Author Archives: Martin Menke

Review of Alexander Lamprecht, Zwischen Seelsorge und Diktatur: Südtirols Kirche in der NS-Zeit

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Review of Alexander Lamprecht, Zwischen Seelsorge und Diktatur: Südtirols Kirche in der NS-Zeit. Bozen (Bolzano): Athesia Verlag, 2019. 299 pp.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

This volume is a revised version of the author’s Master’s thesis at the Philosophical-Theological University of Brixen (Bressanone), the seminary for the diocese of Brixen-Bozen. The work’s nature and its author’s affiliation, however, do not diminish the study’s value. It is an important work not only because it details the role of bishops and clergy during the period. It also is another well-illustrated example of the dilemmas that Christians living under fascism faced. South Tyroleans were ethnic Germans but had been living in Italy since the Treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye in 1919 moved the Austro-Italian border to the Brenner Pass. Under the terms of the October 1939 Hitler-Mussolini Agreement, South Tyroleans were forced to opt for German or Italian citizenship. While Italy initially promised South Tyroleans respect for their German language and culture, the Italian fascist regime forcibly eliminated their language from public life. It enhanced the Italian presence in the region by building a large industrial complex in Bozen. As a result, much of South Tyrolean life, including German language instruction, went underground. As Lamprecht shows, most South Tyroleans bore little love for Italy.

Under the terms of the Hitler-Mussolini Agreement, all those South Tyroleans who retained Austrian citizenship after 1919 were now considered citizens of the Reich. They had no choice but to resettle in post-Anschluss Germany. South Tyroleans who had become Italians in 1919 were given a choice. They could opt for Germany and be resettled as German citizens in Germany, or remain and be confirmed in their Italian citizenship. Lamprecht successfully illustrates the painful decisions that South Tyroleans, lay and clergy, had to make. As a result of effective German propaganda and Italian fascist repression, more than eighty percent of South Tyroleans opted for Germany. South Tyrolean laypeople opted for Germany primarily out of resentment of Italian fascism and Italianization policies. The clergy in the parishes, however, found the decision much more difficult. Most sought to remain in their homeland.

Lamprecht explains that, after the border shifts of 1919, the Holy See had rearranged the diocesan boundaries along the new frontier but otherwise left the South Tyrolean dioceses of Brixen and Trent (Trient/Trentino) intact. In 1939, the bishops of the two dioceses responded very differently to the demand to choose between Germany or Italy. Prince Bishop Johannes Geisler of Brixen decided that, no matter the clergy’s personal preferences, the South Tyrolean parishes moving almost intact to Germany required the pastoral care of their clergy. Thus, the clergy must opt for Germany. The clergy, however, vehemently objected. As a result, a deep chasm arose between the bishop and his curia on the one side and the clergy on the other. The clergy pointed to the German government’s animosity towards the Catholic Church as a deterrent from opting for resettlement. Their bishop, however, countered that any clergy remaining in South Tyrol would have to minister in Italian, both from the pulpit as well as in more personal duties. He warned that many clergy, whose Italian was poor, might find themselves without a purpose or an income once the resettlement process was complete. Geisler himself opted for resettlement and took up residence in the Austrian parts of his (non-contiguous) diocese. He felt secure in his choice since the diocese owned forests and other resources that would financially support his position. His priests, however, enjoyed no such security. By the end of the option process, Bishop Geisler no longer enjoyed any credibility or respect among his clergy.

In the southern part of the region, the Prince-Archbishop of Trent, Celestin Endrici, vehemently opposed the option for Germany. In this, he enjoyed the support of almost all his clergy. In May 1940, Endrici sent the Holy See a twenty-eight-page memorandum describing the state of his archdiocese. He explained that his clergy initially were reluctant to involve themselves in the option question. Once they became aware of the anti-Catholic views and practices of the German government, however, they warned their faithful to opt against resettlement. As a result, the German resettlement authorities in South Tyrol intensified their campaign against the clergy, which widened the gap between parishioners, who largely opted for Germany, and their clergy. While the German authorities were pressuring those inclined to remain by pointing to the many South Tyroleans who opted for Germany, Endrici argued that the clergy had to warn their parishioners because South Tyroleans were unfamiliar with the persecution of the Catholic Church that was so prevalent in Germany. Not to warn South Tyroleans of the dangers of National Socialism would be negligent.

Endrici openly opposed the neutrality that his colleague Geisler in Brixen had imposed on his clergy. Endrici demanded that his clergy fight against resettlement everywhere except from the pulpit. He did not want his clergy accused of preaching outright propaganda, but he wanted it to oppose the pro-German option. In underground meetings, in family visits, during youth catechesis, the priests were to urge South Tyroleans to remain. Lamprecht argues that those lay people in the Archdiocese of Trent who opted to remain did so because of the decisive influence of the clergy. In Brixen, Bishop Geisler had explicitly forbidden the clergy from discussing the option.

Lamprecht carefully differentiates his argumentation. For example, he notes that Giuseppe Mastromattei, the Italian prefect of Bozen, was worried about the double loss (and subsequent economic impact) of too many qualified workers as well as thousands of residents moving to the Reich. He wanted to encourage dissatisfied and disloyal South Tyroleans to leave, but he also wanted the majority to assimilate into Italian culture and remain. He went so far as to argue that anti-Nazi clergy would not be welcome in Germany and might better find refuge in a seminary or monastery, but in ethnically Italian provinces instead of in South Tyrol. The prefect feared for the economic stability of his province and thus sought to assuage the fears of South Tyroleans. His efforts led to German protests, so in 1940, the Italian government transferred him to another post. Also, implicitly, Lamprecht demonstrates that, until the German military occupation in 1943, Italian authorities jealously safeguarded their autonomy from German officials who were promoting and organizing the option registrations and the resettlement in Germany. Lamprecht’s explanation of the motives of different priests to decide one way or the other is also very well differentiated. Some wanted to remain as representatives of German culture in South Tyrol. Others feared for their economic security should they leave. Lamprecht, however, does not discuss the influence of the priests’ local ties on their decisions.

Less convincing is Lamprecht’s claim of an active Catholic resistance against Italian and German authorities. Lamprecht claims Catholic Action was the most effective measure against National Socialist youth workers, who were making inroads among the youth of South Tyrol. While Catholic Action worked discretely and in the shadows, it is not clear that encouraging young people to remain loyal to their faith constituted resistance. The leader of Catholic Action, Father Josef Ferrari, secretly recruited for the Andreas-Hofer-Bund, an underground organization committed to informing the faithful about the truth of National Socialism. While the German authorities sought a warrant for Father Ferrari, the Italian authorities merely admonished him to be more discrete. More explanation is needed for a convincing argument that the Andreas-Hofer-Bund was a resistance organization rather than an informal network of like-minded South-Tyroleans. Lamprecht argues that most South Tyroleans did not support the Bund and the most effective means of resistance remained Catholic Action.

The remainder of the work gives the impression of a list of topical odds and ends. For example, Lamprecht mentions that male clergy of German ethnicity and citizenship had to leave Italian territory or head into purely ethnic Italian areas, where their ability to function would be limited by a lack of Italian language skills. Female consecrated women, however, did not have to move as long as they applied for Italian citizenship. Also, given the organization of the work into separate discussions of Brixen and Trent, the author ends up repeating discussions and analyses. The author ends the work by listing questions requiring further research, such as the Church’s role in both the postwar negotiations about autonomy as well as in South Tyrol during the war more generally, which is ironic given the work’s title.

