aware of the dangers of hagiography, especially in Bonhoeffer’s case–for all the wrong reasons–these authors nevertheless seek to affirm that “the Third Reich had no greater, more courageous and more admirable enemies” than these men who so steadfastly expressed their moral and political revolt against horrendous injustice and immeasurable cruelty. But they leave unexplored the many questions which historians and theologians still have about the complexities of the German resistance movement, and the historical conditions which led these men to follow the path of heroic self-sacrifice and eventual death as witnesses to their beliefs.

Curiously, in the appended footnotes, the references to the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Collected Works are all drawn from the German, rather than the now completed English edition.

Review of Peter Eisner, The Pope’s Last Crusade. How an American Jesuit helped Pope Pius XI’s campaign to stop Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of Peter Eisner, The Pope’s Last Crusade. How an American Jesuit helped Pope Pius XI’s campaign to stop Hitler (New York: Harper Collins 2013), 292 Pp. ISBN 978-6-06-204914-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Peter Eisner, who is an accomplished journalist and contributor to the Washington Post, was intrigued by the remarkable episode in 1938-39 of Pope Pius XI’s “hidden” encyclical, which was never proclaimed and was later suppressed. So he resolved to write this sprightly account, largely using the testimony of Fr. John LaFarge, the American Jesuit who played a major part in the document’s composition.

EisnerPope Briefly the story is as follows. Pope Pius XI (Achille Ratti) who reigned from 1922 to 1939 was increasingly alarmed and dismayed by the rise of Nazism and its flagrant and sustained attacks against both the Catholic Church and the Jews. Already in 1937, Pope Pius, after consulting the German bishops, had issued a vigorous protest in the Encyclical “Mit Brennennder Sorge”. But the results were disappointing. Hitler merely stepped up his persecution of the church, and encouraged his associates to be even more virulent in their campaigning against the Jews. But by 1938 the Pope had determined to protest again, specifically against the violent extremism in the Nazis’ racial and anti-Semitic ideology. By chance the Pope had come across a book written by LaFarge entitled Interracial Justice, which described the plight of blacks in the United States, and pleaded for the church to take a lead in combatting racism in that country. The parallels between racism in America and the dangers of anti-Semitism in Europe were easy to see.

Unbeknown to the Pope, it just so happened that LaFarge was taking a sabbatical trip to Europe in early 1938, and in due course visited the Jesuit headquarters in Rome. When Pius XI heard about this, he summoned LaFarge for a private audience, and on the spot commissioned him to prepare an encyclical which would tackle the fateful subject of racial prejudice and the need for the church to speak out against it. As Eisner points out, Pope Pius envisaged a gesture which would go beyond daily condemnations of each atrocity uttered by the Nazis. He wanted a verbal offensive with a major statement which would have a world-wide impact in denouncing the Nazis’ fanatical anti-Semitic ideology. So LaFarge’s appearance seemed to be both timely and fitting. Indeed, as LaFarge later recalled, the Pope had said he was “heaven-sent”. This commission was to be kept secret. Apparently not even the Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli, nor the Jesuit Superior General Ledochowski was consulted.

For the subsequent events, Eisner relies on LaFarge’s reminiscences as related to his Jesuit fraternity in New York twenty-five years later, shortly before his death in November 1963, on the same day as President Kennedy was assassinated. Not surprisingly Eisner adopts LaFarge’s interpretations, as well as sharing his expectations and disappointments. Since LaFarge had felt he needed help in undertaking this assignment, the Jesuit General Ledochowski called on two other Jesuits, one French and one German, who had already worked on earlier encyclicals and knew the appropriate style and language to be adopted. LaFarge, however, was later to remark that his German colleague, Gustav Grundlach, had only made the document more long-winded. In any case, they decided to retreat to Paris for two months to compose the text and make suitable translations into Latin, French, German and English. Unfortunately Eisner does not reprint the entire text but only gives us certain excerpts in an appendix. These focus almost entirely on a theoretical discussion of the ideas of race and racism, following the document’s title The Unity of the Human Race. Eisner gives us only one short paragraph dealing with the actual persecution of the Jews. This deplored the flagrant denial of their human rights which had affected many thousands of helpless persons, “wandering from frontier to frontier, they are a burden to humanity and to themselves”.