Despite these criticisms, the work is a valuable contribution to the field. Not only does it document the effect of the option program for South Tyroleans on the Catholic faithful, priests, and bishops, but it also contributes to the more extensive discussion of the Church’s role under fascism and National Socialism. Catholic leaders had to weigh the evils of Italian fascism against those of German National Socialism. They had to consider the need to provide pastoral care with the desire to oppose oppression. One can compare the dilemma of South Tyrolean clergy with the much more drastic fate of the French worker priests sent by their bishops to accompany those pressed into forced labor in the Reich to their German work sites, disguised as simple workers in the Service du Travail Obligatoire. South Tyrolean priests seemed more reluctant to follow their flocks in this manner.

This study, grounded in scholarly literature and extensive archival research, provides another example of the profound conflicts of conscience that many suffered under the mid-twentieth-century dictatorships. Lamprecht successfully illustrates not only institutional challenges but also the personal dilemma faced by bishops, priests, and laypeople in confronting the evils of fascism.

Review of Giuliana Chamedes, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Review of Giuliana Chamedes, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). ISBN 978-0-674-98342-7.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

In this useful volume, Giuliana Chamedes describes the Catholic Church’s efforts to resist what it considered the dangerous ideologies of the modern world. She presents not only communism and National Socialism as the enemies of faith, but in the most crucial contribution of the work, she demonstrates that the Church resisted and rejected what it perceived to be American liberalism and materialism. She argues that, to oppose liberalism and especially communism, the Church made common cause with fascist regimes. She describes these efforts as a crusade, which is an unusual choice of word, laden with historical and also contradictory meaning. Using the term “crusade” to refer to the attempted conquests of the Holy Land several centuries ago is problematic. The term is more appropriate if one defines a crusade as an organized effort by the Church to regain influence on the European continent. Chamades’ interpretation of the Vatican’s efforts to combat modern ideologies ever since Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum as part of an organized campaign to regain political and moral influence justifies the term “crusade.” Chamades, however, goes beyond the broad term “crusade” to argue for the existence of a Catholic “International,” a term suggesting a centrally-organized, conscious effort with national and regional branches. Instead, the sources indicate an effort that might better be described as a theme or leitmotif rather than an organized campaign. Thus, while Chamades demonstrates consistent anti-communist efforts by various Vatican offices, these efforts fall short of an institutionalized and centrally organized campaign. There is no evidence of an organized or institutionalized Catholic “International.” Nonetheless, the work has some interesting points to offer.

Chamedes summarizes the existing scholarship concerning the Church’s fight against communism and its willingness to collaborate with fascism. However, her insights about the fear of Western liberalism and materialism are novel and worth exploring further. For example, she cites Vatican archival records in which editor of the Code of Canon Law Eugenio Pacelli, future nuncio to Germany, Cardinal Secretary of State, and Pope, stated his fear that the U.S. entry into World War I was part of the campaign to secularize Europe. [2] The author argues that the Church perceived President Woodrow Wilson as determined to destroy the Church. As Chamades shows, the Church’s fear of liberalism lasted well beyond World War II. After World War I, the Church saw itself engaged in an existential struggle with liberalism, which explains its willingness to work with fascist regimes that opposed both liberalism as well as socialism.

The author suggests that the papal peace plan of 1917 and the promulgation of the Code of Canon Law that same year constituted efforts to gain influence in international relations by reviving papal diplomacy. The Church sought to promote its values by integrating provisions of the new Code of Canon Law into concordats to curb the influences of socialism and liberalism. The church sought to retain legal control over marriages and education. Chamedes shows that this new papal diplomacy by concordat succeeded only when the country in question also considered such agreements advantageous. For example, the Baltic Republics and Poland believed the concordats affirmed their national sovereignty. The Church also usually conceded to the state some influence over appointing influential national church leaders. [44] When in 1925, the Vatican established a Polish metropolitan see at Vilnius, however, Lithuania broke off concordat negotiations before an authoritarian regime concluded a concordat in 1927. [62-63]

Chamedes discusses scholarly literature and sources referring to the “Catholic International” compared to the Communist International and similar organizations, but she does not fully define the term, nor does she provide evidence of a Catholic International. [6, 86] While the term “Catholic internationalism” describes the Church’s universalist claims well, the term “International,” especially when capitalized, suggests something much more formal and suggests a structure comparable to the Communist “International.” That idea suggests more centralized power over national churches than the papacy ever possessed. Also, the fascist regimes with which the Church cooperated – never unconditionally and rarely wholeheartedly – rejected internationalism, a contradiction that Chamedes does not address. In fact, in its propaganda, the National Socialist regime told a tale of secret Catholic ambitions to control the world. The closest the Church came to an open claim to world leadership was its vehement rejection of the League of Nations, another Wilsonian idea. Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, declared the League superfluous since the Church was the one true global league. [55] With some justification, other Church officials denounced the League as a tool of the war’s victors to control international affairs.

Between the end of World War I and the early Cold War, Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli played an essential role in Vatican diplomacy, first as one of the editors of the Code of Canon Law, then as nuncio to Bavaria and Germany, then as Cardinal Secretary of State, and finally as Pope Pius XII. Chamades accurately narrates Pacelli’s turn to a fiercely anti-communist and more antisemitic position based on his experiences as nuncio in Munich during the revolutionary period 1918-1919. (80) Chamades suggests Pacelli embraced the popular notion of Judeo-Bolshevism and encouraged the Bavarian People’s Party, which had broken away from the (Catholic) German Center Party, to establish Bavaria as a base against the perils of communism [90]. Chamades stresses that Pacelli adopted this stance well before the Vatican relinquished hopes of achieving a modus operandi with the Soviet government in the later 1920s. Chamades argues that Pacelli urged his predecessor as Cardinal Secretary of State, Pietro Gasparri, to pursue an aggressive anti-communist agenda. [104]

While increasingly the Church focused on anti-communism, anti-liberalism remained a common denominator between the Church and fascist regimes. Chamades explains how Italian fascism, initially anti-clerical, changed course out of consideration that the Church was an enemy of communism. [96] Chamades emphasizes Mussolini’s early anti-liberal turn, which the anti-communist campaign later superseded. According to Chamades, the Church responded to communism and liberalism by promoting its model of an ideal civil society, organized around “Catholic Action,” a renewed attempt to tie Catholics to civic organizations arranged within a parochial, diocesan, and universal Catholic hierarchy. [112] Of all the early twentieth-century Vatican initiatives, Catholic Action was the most organized and institutional, though still largely ineffective in rallying the faithful. Catholic Action’s aims to organize all Catholics led to the Church’s first open conflict with Italian fascism, a conflict then repeated with all other authoritarian regimes.