Having completed his assignment, LaFarge took the resulting texts personally to Rome, and loyally presented them to Ledochowski, confident that they would be forwarded speedily to the Pope. But he himself did not meet with the pontiff and instead sailed home to America where his brother was dying. He eagerly looked for news from Rome about the Pope’s reactions, but none was ever received. On the other hand it is clear that the intended secrecy had been breached. By the end of 1938, rumours were circulating in Paris that the Pope was about to issue a new encyclical outlining the church’s opposition to Nazi fanaticism. In January 1939 it was announced that the Pope would make a important announcement when he addressed the Italian bishops in early February. LaFarge naturally expected that that this would be the occasion when “his” encyclical would be promulgated and his views given official endorsement. But in fact Pius died early on 10 February just two days before his speech was due to be made.

Eisner is very skillful in depicting the atmosphere in the papal court and the diplomatic and political repercussions which ensued. He conjures up the death bed scene in the Vatican, and describes the reactions of the major ecclesiastic and political participants. According to a venerable Vatican tradition, the dead pope’s offices and files were immediately sealed. Four weeks later, the Conclave to elect a new Pope was held, when Cardinal Pacelli was chosen and took the name Pope Pius XII. One of his first actions was to order that all copies of the proposed encyclical should be destroyed, while he embarked on a very different and much more accommodating tactic in dealing with Hitler. In April LaFarge was informed that his proposed encyclical had been rejected by the new Pope. Both he and Grundlach were understandably disappointed. But LaFarge continued to believe that a bold public outcry from the Vatican would have mobilized opinion against the Nazis, and might even have saved hundreds or thousands, even millions of lives — a sentiment which Eisner appears to share.

In 1972 the National Catholic Register published an extensive report about LaFarge and the encyclical, contending that “had it been published it would have broken the much criticized Vatican silence on the persecution of the Jews”. Naturally Eisner agrees. But a decade later, two French authors came across a French version of the encyclical which they quoted at length in their book, and which gives a much less favourable view. According to Passelecq and Suchecky, LaFarge, while condemning racialist anti-Semitism, had fallen back into the traditional Catholic anti-Judaic stance. The fact is, LaFarge had claimed, that the Jews were a chosen people who had refused their calling, “blinded by a vision of material domination and power”. The Jews, he said, “are an unhappy people whose misguided leaders have called down upon their heads a divine malediction, doomed to perpetually wander over the face of the earth”. The answer, LaFarge asserted, is to accept he church’s offer to convert to Christianity, “either as individuals or peoples. But until that happens, Christians had to be warned of the spiritual dangers to which contact with Jews can expose souls”. Eisner, presumably deliberately, does not choose to use this quotation, or to take issue with the wider question of the virulence of Catholic traditional prejudices against Judaism.

As for Pius XI, the verdict is equally ambivalent. To be sure, he spoke out against Nazi totalitarianism and attacked the mistreatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. But, on the occasion of the notorious Crystal Night pogrom of November 1938, Pope Pius XI, along with all the German bishops, was silent. Whether or not the proposed encyclical, with its traditional rendering of anti-Judaic rhetoric, would have led to any mobilization of sympathy for the persecuted Jews remains doubtful. Eisner’s confidence that Pope Pius XI’s last crusade would have had the desired results seems therefore misplaced. Another twenty-five years were to pass before the remarkable changes of the Second Vatican Council brought about a striking abandonment of Catholic anti-Judaism, and issued in a wholly new relationship between Christians and Jews, of which Eisner undoubtedly and wholeheartedly approves.

Review of John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother. The revolution in Catholic teaching on the Jews 1933-1965

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother. The revolution in Catholic teaching on the Jews 1933-1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), Pp 376. ISNB 978-0-674-05782-1.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The most significant theological development of the twentieth century was the abandonment of the centuries-old Christian hostility towards the Jews and Judaism. There were two principal causes: the catastrophic annihilation of so many Jews during the Nazi-sponsored Holocaust, and the establishment of the independent State of Israel in 1948. The combination of these two political events, occurring within a few years of each other, profoundly, and it may be hoped permanently, changed the relationship between the Christian churches and the Jewish people. Theologians and scholars were obliged to reassess traditional attitudes that had held sway for many centuries. This revision included the abandonment of the age-long assertion that the Church had replaced the Jews as the Chosen People. Furthermore, the emergence of the State of Israel, where the Jews were again restored to their own homeland, sent a theological shock throughout Christendom, since it questioned the traditional Christian myth about the place of Jews in history.