Intending to resolve such differences, the Vatican began negotiating a concordat with fascist Italy. Pope and Duce each intended the subsequent Lateran Agreements of 1929, ostensibly concluded to resolve their conflicts, to advance their own interests, which led to continued tension. [117] Concordats were no longer measures to impose Catholic Canon Law and Catholic moral teaching on the state, but rather defensive agreements to secure existing rights. The Lateran Agreements gravely disappointed anti-fascist Catholic politicians such as Luigi Sturzo and Alcide de Gasperi. Chamades demonstrates that the financial terms of the Lateran Agreements, primarily their financial and bond payments by Italy to the Holy See, exposed the Vatican to global economic turmoil in new and devastating ways. [122] To put the Catholic social teaching of Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum in the context of the post-war world and the Great Depression, Pope Pius XI again related liberalism and socialism to one another as erroneous ideologies destined to lead the faithful astray. Discussing the aftermath of Quadragesimo Anno, Chamades again refers to a Vatican anti-communist “campaign.” The term “campaign” denotes organized and coordinated efforts. While Chamades cites the most relevant scholarly works before the establishment of the Secretariat for Atheism in the later 1930s, the argument lacks a smoking gun. She does not mention a meeting, correspondence, or institution that launched such a campaign. Yes, the Vatican’s efforts after Quadragesimo Anno no longer sought any accommodation with communist regimes, but there is no evidence of a campaign against communism. Instead, it seems as if an anti-communist Zeitgeist might be a better term than “campaign.” According to Vatican archival documents cited by Chamades, by 1931, Pope Pius XI determined that communism was the most dangerous enemy of the hour, but he did not launch an anti-communist campaign. [125] Chamades points out that Pacelli was the driving force behind the pope’s anti-communism, which by April 1932 had come to dominate the Holy See’s ideological concerns. [134] According to Chamades, a 1932 circular by Pacelli, now Cardinal Secretary of State, “proposed to launch an anticommunist campaign.” [125] Since the document is crucial to Chamades’ arguments, one wishes she had discussed it in more detail, especially regarding its consequences. What did Pacelli mean by the term “anti-communist campaign?” Again, a campaign requires organization and leadership. Did this ever come to be? Did Pacelli intend something like the creation of the Secretariat of Atheism? A later discussion of the “anti-communist campaign” provides no further explanation except to equate Catholic internationalism with the media “campaigns” of the 1930s. Missing is proof of any organized campaign. (132)

While Chamades correctly identifies anti-communism as the European hierarchy’s primary concern, she underestimates the Church’s continuing wariness of fascism, as for example with the German episcopate’s 1931 condemnation of fascism, to which she does not give sufficient attention. (138) Until the late 1920s, the Vatican had sought some accommodation with the Soviet regime and had devoted charitable aid to the regions stricken by the Russian Civil War. It is essential, however, to consider the Church’s growing anti-communism in connection with the Vatican’s increasing concern with Mussolini’s fascism and German National Socialism. Neither ideology developed in ways compatible with Catholic teaching. Furthermore, concerning the National Socialist rise to power, Chamades follows a familiar but deeply flawed argument when she claims it was an easy path from the March 1933 Enabling Act to the Concordat signed that July. All evidence, much of it available since the 1960s, proves how tortuous the negotiations were, and how the Vatican sought to gain every possible advantage. Chamades herself relies heavily on Vatican records, but not on all of them. Her use of the Vatican correspondence with papal nuncio in Berlin Cesare Orsenigo and the correspondence between Jesuit Superior General Wlodimir Ledochowski and the Vatican is beneficial. Still, she ignores other Vatican archival records relating to such processes as the Reich concordat negotiations. In particular, it would have been useful had she used the documents published by Father Ludwig Volk, SJ, and Alfons Kuppers. (Ludwig Volk, Kirchliche Akten über die Reichskonkordatsverhandlungen 1933. Mainz: Mathias-Grunewald-Verlag, 1969. Alfons Kupper, Staatliche Akten über die Reichskonkordatsverhandlungen 1933. Mainz: Mathias-Grunewald-Verlag, 1969).

While the fascist governments in Berlin and Rome violated the concordats as much as they observed them, Chamades shows that forces in the Vatican now called for a single-minded focus on anti-communism. In late 1933, Jesuit Superior General Wlodimir Ledochowski convinced Pius XI to establish a “Secretariat on Atheism.” [146] Chamades explains the considerable public relations activity of the Secretariat across Europe; one wonders how effective the Secretariat was in influencing not only members of the hierarchy but also the faithful. How much was the average Catholic aware of this centrally coordinated campaign? Furthermore, while Chamades convincingly shows the extent of the Vatican’s anti-communist “campaign” across the continent, one has to wonder how much fascist regimes desired to encourage widespread media work by the Church. Furthermore, the question again arises of how organized and centralized efforts must be to qualify as a campaign. It seems as if different Vatican offices pursued anti-communist efforts because they knew these were in line with the leitmotif of anti-communism, not because someone centrally coordinated their efforts.

While one might think that the establishment of the Secretariat marked the end of anti-fascist concerns, Chamades acknowledges that the Church in the early 1930s was preparing a new Syllabus of Errors to condemn both communism as well as fascism. The Church abandoned this thrust not only because of the opposition of Ledochowski, but also under the influence of the Popular Front victory in Spanish elections. [172-173] Alongside many scholars, Chamades criticizes the relatively weak language in the 1937 encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge and notes, in contrast, that in the anti-communist encyclical Divini Redemptoris released five days later, the Vatican pulled no punches. Following the condemnation of communism in Mexico in Firmissimam Constantiam, these three encyclicals made clear that the Church now considered communism, not totalitarianism, to be the greatest threat of the twentieth century. While much of the narrative recounted here is well known, Chamades provides a useful summary and some helpful distinctions. Her global perspective is helpful.

Once the newly elected Pius XII and those around him suppressed the draft of Pius XI’s encyclical condemning racism outright and when, a year later, World War Two broke out, the Church seemed firmly on the side of all anti-communist forces. Comparing the Church’s position in World War II to that in World War I, Chamades notes that the Church had virtually no allies in the second war and that the Vatican developed no significant diplomatic activity, an assessment surprising to any historian familiar with the Vatican during that time. Faced with Pius XII’s supposed inaction, Chamades argues an internal opposition arose within the Church. When Cardinal Pacelli became Pope Pius XII, however, the Vatican reaffirmed its centralizing and hierarchical approach to church leadership, in which there was little room for dissent. The outbreak of war, however, limited the ability to engage in any efforts to combat communism and subjected the Church to an increasingly assault by National Socialism. Both to those hoping for a pontiff more critical of fascism as well as for the Catholic leaders of newly invaded Poland, the first encyclical of Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, proved a disappointment because it lacked a clear condemnation of the German invasion and its consequences. Those Catholics whom the Vatican’s inaction disappointed began to demand greater Catholic engagement for peace. Men like Don Luigi Sturzo, Jacques Maritain, and Henri de Lubac forcefully made their case in whatever press would publish their work. Additional efforts by Sturzo and Maritain, whom Chamades calls Catholic internationalists, to convince Pius XII to take a more active stand failed. This inspired a new type of Catholic activist, those committed to a peace based on Christian democracy.

Chamades demonstrates that Vatican attitudes shifted after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the U.S. entry into the war. [220-222] The pope did not endorse the German invasion. Furthermore, he agreed to urge the American bishops to support the lend-lease agreement. Her discussion of the papacy’s response to the Shoah is limited to a few pages in which she notes that bishops informed the Vatican of the deportations of Jews and that the Vatican could have done far more to help Jews. On the one hand, this brevity is a wise choice, given the vast and contradictory scholarly literature on the subject. Chamades could have developed the complexity of her argument. Does she consider national socialist antisemitism an instance of concurrence between longstanding Catholic antisemitism and a modern ideology? On the other hand, given the German promotion of a “crusade against Bolshevism” and the thesis she is trying to prove, a more detailed discussion of the Catholic response to the Shoah would have been helpful. Chamades points out, that the Vatican did not welcome the public appeals for an outspoken condemnation of National Socialist atrocities. [228] Nonetheless, Catholic dissidents, as Chamades calls them, continued to speak up and began to organize to create a post-war world based on Christian principles, especially on a commitment to freedom and peace. Eventually, these would become the post-war Christian Democrats. She points out that “after the war, the papacy also agreed to work with Europe’s new Christian Democratic parties” [236] and even endorsed the United Nations, part of the Vatican’s general shift to greater cooperation and engagement with other civil society organizations. And yet, the Vatican’s new understanding of democracy was not one of total liberty but of freedom based on Catholic moral teaching. A more probing analysis of how, why, and with what consequences the war transformed the Vatican’s values would have enriched the work.

Beginning in 1945, the Vatican feared that the Western allies were too accommodating of the Soviet Union and were willing to hand over Eastern Europe. Chamades points out that, in contrast to the Church’s wartime failure to share information about atrocities in Eastern Europe, it now broadly shared all news of communist persecution of the Church and the faithful. [245] Furthermore, Pope Pius XII sought the aid of the United States to combat the growth of communist parties in Western Europe, which represented an abandonment of the Church’s interwar anti-liberal criticism of the United States. Despite these tactical changes, the Church envisioned a Europe formed of Christian states. It became suspicious of Christian Democratic movements when these, building on the wartime criticism within the Church, insisted on their independence from the Catholic hierarchy. [250] Chamades might have noted that the interwar Catholic parties also jealously guarded their independence from the Vatican. She claims that a new Christian Democratic International arose from the discussions of post-war Christian Democratic groups, but again, there was no such organization.

Chamades shows that, in the postwar era, the Vatican could not exercise the influence which it had expected in a post-war world. A brief period of goodwill towards the United States and the new Christian Democrats soon gave way to criticism and mistrust of both as too independent in the case of the Christian Democrats and too rooted in anti-Catholicism in the case of the United States. As Chamedes herself shows, the Vatican feared that Christian Democracy was insufficiently immune to communist. Also, Christian Democratic political parties and actors proved increasingly independent of the Vatican. The Vatican again became critical of the United States. [282] According to Chamedes, the resurgence of American Protestant anti-Catholicism and the break in U.S. diplomatic representation to the Vatican contributed to a revival of Vatican anti-Americanism, expressed as fears of American hegemony and materialism. This seemingly left the Vatican without political allies.

In the 1950s, new criticisms arose against the Vatican. The Church’s failure to side with anti-imperialist movements in the developing world led to further alienation. [286] Another challenge to Church authority and legitimacy arose via the accusations by journalists, scholars, and others of Church complicity with the National Socialist regime. In many ways, the 1950s marked the nadir of Church influence in Europe. Chamades argues that the Second Vatican Council represented Pope John XXIII’s recognition that the influence of the Vatican and of the broader over the faithful in private and public life was waning, and that the policies of his predecessors had led the Church to a dead-end.

Consequently, as Chamades convincingly explains, the Second Vatican Council overthrew much of what the Vatican leadership had considered self-evident about Church-state relations and about Church power and authority. She argues that the new Apostolic Constitutions, such as Lumen Gentium and Dignitatis Humanae, on the one hand, attempted to meet the expectations of many who demanded change in the post-war Church while at the same time proving unable to relinquish dogmatic claims to represent the one true path to salvation. Chamedes argues that Gaudium et Spes, the constitution explaining how Catholics and their Church should function in a modern, pluralistic society, constituted a rejection of the concordat strategy employed during the first half of the twentieth century. [301] Instead, the Second Vatican Council suggested a way forward in cooperation with other faiths and other ideologies as long as they authentically promoted human welfare.

In the conclusion, Chamedes argues that the Vatican’s policies of the 1930s sowed the seeds for the demand for reform that became vocal after 1945. The Church’s reform efforts of the 1960s came too late; too many Catholics were already heading out the door. [312] Chamades argues that Humanae Vitae accelerated the exodus. In contrast, Pope John Paul II promoted Church leaders who were critical of the Second Vatican Council and more comfortable with cold-war anti-communism. Despite this decline in Vatican authority over the faithful, Chamedes argues that the Church remains a powerful actor on the world stage thanks to its moral pulpit.

Review of Johannes Sachslehner, Hitlers Mann im Vatikan: Bischof Alois Hudal: ein dunkles Kapitel in der Geschichte der Kirche

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2024)

Review of Johannes Sachslehner, Hitlers Mann im Vatikan: Bischof Alois Hudal: ein dunkles Kapitel in der Geschichte der Kirche (Graz: Molden Verlag, 2019). ISBN 978-3-222-15040-1.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

In this work, Johannes Sachslehner, an Austrian historian and prolific author, offers a biography of the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, notorious for his complicated relationship with National Socialist ideology and for his involvement in the postwar effort to enable refugees and war criminals to escape to South America. The author’s attention to Hudal’s entire lifespan — not only his years at the Pontifical Institute of Santa Maria dell’Anima, better known as “the Anima,” but especially to his formative years in Graz — might have rendered this work a useful contribution to the scholarly literature. Instead, the reader faces a fatally flawed book.

Sachslehner’s emphasis on Hudal’s early ambition, constant desire for recognition, and embarrassment over his heritage helps to explain both his career as well as his extreme commitment to German nationalism. Hudal’s contemporaries soon recognized his ambitions and accused him of sycophancy. Sachslehner suggests that this need for recognition contributed to Hudal’s völkisch and pro-National Socialist positions as well as his later commitment to a free Austria, even as he helped hunted war criminals to escape. Hudal grew up near Graz. Proving himself intelligent, he won scholarships to obtain a Catholic education, leading to his ordination in 1908 and to a doctoral degree in Old Testament Scripture in 1911. In 1914, the bishop of Graz sent Hudal to the Anima in Rome to continue his studies. Such appointments were considered a stepping stone to higher office in the Austrian church. Hudal helped to ensure that the leadership of the parish and the institute remained in Austrian hands despite German diplomatic efforts to change that. At the time, Hudal believed his only suitable further promotion was to the episcopal seat at Graz, whereas his bishop believed a university post in Graz was a sufficiently dignified position.

During World War One, Hudal served as a military chaplain in the Habsburg army. He gave rousing sermons in German, Italian, and Slovenian. Soon after the collapse of Austria-Hungary following the war, Hudal began promoting Germany’s cultural mission in Europe and the political hegemony arising from that mission. In 1919, Hudal became a professor of Old Testament Scripture at Graz University and achieved tenure in 1923. The same year, he was appointed coadjutor at the Anima (he took a leave from Graz to pursue this) and became its rector in 1937. In 1934, Hudal seized the opportunity to promote himself by producing a draft concordat with Austria long before either the Austrian government or the Holy See considered such a treaty. Hudal’s contributions to the concordat won him the favor of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Cardinal Secretary of State and later Pope Pius XII, at least for a time. His role in placing Alfred Rosenberg’s Mythos des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts on the index of forbidden books in 1934 also enhanced his standing in the Vatican. Furthermore, it showed how opposed Hudal initially was to National Socialist ideology.