The subsequent alteration of the Catholic Church’s teachings about Jews and Judaism was particularly notable, culminating in the famous declaration, Nostra Aetate, made in the context of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. How this was achieved is the main subject of John Connelly’s excellent account. He gives principal credit to the small group of theologians, most of whom were from Germany or Austria, and all of them converts. By one means or another, they escaped the Nazis’ persecution and were then resolved to challenge the long-standing prejudices about Jews in the Catholic Church, which they were all too well aware had played a significant role in fomenting the Nazi-led Holocaust. Indeed, Connelly is right to stress the fact that the deeply-entrenched anti-Judaic sentiments in the Christian churches only reinforced the wider and more virulent anti-Semitism and racism which had prevailed for many years. As he shows in his opening chapters, there were many prominent Catholics, especially in Germany, in the 1930s who embraced racialist ideas. They assumed that Jews were racially inferior, as well as theologically damned for their putting Christ to death. One noted Catholic professor of Tübingen, Karl Adam, for example, held the view that baptism was powerless to cure Jews of their racial taints. Bishop Alois Hudal was not alone in believing that, on racial-biological grounds, Jews could not have the same values and rights as the German people. Nazi Germany was effecting the will of the Almighty through its racial laws. In fact, apart from the handful of emigres, no one rose to challenge such Catholic racial views, neither in the Catholic press, nor among the Catholic bishops. A further difficulty was that, even if the opponents of Nazism so desired, they lacked the language and concepts with which to attack the popular prejudices. Technically, Jews were supposed to convert for the sake of salvation. But in fact many Christians were suspicious, on racial grounds, of the few who tried to take this course. One of the most difficult experiences for Jewish Christians was their rejection by other Christians because of their Jewish origins. Even after Nazism was overthrown, the vast majority of Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, felt no guilt for what had happened to the Jews.

This inauspicious climate was to continue in the immediate post-1945 years due to the singular lack of reflection amongst Catholics on the significance of the Holocaust. During all of the 1950s, indeed, the Catholic press, from the Vatican to the local diocesan papers, ignored this issue. Only when Israeli historians published irrefutable evidence of the Jewish sufferings, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann gained world-wide attention, did the situation begin to change. It was left to the small band of intrepid advocates for a different and much improved relationship between Catholics and Jews to take up the challenge of the legacy of Auschwitz. Connelly pays particular tribute to several of the leaders of this cause, all of whom were in some sense “outsiders” but ready to tackle the entrenched prejudices of the Catholic hierarchy and indeed laity also. All of them were converts either from Judaism or Protestantism, and all had experienced at first hand persecution from the Nazis.

Johannes (later John) Oesterreicher was a young Jewish student in Vienna who had been converted in 1922, was later ordained and served in various parishes in the Vienna region until forced to flee when the Nazis seized power in 1938. Thereafter he launched a vigorous campaign to combat Catholic anti-Semitism, broadcasting from Paris with a combination of apocalyptic vision and intense political engagement. But when the German army invaded France, he had to make his escape across the Pyrenees and eventually resettled in New Jersey. There he learnt that both his parents had died at the hands of the Nazis. Oesterreicher was greatly assisted by Karl Thieme, an academic and former Protestant, who also had to take refuge in Switzerland, but who returned to Germany after 1945 and provided much of the academic theory for the struggle to improve Catholic relations with Jews. In the south German diocese of Freiburg he linked up with the redoubtable figure of Gertrud Luckner, who served as a courier for the bishop during the war, warning those in danger to move into hiding, and supporting those in need. She was eventually arrested by the Gestapo, and spent eighteen months in the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück. After she was liberated, she resumed her work on behalf of the victims of persecution. Indeed she was to continue to do so for the next forty years. But perhaps more significant was her work in publishing, with the editorial assistance of Karl Thieme, the Freiburger Rundbriefe which from 1948 were compilations of sermons, statements, conference reports and other materials relating to Christian-Jewish relations in both the theological and political aspects. These Rundbriefe were an important source of information, and soon achieved an international audience, helping to overcome the embedded silence of many in the Catholic hierarchy. A further ally in this cause was another “outsider”, the Church of England vicar, James Parkes, whose early study The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue was the first comprehensive analysis of the Christian origins of anti-Semitism. But he was widely shunned by his fellow Anglicans because of his extreme liberal views.