As Sachslehner shows, Hudal suffered humiliating career reversals during his early years. Hudal repeatedly attempted to rewrite his biography to erase his working-class roots and Slovenian paternity. In 1923, Cologne’s Archbishop Cardinal Karl-Joseph Schulte, who wanted to end Austrian leadership of the German-speaking community in Rome, strongly opposed Hudal’s appointment as Coadjutor of the Collegio Teutonico di Santa Maria dell’Anima, the German seminary in Rome. Fully expecting to be ordained Archbishop of Vienna upon the death of Cardinal Friedrich Gustav Piffl in 1932, Hudal ordered a bishop’s crozier. Ultimately, he had to wait a year before his ordination as titular bishop of Aela without a proper diocese. Furthermore, as World War Two ended, Hudal began emphasizing his Austrian heritage and his critiques of National Socialism. He sought good relations with the Allies in Rome and elsewhere. Sachslehner also shows Hudal’s exaggerated self-importance, shown when he sent memoranda to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin on a possible post-war Danubian confederation.

Later, Hudal nurtured plans for a new university chair in Vienna dedicated to the study of the Eastern churches, which he intended to fill himself. This also did not come to pass. These details confirm what other scholars have written about Hudal’s most active years, and Sachslehner puts these activities within the broader contexts of Hudal’s life.

Once Hudal became rector of the Anima, in spite of the opposition of Cardinal Schulte and with the support of the Austrian government, he tried to emphasize the Anima’s all-German identity. Like many Germans and Austrians, Hudal rejected the outcome of World War One. Hudal did not seek, however, the restoration of the Austro-Hungarian multi-ethnic empire, nor did he seek, at the time, the Anschluss (the unification of Austria and Germany). He imagined Austria’s future as a strong, independent state. Furthermore, Sachslehner shows that, throughout his life, Hudal still ranked commitment to the church and faith above his commitment to the German nation. As others have shown, Hudal’s views on National Socialism changed over time. Sachslehner contributes a differentiated view of these changes. Hudal rejected National Socialism’s desire to replace faith in Christianity with racial faith, but he embraced antisemitism and ethnic prejudice. His antisemitism stemmed from his formative years in Graz. In 1919, he blamed Austria-Hungary’s defeat on the “Jewish Bolshevik [Karl] Kautsky.” Hudal always associated communism with Judaism. Sachslehner argues that Hudal’s desire for recognition fed his increasingly close ties to National Socialism. In 1937, the same year he became rector of the Anima, he published Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus, seeking to build a bridge between the Church and National Socialism. He argued that only German culture could guarantee the continuation of Christian values in Europe. The work showed that Hudal completely misunderstood the National Socialists’ intentions and overestimated his own importance. The changes in National Socialist ideology that Hudal considered necessary and possible were, in fact, unimaginable. The Grundlagen sapped much of Hudal’s support in the Vatican curia, and after the 1938 Anschluss, which Hudal had promoted, he lost all favor with Pacelli (the future Pius XII). Pacelli forbade Hudal from celebrating a Te Deum thanksgiving service for the Anschluss. While many historians have focused on Hudal’s work enabling hunted war criminals to escape, Sachslehner shows that these pre-war events marked the beginning of Hudal’s downfall.

The story of Hudal’s wartime and post-war activities is well known. Working with archival records from the Anima made available in 2006, Sachslehner offers some useful corrections to the most extreme accusations leveled against Hudal. For example, during the German occupation of Rome, Hudal hid both hunted Germans and Austrians (such as conservatives who had been safe in fascist Italy, such as the German army officer Bernhard Schilling [161]) and Allied soldiers in the Anima. During the 1943 raids against Roman Jews, German diplomats asked Hudal to send a letter to the German Commandant of Rome, Major General Rainer Stahel. Written at the clandestine prompting of German embassy officials, it was intended to hasten end of the raids. (159) Because of bureaucratic delays, the letter reached Berlin when the raids had all but ended. It should be noted here that, while Sachslehner cites his source, Rom 1943-1944 by Robert Katz, the citation is incomplete (the complete title is Rom, 1943-1944: Besatzer, Befreier, Partisanen und der Papst [Essen, 2006]), and Sachslehner does not list this volume in the bibliography. Sachslehner notes that Hudal was “not particularly proud” of the letter and quotes Hudal’s secretary, Joseph Prader, who claimed, “Hudal absolutely hated Jews.” (159) Sachslehner points out that, after the war, he did help known war criminals escape but was not responsible for the escape of Adolf Eichmann. Hudal abused his ties to Austria in order to provide false documents for these criminals. Hudal seemed to see no contradiction between hiding anti-fascists during the war and helping fascists escape after the war. To him, they were all persecuted Christian victims deserving of Christian charity. In Rome, Hudal sought to maintain control of the Austrian community. Suddenly, he supported Austrian independence and claimed to represent Austrian interests when dealing with Allied officials in Rome. There is some evidence that Hudal acted as a paid informant for U.S. military counterintelligence services. As in so many cases from this period, a strident anti-Communism made up for Hudal’s previous fascist leanings.

Sachslehner again points to Hudal’s need for recognition as a driving force for his post-war actions, which occurred after he had lost Vatican support and his academic position at Graz, for which he had been paid during his entire lengthy absence. By the early 1950s, his continued presence at the Anima proved an embarrassment to Church officials, who forced him from office, which left him embittered.

Sachslehner provided no evidence that Hudal ever admitted the contradictions in his life, even to himself.

Sachslehner’s argument about and analysis of Hudal’s early life are persuasive. Some scholarly concerns about the work remain. The citations of archival materials lack detail. In some cases, only box numbers are mentioned. In others, even box numbers are missing. Sachslehner includes some questionable works among his cited sources, such as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s The Catholic Church and the Holocaust and the judgment of a German neo-Nazi. Even if he critiques their judgment, why include them at all in his review of the literature? Hudal’s views and actions justly led to his condemnation by less controversial scholars. Even so, Sachslehner’s contribution to scholarship on this subject might have been his emphasis on what one might consider Hudal’s inferiority complex about his origins and certainly on his ambition and need for recognition as motives for his views and actions. But do they change the field’s judgment of Hudal’s role in this dark chapter of history? Not significantly. Worse, there is good reason to believe that academic dishonesty undermines any value of this work.

Given the problematic use of the Katz volume mentioned above, it is not surprising that other reviewers have found additional scholarly problems. A fellow editor directed this reviewer to a lengthy review of Sachslehner’s work by Austrian historian Dirk Schuster[i], who found a number of problematic passages. Conducting further research, Schuster found an uncanny resemblance between passages in Sachslehner’s volume and the unpublished dissertation of Markus Langer, entitled “Alois Hudal: Zwischen Kreuz und Hakenkreuz: Versuch einer Biographie,” submitted in 1995.[ii] First, the chapter and sub-chapter titles in Sachslehner vary very little from those of Langer.[iii] Second, according to Schuster, there are passages in Sachslehner’s work that are simple paraphrases of Langer’s work.[iv] While Sachslehner mentions some of Langer’s work in the endnotes (for example, endnote 148), he omits the title and any additional information, and he omits Langer’s work entirely from the bibliography.

In the case of another scholar’s work, Schuster accuses Sachslehner of plagiarism. Schuster shows that Sachslehner copied verbatim several text passages from the work of Hansjakob Stehle in Die Zeit.[v] While Sachslehner mentions several works by Stehle in his endnotes and bibliography, he does not identify them as quotations. Schuster also mentions other problems concerning inaccurate citations. Simply put, with his name on the book, Sachslehner claims credit for scholarly research that he never conducted. This renders the work unreliable and the author’s conduct unethical.