It is to the credit of this group of pioneers that they faced up to the legacy of anti-Judaic hostility in the churches’ record, as well as the Catholics’ continuing indifference to this issue. Talking to Jewish scholars and rabbis made them all well aware that the teaching of contempt had contributed to making Auschwitz possible. They were all the more zealous to change this pattern of Christian witness. For this purpose they organized a series of international meetings. These were small but crucial gatherings, especially one held in Seelisberg, Switzerland in 1946. The ten landmark theses of this conference are now recognized as the first important fruit of this dialogue between Christians and Jews.

But the impact of such statements was very limited for over a decade. Not until Pope Pius XII died and was replaced by John XXIII did a new climate emerge. It was helpful that Pope John had been Nuncio in Turkey during the war, and had assisted many Jews to flee from Nazi persecution. It was also helpful that he was willing to receive a leading French Jewish scholar, Jules Isaac, who urged the adoption of the Seelisberg programme for better relations with Jews, and the overcoming of the teaching of contempt. It was also helpful that by this time Catholics, especially in Germany, were more fully aware of the Catholic Church’s complicity by its silence during the Holocaust. In the shadow of Auschwitz, all ideas of Jewish deficiency or guilt sounded obscene. As a result, Thieme and his colleagues led the way in recognizing that combatting Christian anti-Semitism was not enough. They needed to go further to tackle the equally entrenched anti-Judaism. It was also helpful to this cause that the theological reverberations of the creation of the State of Israel meant that the age-long calumnies about the Jews being condemned to wander the earth could no longer be maintained. Some went so far as to advocate the abandonment of Christian missionary efforts to Jews. Thieme and his friends began to argue that Jews should no longer be regarded as enemies but rather as the Christians;’ elder brothers in faith.

Furthermore, just as they had, as Germans, protested against accusations that all Germans were to be branded as guilty of the Nazis’ crimes, so now the argument could be used against the collective guilt of the Jews for Christ’s crucifixion or the Jewish refusal to be converted to Christianity. It was also helpful that Pope John promoted the German Jesuit, Augustin Bea to be a Cardinal, and made him president of the newly-formed Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. In 1961 the Pope charged Bea with the task of formulating a new statement on the Church’s relations to the Jews. As Connelly rightly notes, for this new teaching, Cardinal Bea was the engineer, but Thieme and his friends in Freiburg were the real architects.

Connelly skillfully describes the process by which this declaration came through the preparatory stages and then the actual debates of the Second Vatican Council. To achieve this, Cardinal Bea had recalled Oesterreicher from the United States, who brought with him a talented young priest from Canada, Gregory Baum. Baum had been born in Berlin in a family of Jewish origin, had been evacuated as a teenager to Wales in 1939 on one of the Kindertransporte, but a year later had been interned by the British authorities as a suspect enemy alien and exiled to Canada. After his internment there, he converted to Catholicism and joined an Augustinian monastery in Nova Scotia.

Oesterreicher’s team and Bea’s Secretariat labored intensively to draw up a document which would embody the ideas percolating over the previous decade. But they encountered two major obstacles. They were opposed first by the Catholic conservatives, both in the Vatican bureaucracy and amongst the newly-arrived bishops at the Council, who were reluctant to abandon the language and stereotypes about Jews with which they had been brought up. They therefore made frequent efforts to suppress or water down parts of the document of which they disapproved. This defensive reaction was only intensified by the outrage aroused by the publication in 1963 of the play The Deputy by the young Swiss playwright Rolf Hochhuth This drama was a vitriolic attack on Pope Pius XII for his alleged silence during the Holocaust, and by inference was a striking accusation of the Catholic Church’s intolerance and insensitivity towards the suffering of the Jews. But Oesterreicher came to believe that, after such an onslaught, the need for a strong pro-Jewish statement was all the more urgent. The bishops could have no illusions about the response of world opinion if the Council was silent on the Jews.

The second wave of opposition came from the bishops of the eastern Catholic Churches in Arab states, who were concerned about the future of their flocks, especially Palestinians, if any statement appeared to favour the Jews. They even enlisted the political support of their governments. The government of Syria, for example, protested plans to free Jews from the charge of deicide, and the Premier of Jordan threatened sanctions against any bishop who voted to absolve Jews from guilt for Christ’s crucifixion. But in fact such tactics caused a backlash among the more broad-minded bishops. Luckily in the great debates held over this document in 1964, a consensus rapidly formed that Jews were not to be held collectively responsible for the death of Christ. At the same time, Bea was at pains to make it clear that the document was solely religious in tone and had no political implications at all. The terms Israel and Israeli were avoided wherever possible. Instead Jews were referred to as “the stock of Abraham”. On the other hand, it is clear that great pains were taken to assuage the sensitivities of the numerous Jewish observers, both in Rome and elsewhere.

When the bishops finally and overwhelmingly approved Nostra Aetate in October 1965, Oesterreicher regarded it as a “miracle’. Calling the Jews ‘beloved by God’ put an end to centuries-old harmful teachings of the Church. God’s promises to the Jews were declared irrevocable. The inevitable corollary was to abandon efforts to convert Jews to Christianity but rather to embrace them in an ecumenical fellowship as no longer enemies but elder brothers.

In his concluding chapter Connelly again pays tribute to the handful of outsider pioneers who successfully broke the traditional pattern of Catholic prejudices about the Jews and Judaism. He attributes this success to their personal histories as they mobilized opposition first to Catholic anti-Semitism and then to Christian anti-Judaism. In the end they recognized that it was more opportune to convert Catholics than Jews but to seek to bind both in a more ecumenical relationship which would acknowledge both as God’s chosen people.

Review of Dietz Lange, Nathan Söderblom und seine Zeit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Review of Dietz Lange, Nathan Söderblom und seine Zeit (Göttingen and Oakville, CT, USA: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), Pp 480, ISBN 978-3-525-5701-5.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Lange-Soederblom A new biography has recently been published in Germany of Nathan Söderblom, the most prominent Protestant church leader in the decade of the 1920s. The author, Dietz Lange, is the emeritus professor of Systematic Theology in Göttingen, and in this laudatory but leisurely account of Söderblom’s career, the emphasis is placed on the evolution of Söderblom’s intellectual ideas and his relations with other scholars and theologians of his time. Lange supplements but does not supplant the standard biography in English, written nearly half a century ago by Bengt Sundkler, which concentrated on Söderblom’s main claims to fame, his championships of the peace endeavours during the first world war, and his leadership of the ecumenical movement in the aftermath.

Lange traces Söderblom’s energetic and often fervent debates about the theological novelties at the end of the nineteenth century, when the impact of German Protestant scholarship, at the hands of such men as Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack, was at its height. Although brought up in the rather narrow evangelicalism of a Swedish pastorate, Söderblom quickly took advantage of the new and wider horizons of this contentious German Protestantism. At the same time, he retained his original attachment to the forms of Swedish piety of which he became the prime exemplar. His talents led him early in his career to take on new opportunities for service, first as chaplain to the Swedish community in Paris for seven years, and later on, for two years, as visiting Professor of Church History in Leipzig University. These postings gave him insight into the rival militaristic and nationalistic sentiments in Europe, which did so much to lead to open hostilities in 1914.

Söderblom returned from Paris in 1901 to take up the chair of Comparative Religious History in Uppsala, when, as Lange describes, his main interest was in the development of religious ideas and practices amongst earlier civilisations or societies, which led to a close examination of such themes as the godhead, eschatology, the appearance of ethical systems, or the relationship between such theologies and magic.