Thus, we will continue to wait for an authoritative biography of Alois Hudal to appear. As Thomas Brechenmacher points out, Hudal offers much more scope for research than what has been published up to this point.[vi]

Notes:

[i] Dirk Schuster, “Sachslehner, Johannes: Bischof Alois Hudal. Hitlers Mann im Vatikan. Ein dunkles Kapitel in der Geschichte der Kirche “ In Religion in Austria 6 (2021), 395-411.

[ii] Schuster, 396.

[iii] Schuster, 400.

[iv] Schuster, 402.

[v] Hansjakob Stehle, “Pässe vom Papst? Aus neuentdeckten Dokumenten: Warum alle Wege der Ex-Nazis über Rom nach Südamerika führten.” Die Zeit, 4 May 1984, 9-12, discussed in Schuster, 403-407.

[vi] Thomas Brechenmacher Alois Hudal – der „braune Bischof“? In: Freiburger Rundbrief. Nr. 2 14, 2007, ISSN 0344-1385, S. 130–132.

Conference Report: Panel Discussion on David Kertzer, The Pope at War, ACHA/AHA

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 1 (Spring 2024)

Conference Report: Panel Discussion on David Kertzer, The Pope at War, ACHA/AHA

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

At this year’s American Catholic Historical Association conference, held in conjunction with the American Historical Association’s 2024 Annual Meeting, four colleagues in twentieth-century Italian and German history – Mark Ruff, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Martin Menke, and Roy Domenico – met to offer a panel discussion of David Kertzer’s latest work, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (Random House, 2022). Kertzer then offered a response to their comments. The discussion built on a review forum of his work, to which the panelists contributed, that had appeared in the summer 2023 issue of the Catholic Historical Review (Vol. 109 (2023): 752-767). The in-person conversation proved fruitful by adding new insights and perhaps a more nuanced understanding of this complicated topic.

The first to speak was Mark Ruff of Saint Louis University. He succinctly summarized the book’s topic, what he described as the cause of the “sullied reputation” of Pius XII, which was his action, or lack thereof, to protect or at least protest against the persecution of Europe’s Jews during the war. Ruff noted that Kertzer shows, relying on the papers of Angelo Roncalli (the later Pope John XXIII), that Pius XII was well aware of the damage that his silence might do to his reputation, which meant he was aware he was being perceived to be silent. Ruff notes that Kertzer distinguishes between the early years of the war, when a German victory seemed possible, and the later years when an Allied victory became much more likely. During the earlier period, Vatican officials considered the need to arrange itself with a victorious National Socialist German regime in Europe. Kertzer also showed how well Pius XII was informed of Jewish suffering throughout Europe, especially in his beloved Rome. While the pope did not clearly condemn Jewish persecution, he did vehemently decry Allied bombings of Rome and personally visited the affected areas. Ruff pointed to Kertzer’s explanation for this papal reticence, which was the pope’s “personal weakness, not ideological affinity.” This is an essential break with earlier scholars who argued that Pope Pius XII preferred authoritarian fascism to liberal democracy. Kertzer notes that, in the safety of June 1945, Pius XII described National Socialism as a “satanic ghost.” Ruff emphasized Kertzer’s “unsparing judgment” that this pontificate was a moral failure.

Ruff’s most significant contribution to the discussion is related to the historiographical context of Kertzer’s work. Ruff notes that while Kertzer refuted the pope’s apologists, his critique of Pius differs from that of previous critics. Pius XII had no affinity for fascism, nor is there evidence that, in contrast with leading papal officials, he was an antisemite. Ruff also noted that Church history has become increasingly globalized. Since the pontificate of Pius XII extended another thirteen years, was he, as Kertzer’s title suggests, always a “pope at war?” What about his public interventions in the Middle Eastern question, in defense of Christians in Communist China, or his criticisms of Cold War communism in Eastern Europe? Ruff’s concluding questions suggest that a better understanding of the remainder of Pius XII’s pontificate might contribute by extension to a better understanding of his wartime behavior.

Next, Suzanne Brown-Fleming from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum offered comments. She expanded on Kertzer’s argument that, until 1943, the pope had to expect a future Europe dominated by National Socialist Germany, in which the Church would need to find ways to survive. Brown-Fleming argued that the necessary proof of the importance of Kertzer’s work lies in the many responses to the book and related articles in The Atlantic First, “What the Vatican’s Secret Archives are about to Reveal” (March 2, 2020), “The Pope, the Jews, and the Secret of the Archives” (July 27, 2020), “The Pope’s Secret Back Channel to Hitler,” (May 31, 2022). Perhaps the most robust rejoinder appeared in a full-page article in L’Osservatore Romano (20 June 2022). Given the depth of Kertzer’s archival research, Brown-Fleming found the resistance to his findings surprising. She voiced hope for a new manner of historical scholarship and dialogue that is open-minded and evidence-based rather than a continuation of the type of conjecture typical of much of the scholarship produced before the recent opening of the relevant archival materials in the Vatican archives, both supportive and critical of the pope.

Martin Menke of Rivier University noted that, while defenders of Pius XII have pointed to particular statements that can be interpreted as statements of concern for persecuted Jews, Kertzer emphasized that the pope’s contemporaries considered the statements weak. Menke pointed out that the chair of the Fulda bishops’ conference, Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau, similarly refrained from public pronouncement but relied instead on private petitions out of fear that public opposition would yield further repression of Catholics. Kertzer shows that, in the pope’s private encounters with German diplomats, he was at times more candid than in his public pronouncements. Menke noted that Pius XII’s greatest fears were for the survival of both the Church in Europe, as much as the Vatican State. Menke said, “Ultimately, the pope’s fear of jeopardizing the sacramental life and the integrity of the institutional church led to his reticence.” Pius XII did not realize how fascist forces had already compromised this integrity. Menke also compared Pius XII’s criticism of moral decay in Allied-occupied Rome with Bishop Clemens Graf von Galen’s criticism of the British treatment of Germans in occupied Westphalia, which reflected willful blindness to German crimes. One doubts whether Italian fascists or German National Socialists would have been as tolerant of criticism of the pope’s criticism as were the Allied powers.

Menke asked if Kertzer might have shown greater understanding of the pope’s humanity, in all its weakness, or if one might consider the Catholic teaching of accidentalism, that governments are to be obeyed as long as they defend Catholic moral teaching. Finally, Menke pointed out that Pius XII privately resented the silence of many German bishops, such as Cardinal Bertram, and applauded the more confrontational stand of Berlin’s Bishop Konrad von Preysing. In the end, Menke agreed with Kertzer that timidity prevented Pius XII from being a great, forceful leader of the Church and instead led to his failing as Pontifex Maximus.

In his remarks, panel chair Roy Domenico of the University of Scranton contributed a critical Italian historical perspective to the discussion. He emphasized the romanitá of Pius XII, which eventually made him an alternative authority figure to fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Domenico shows that the pope’s popularity rose as that of Mussolini and, eventually, the king declined. He also discussed the pope’s significance in promoting the postwar idea of Italians as brava gente, hardly responsible for the regime’s collaboration with the National Socialists and the Italian fascist regime’s atrocities. Crucially, Domenico reminded those present that the Church cannot be reduced to one man, even one as necessary as the pope. Many Catholics in Italy and elsewhere did do much to save persecuted Jews. He stressed that at no time did the moral authority of the Italian fascists outweigh that of the Church. One might add that, in Germany, too, most of the bishops proved weak, but their priests and laypeople often risked their lives to help those persecuted by the regime.