But in the summer of 1914, Söderblom’s career took a wholly unanticipated turn when he was appointed Archbishop of Uppsala and Primate of the Swedish established church. A few months later the outbreak of war on the continent imposed new and burdensome international responsibilities. He quickly gave his support and that of his church to Sweden’s position of neutrality. He gave strong leadership to the efforts to stop or mitigate the hostilities, and deplored the readiness of churchmen in both camps to claim that God was on their side. At no point was he prepared to believe that divine approval should be claimed for either side’s military ambitions or their effects. War to him was nothing less than a disaster. As a result he sought to mobilize the Christian churches in the neutral countries to put forward peace proposals, which however were rejected by one side or the other. But such efforts gave him an international prominence and a determination to make reconciliation and reconstruction his top priority in the post-war years.

Lange’s biography recapitulates the well-known story of Söderblom’s initiatives and leadership which resulted in the creation of the Life and Work movement of the churches. To his great regret he was unable to gain the support of the Roman Catholic Church, but effectively drew together the Protestant and the Orthodox churches in an unprecedented commitment to ecumenical co-operation, which was to become the basis for the future World Council of Churches.

The high point of Söderblom’s influence came at the notably famous Stockholm Conference of 1925, when for the first time since the end of the Great War churchmen from all different denominations and groupings were able to meet to consider how to make plans for a more harmonious and effective church witness. It was surely due to his generous and inspiring leadership that the churches were encouraged to set aside the resentments and grievances caused by the war, and to focus on the positive steps which greater ecumenical co-operation could produce. In this regard, he strongly urged that the churches support the work of the newly-established League of Nations. But the German delegation, consisting mainly of stanchly conservative nationalists, refused all such panaceas. They maintained a wholly pessimistic view of the future, and loudly protested against the so-called injustice of the Versailles Treaty. Lange lets them off very lightly.

Söderblom’s chief hope was that the ancient divisions within the churches would be replaced by a new spirit of evangelical catholicity. But, as Lange admits, neither the theological climate nor the political circumstances of the 1920s were propitious. The rise of Fascism and Nazism in the 1930s destroyed most of Söderblom’s optimistic world-view. He died in 1931 and his influence ebbed rather quickly. The renown and reputation earned by his indefatigable witness, which had brought him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1930, was all too soon forgotten. But the hope of calling the churches together for a more effective witness to Christian life and work still remains as Söderblom’s lasting legacy. We can therefore be grateful to Professor Lange for recalling the numerous contributions to this cause made by this redoubtable world churchman.

Review of Daniel Gawthrop, The trial of Pope Benedict. Joseph Ratzinger and the Vatican’s Assault on Reason, Compassion and Human Dignity

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Review of Daniel Gawthrop, The trial of Pope Benedict. Joseph Ratzinger and the Vatican’s Assault on Reason, Compassion and Human Dignity (Vancouver. B.C.: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013), 315 Pp, ISBN 978-1-55152-527-3.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

It is rare, in our practice of church history, to be invited to review a book which is so filled with hostility towards its subject as is Daniel Gawthrop’s The Trial of Pope Benedict. Gawthrop was brought up in a traditional Catholic family, but as a boy and young adult was much influenced by ideas derived from the Second Vatican Council. His bishop had been appointed in 1962 as the youngest and newest Council Father, and participated fully in all its sessions. On his return to his Pacific Coast diocese, this bishop sought to implement the spirit and the reforms suggested at the Council. As a young Catholic activist, Gawthrop wanted to carry this process still further in the hopes of bringing the Catholic Church into the modern world, and rejuvenating its following. But he became disillusioned when the steps he hoped for were not taken. He now considers himself an ex-Catholic atheist. Among the changes he wanted to see were the abolition of clerical celibacy, the ordination of women, a permissive attitude towards homosexuality and same-sex marriages, the removal of the prohibition on abortion, and even the permission to engage in voluntary euthanasia. But all of these so-called “reforms” have been condemned by the Church authorities. Instead of recognising that such fantasies are derived from his own cloud-cuckooland wishful thinking, Gawthrop lays the blame on Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the one individual in the Vatican hierarchy, he believes, whose sinister policies effectively undermined the impact of the Second Vatican Council, and turned the church into a breeding ground for reactionary, ultra-orthodox conservatism.

Gawthrop-Trial Writing with considerable journalistic flair, but of course without any Vatican official documentation, Gawthrop presents us with a highly critical account of Ratzinger’s career. To be sure, he allows that, during the Council’s sessions, Ratzinger, then a theological advisor to one of the German Cardinals, supported many of the reformist ideas. But only a few years later, while he was teaching at Germany’s most prestigious university of Tübingen, he was deeply offended by the virulent student radicalism embracing a “Marxist messianism”. As a result he turned away from his colleagues such as Hans Kung and other progressive theologians. Shortly afterwards he retreated to the rural backwater of Regensburg in his native Bavaria, and began to prepare his theological counter-offensive to Vatican II.

In May 1977 Ratzinger was promoted to be Archbishop of Munich, and a month later was made a cardinal. He was thus in place to attend the two conclaves of 1978, following the death of Pope Paul VI. Gawthrop obviously has a liking for Pope John Paul I, a clerical populist, who promised to carry forward the reforms so long blocked by his predecessor. But only a month later he was found dead in the papal apartment. Gawthrop still seems to believe that this sudden death was not natural, despite the evidence produced in David Yallop’s book. Possibly this is because this development put an end to Gawthrop’s unfulfilled wishful thinking for a progressive new Catholicism.

The accession of John Paul II brought a wholly different and staunchly conservative leader to the Vatican, marking in Gawthrop’s view “a decisive turn to the right which would ultimately put the torch to Vatican II”. The new Pope soon recognized he had an ally in Ratzinger, and shortly after in 1981 summoned him to Rome to be put in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He was thus responsible for maintaining the church’s orthodoxy and blocking the introduction of novel or heretical ideas. While John Paul II played the role of a rock star, Ratzinger had to deal with liberal dissenters or undisciplined priests and professors. It was a part which he relished and played with increasing doctrinaire policies for the next twenty-four years. Over these years Ratzingrer would expel at least 107 theologians through defrocking, removal of teaching privileges, or official silencing through denouncement. Many others, including bishops, would be called to Rome and carpeted for “instruction”. Such behaviour was particularly galling to the victims, since there was no means of challenging Ratzinger’s authority, no appeal process, but only continuing disgrace and relegation in the church.

His first targets were those in Latin America who supported the ideas of liberation theology, especially Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutierrez. But to Ratzinger, liberation theology replaced the Christian promise of redemption with a Marxist programme for secular salvation through revolution. It also challenged the internal hierarchy of the church by aligning priests with the poor instead of with Rome. By definition, liberation theology supported leftist political movements, and in Ratzinger’s view substituted political criteria for more spiritual goals. Such tendencies had therefore to be suppressed.

Similar dogmatic rigidities were expressed in Ratzinger’s policies with regard to other Christian denominations and other faiths, most notably in the year 2000 declaration Dominus Iesus, which stated that non-Catholic Christian ecclesial communities are not “churches” in the proper sense. Such a comment was naturally ill-received by both Protestants and Orthodox churchmen, and revealed the narrowness and intolerance of Ratzinger’s approach. Even more criticism was voiced about his views on other religions, which he claimed were seriously deficient in their access to the means of salvation. His well-known gaffe in a lecture in Regensburg in 2006 when he characterized Muslims as given to violence—admittedly in a historical context—caught world attention. To be sure, he carried on with John Paul’s desire to encourage better relations with Jews, and even visited Israel. But he made no reference while there to the long history of Christian anti-Judaism which contributed at least in part to the Nazi atrocities. Gawthrop is naturally scathing about such instances.

In the same vein, Gawthrop is highly critical of Ratzinger’s attempts to maintain the orthodoxy of the Catholic faith with his suppression of such forward-looking theologians as Matthew Fox with his ideas about creation spirituality, or Thomas Reese who advocated the ordination of women in his weekly Catholic journal, America. Likewise Ratzinger’s steadfast view that homosexuality represents an “intrinsic moral evil” was drawn from “the solid foundation of a constant Biblical testimony”. Gay rights activists are, in Ratzinger’s view “guided by a vision opposed to the truth about the human person, and reflect a materialistic ideology which denies the transcendent nature of the human personality as well as the supernatural vocation of each individual”. Gawthrop inevitably differs and asks whether such a view is fitting for pastoral care in the current century.