The author of The Pope at War, David Kertzer of Brown University, responded to the other panelists. Despite his profound archival research and his kind acknowledgment of the other panelists’ comments, his response reflected the fundamental confusion or astonishment at the moral failure of Pius XII by all those who expect the Church, and especially the pope as its head, to live up to the higher moral calling they claim to embody. Many scholars and laypeople share in this confusion about the poor record of the Christian churches during this time. In the end, Kertzer argued that the Church perhaps needed a two-fold leadership: the pope as a moral leader and some other administrator of the Holy See and its interests worldwide, since someone tasked with moral leadership, as history shows, is easily compromised by diplomatic and other political considerations.

Review of Doris L. Bergen, Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 3/4 (Fall 2023)

Review of Doris L. Bergen, Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University (mmenke@rivier.edu)

Doris Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at Toronto. Her works on the Holocaust, War, and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust and Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich are standard works in the field. In her most recent work, she studies the one thousand Christian chaplains in the Wehrmacht during World War II. (2) Specifically, she asks whom chaplains served during the war. Her answer is a few chaplains served the regime, most served the soldiers in their care, and virtually none served the victims of Germany’s wartime atrocities.

Bergen first asks what chaplains knew about the annihilation of the Jews and whether or not they sought to intervene. Working with letters individual chaplains sent to their bishops, friends, and family, official Wehrmacht reports on the chaplaincy, and more, Bergen paints an expected but devastating picture. Bergen demonstrates that the chaplains she studied were committed to their pastoral duties as they understood them. The chaplains celebrated religious services, counseled individual soldiers, and accompanied soldiers sentenced to death by a German court-martial on their final way. Before the war, Bergen shows, the chaplains continuously sought to prove their relevance to the soldiers in the field, both to prove their Germanic manliness and to prove themselves worthy of serving at the front. As Lauren Faulkner Rossi showed in her work Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation, the chaplains were constantly fighting efforts by the national socialist regime to curtail their activities, including the wartime decision not to replace chaplains killed or wounded in action with other chaplains and appoint Nationalsozialistische Führungsoffiziere (NSFO), national socialist leadership officers, instead. (Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the War of Annihilation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015)). Beyond the fear of the NSFO, Bergen shows the chaplains continuously sought to prove their relevance to the soldiers in the field, both to prove their Germanic manliness and to prove themselves worthy of serving at the front.

At the heart of the study lies the chaplains’ response to the antisemitic atrocities occurring around them. Bergen shows that chaplains hardly ever wrote or spoke about massacres observed near their positions. Instead, Bergen convincingly argues, the chaplains focused their pastoral care on both active duty and wounded soldiers, often more intensely than the regime desired. Soldiers perceived the chaplains’ presence and pastoral to absolve the soldiers from any guilt incurred during combat but also in measures against the civilian population. (8, 10, 20) Bergen asks, “Were the chaplains Nazis? A more fruitful question asks how people who were not fervent Nazis or eager killers ended up playing an essential role in atrocity?” (15)

Bergen’s work contributes to current scholarly inquiry into the behavior of Christian clergy during the national socialist era. How did Christian clergy respond to national socialist persecution of minorities such as Jews and individuals with disabilities? One must find the military chaplains essentially wanting by today’s standards. Just as clergy in the Altreich, with exceptions, failed to protect Jews, military chaplains closed their eyes to the atrocities committed by the German armed forces. Already in 1933, the might be said about Christian leaders in general, such as Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich, who in 1933 argued that “Jew-Christians” (Judenchristen) could take care of themselves. (Ludwig Volk, Der Bayerische Episkopat und der Nationalsozialismus 1930-1934. Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, series B, vol. 1 (Mainz, 1965), 78: Nachlaß Faulhaber)) In addition to the concerns Bergen mentioned about manliness and loyalty, Faulhaber mentioned the fear that defending Jews might lead to the persecution of Catholics. The desire to avoid opposing national socialist policy prevailed among military chaplains as it did among most civilian clergy. See, in exemplary fashion, the work of Kevin Spicer. (Kevin Spicer, C.S.C., Resisting the Third Reich: Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004) and Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 2008)). Also, military chaplains faced the additional burden of supporting troops on the front lines. She argues, “The Wehrmacht chaplaincy acted as an insulating layer, protecting German soldiers from listening to their consciences or reflecting on Christian teachings. The buffer also covered the chaplains themselves and absorbed objections they may have had. The chaplaincy became a cone of silence, a tunnel.” (20) It would have been challenging to warn those involved in atrocities of the sinful nature of their acts.

While Bergen’s argument makes sense, one wishes she had done more to explore subjects that might weaken her argument. Most importantly, putting pen to paper during the national socialist era was perilous. It would have been helpful to understand the chaplains’ reports and letters home in the context of military censorship of the mail from the front. Given the regime’s hostility to the chaplaincy, might the chaplains have been particularly concerned their mail would be intercepted and exploited? Bergen herself notes that clergy who contradicted the regime’s official line on the Kristallnacht pogrom found themselves barred from service as chaplains. (74) Bergen shows that the vetting process for chaplains sought to weed out any individual previously critical of the regime. As Bergen notes, this kept principled clergy from becoming chaplains, which led to a chaplain’s corps being more inclined to support the regime. Bergen might have displayed more understanding of the pressure chaplains felt to care for their assigned flock against the scrutiny of the regime. They focused on the soldiers in their units, to support them and provide them with solace, which they could not have done had they remonstrated with them about the atrocities German forces were committing.

Furthermore, with few exceptions, Bergen does not show direct awareness by chaplains of atrocities committed by German forces. “Many chaplains’ activity reports situate individual clergy squarely in the areas of major massacres of Jews, although they do not explicitly mention these events.” (123) A more detailed analysis of the stations at which Christian chaplains served at any given point during the war about the occurrence of atrocities would have been helpful. Beyond the data provided, a more detailed analysis of the distribution of Christian chaplains among Wehrmacht units would have been helpful.

Nonetheless, Bergen’s fundamental question remains valid: “Whom or what does a chaplain serve?” (2) A Christian clergy should first serve God and God’s commandments, regardless of nationality, ideology, etc. Seeing evil, or at least the evidence of evil, clergy should have interceded for the victims. Instead, and this Bergen might have emphasized further, the chaplains considered their mission limited to the welfare of German soldiers, not to all those they encountered. As a result, “In the Nazi empire, Christianity and Christian chaplains were essential components in a system of ideas, structures, and narratives that protected and rewarded the perpetrators of genocide and their communities even as it erased their victims and denied their crimes.” (232)

Review of Hans-Otto Mühleisen and Dominik Burkard, Erzbischof Conrad Groeber reloaded: Warum es sich lohnt, genauer hinzusehen

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Review of Hans-Otto Mühleisen and Dominik Burkard, Erzbischof Conrad Gröber reloaded: Warum es sich lohnt, genauer hinzusehen (Lindenberg: Kunstverlag Josef Fink, 2020). ISBN 978-3-95976-305-9.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

In this volume, two historians, one emeritus at Augsburg and the other still active at Würzburg, seek to restore scholarly credibility to the politicized debate about the role Archbishop Conrad Gröber played during the years of the National Socialist regime. Ordained to the episcopate as Bishop of Meißen in 1931, he served as Archbishop of Freiburg from 1932 until he died in 1948. Mühleisen and Burkard argue, each in a separate essay, that the politics of memory and history demands that historians undertake particularly accurate scholarly research and analysis. In the historiography of the Christian churches in the twentieth century, that constitutes a grave problem, as one can see from the Concordat debate of the 1950’s onward. Today, most historians have moved beyond defensive or accusatory positions. The history of the churches, like all history, is too complex to permit generalized conclusions.