Gawthrop’s chapter on the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church provides damning evidence of the Vatican’s official culture of denial, cover-up and shaming, going back over half a century. From his position of authority for more than thirty years, Ratzinger could have done something about this. But his responses were unconvincing, overly defensive or too little and too late. In Gawthrop’s view a married clergy and female priests would produce a healthier and more balanced Catholic theology of sexuality, and would surely do something about the rapid exodus of priests from holy orders, as particularly seen in Ireland in recent years. But the demonization of homosexuality, the attempt to suppress the truth, the denials of local bishops, the reshuffling of accused priests to another assignment have all contributed to a disastrous situation.

Finally Gawthrop turns to the latest Vatican scandals with what the Vatican officials themselves called the “Vatileaks”. Gawthrop suggests that this was the final straw which led Pope Benedict to offer his resignation. But he has little hope that the institution has the courage to put matters to rights. The policies of ultra-orthodox conservatism have clearly failed. But whether Pope Francis, who is no less doctrinally conservative than his two predecessors, and is a Vatican neophyte to boot, can possibly provide the impetus for a more sweeping reform is very much open to question. In his epilogue Gawthrop suggests that the new Pope should summon a Vatican III which would reignite the fires of reform, decentralize power, and reopen the questions of priestly celibacy and women’s ordination. Such measures, he believes would do a lot to solve the troubling issues which now beset the church and might even enable some disillusioned ex-Catholics like himself to take another look inside the church’s doors.

Book Note: Vera K. Fast, ed., Companions of the Peace Diaries and Letters of Monica Storrs, 1931-1939

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Book Note: Vera K. Fast, ed., Companions of the Peace Diaries and Letters of Monica Storrs, 1931-1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), ISBN 0-8020-8254-8, 246 Pp.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

In November 1938, one of the more remarkable responses to Hitler’s brutal pogrom against the German Jews—the Kristallnacht—came from a remote Anglican parish in distant northern British Columbia.
Monca Storrs, the parish worker at St Martin’s Church, Fort St. John, in the newly settled Peace River District, was so outraged that she spontaneously contacted George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester and chairman of the Church of England Committee for non-Aryan Christians, and offered to sponsor and act as guardian to two young victims, if the bishop could arrange for them to be brought to England, and if they were willing to come out and live in what she described as “the very western edge of the British Empire”.

Fast-Companions Monica was a cultured English gentlewoman who had volunteered in 1931 to come out to western Canada to help build up the Anglican Church amongst the isolated and often impoverished homesteaders of the Peace Dictrict. Luckily, at the end of 1938, Monica was taking a home leave, so she was able to meet the two German boys when they arrived in England on one of the “Kindertransporte” which rescued several thousand children in the few short months before the outbreak of war.
Horst, later Hugh, Schramm and Arwed, later David, Lewinski had been selected through the Society of Friends office in Berlin, where Bishop Bell’s sister-in Law, Laura Livingstone, took care of the transport and the paperwork involved. The children had to say goodbye to their parents on the Berlin railway station platform, not knowing when or if they would ever meet again. In Hugh’s case, his father was killed fighting in Russia, but his mother managed to escape to Shanghai. She and her son were later reunited when she migrated to the United States after the war was over. In David’s case, both his parents were deported to Auschwitz, where his mother died but his father survived. In 1953 David was at last able to fly over to Germany to meet his father again, after fourteen cruel years of separation.
Monica had hoped to bring the boys back with her to Canada when she returned in 1939, but bureaucracy intervened. The Canadian government was still reluctant to admit Jewish refugees, even Christian ones. On her way home, she stopped off in Ottawa to intervene personally with the immigration officials and even secured an interview with the Governor-General, Lord Tweedsmuir, to ask for his help. But it took a year before permission was granted for the boys to accompany a group of English children being evacuated to Canada. Eventually they arrived in British Columbia to be greeted most warmly by Monica and her colleagues in the community she had established as the Companions of the Peace.

This generous response undoubtedly saved the lives of these two refugee boys. But for years this international and humanitarian gesture remained unknown. This book shows us this inspiring example of one woman’s resolute service and outreach from furthest western Canada to help alleviate the terrible crimes of the Holocaust.