In 2015, a movement arose to repeal Gröber’s honorary town citizenship based on impressions contemporaries had of his speeches and his supposed support for the National Socialist regime, especially in 1933-34. In response, Mühleisen offers a differentiated analysis of Gröber and avoids definite judgment where ambiguity remains. Mühleisen also avoids moral judgment, which he argues is not the purpose of this historical study. He questions whether or not one can weigh moral accomplishments against moral failings to arrive at a “bottom line” judgment. In a fairly balanced account, Mühleisen discusses several lapses in judgment by Gröber, such as his decision to join the SS “booster club.” Also, Mühleisen notes that Gröber’s early public support for the regime confused the laity. While incomprehensible today, some have described membership in this organization as a protection racket. Similarly, in the first months of the new regime, Gröber emphasized his willingness to work with the new government authorities. Possible evidence for this is the Gestapo’s fear of Gröber’s fundamental opposition to the regime.

Mühleisen suggests that Gröber walked a fine line of superficial support for the regime, necessary to continue his defense of Catholic teaching, the Church, and Catholics in his archdiocese—one should remember that all-too-open opposition against the regime led to the exile of Joannes Baptista Sproll, Bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart. For the war years, Mühleisen shows that Gröber’s homilies and speeches often appeared to focus on matters internal to the Church but that implicitly, they contained ambiguities and meaning that suggested complying with Gröber’s interpretation of Catholic teaching would lead if not to resistance, then at least to a more critical view of the regime. In authoritarian regimes, reading between the lines of public pronouncements by individuals not affiliated with the regime became a cultivated skill.

Mühleisen emphasizes Gröber’s unrelenting insistence on Catholic moral teaching and on protecting the rights of the laity to worship and especially of the clergy to fulfill their sacerdotal duties. Mühleisen goes so far as to claim that Gröber’s constant public insistence on the rights of the Church and the faithful constitutes a form of resistance, which might not apply in the regime’s early years, but became increasingly accurate as repression worsened.

An essential element of Muhleisen’s discussion relates to a homily Gröber preached in the fall of 1942. He employed vicious antisemitic tropes, such as the Jewish striving for world domination. Mühleisen does not attempt to excuse these lapses. He does, however, note that at the same time he was making such comments, he was providing Gertrud Luckner, charged with helping non-Aryan Christians and all those persecuted, with funds to bring to persecuted communities. Mühleisen does not explain these contradictions, primarily because Gröber’s true intentions are undocumented. Mühleisen is sympathetic to Gröber but refuses to absolve him from mistakes in his relationship with the regime.

In the second essay, Dominik Burkard responds to claims by Wolfgang Proske, doctorally qualified history teacher and publisher of Täter, Helfer, Trittbrettfahrer, a series of studies on those actively involved or enabling the National Socialist regime in southern Germany. Proske considered Gröber “an unambiguous aide to the regime and tarnished by National Socialism.” Rather than undermine Proske’s arguments directly, Burkard undertakes a scholarly analysis of Proske’s sources, in particular records of the French authorities, housed in the Archives de l’occupation franҫaise en Allemagne et en Autriche. These contain a dossier on Gröber, which is unsurprising given his position in the French zone. In the dossier, Burkard found several character appraisals of Gröber and thirty-pages of documentation of sexual liaisons in which the archbishop supposedly engaged. Proske believed these documents were collected by the Gestapo Karlsruhe, from where they ended up in French hands. Burkard, however, convincingly argues otherwise.

Given some of the details in the document, Burkard dates the documents’ creation to the fall of 1947, while a French translation, whose text does not precisely mirror the German text, was produced in 1949. Burkard believes these documents were created in response to the publication of a volume of Gröber’s wartime homilies and pastoral messages, which the author considered propaganda by the archbishop. The documents’ author described Gröber as a careerist, opportunist, power-hungry, non-religious, and superficial. There is a kernel of truth in these claims. Gröber’s career involved little parish work. He spent twelve years as rector of the minor seminary in Konstanz, from where he moved to diocesan administration. He was authoritarian. Given his willingness to test the limits of public criticism of the regime, however, his faith must have had some deep roots. In a well-differentiated study, Burkard discusses Gröber’s critics within the Church, particularly Vicar General Josef Sester and inactive priest Heinrich Mohr who supported National Socialism. Sester, before he died in 1938, had filed charges of sexual impropriety against Gröber, which the Holy See rejected. Mohr and his sister, Teresa Mohr, waged a decade-long campaign against Gröber in which they accused the archbishop of moral failings and close collaboration with the regime. After discussing several other possible authors of the documents against Gröber, Burkard convincingly points to a preponderance of evidence against Teresa Mohr, whom contemporaries described as unhinged in her hatred of Gröber.

Burkard notes, without irony, that today’s critics of Gröber, like Proske, rely on documents in part created by supporters of National Socialism to make their case. Not quite as convincingly, perhaps because he does not expand on the role of the Mohr siblings in the education politics of postwar Baden, Burkard argues that they opposed Gröber’s support for the Christian Democratic Union and interconfessional public schools. They demanded his support for the resurrected Center Party and the denominationally segregated public schools that had existed before 1933. Gröber also argues that the theologian Paul Jungblut, another priest critical of Gröber, revised the original text written by Teresa Mohr. He revised the text after Gröber’s death with the hope that none of Gröber’s confidants would succeed him as archbishop.

Mühleisen and Burkard, while sympathetic to Gröber, do not offer hagiography, nor do they engage in polemics against Proske and others. Instead, they go where the evidence leads them and subject their findings to rigorous scholarly inquiry. Concerning Gröber’s actions and intentions, there can be no clear conclusion, although the preponderance of the evidence leans toward characterizing him as a critic of National Socialism. Concerning the state of public discussion and scholarly work on the churches during the Nazi era, this work stands as a model of dispassionate research.

Review of Josef Meyer zu Schlochten and Johannes W. Vutz, eds., Lorenz Jaeger: Ein Erzbischof in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Review of Josef Meyer zu Schlochten and Johannes W. Vutz, eds., Lorenz Jaeger: Ein Erzbischof in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Münster: Aschendorff, 2020). ISBN 978-3-402-24674-0.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

By necessity, prominent figures in the first three decades of the Federal Republic’s existence had experienced the Third Reich as young or middle-aged adults. Many of those in responsible roles during the Third Reich hid or minimized their involvement with the regime. Beginning with the revelations concerning Heinrich Globke, close aid to Chancellor Adenauer, the pasts of prominent figures came to light. Often, those responsible for such disclosures aimed to embarrass and damage the reputation of those concerned. A particular target for some were the leaders of the Christian churches in Germany, most of whose careers had begun long before 1945. Among historians, revelations of past mistakes and crimes have evolved from sensational efforts to discredit certain figures to reviewing individual biographies as part of Germany’s broader coming to terms with its past, its Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Most recently, perhaps with the benefit of distance, more methodologically sound, less agenda-driven scholarship is occurring. In this historiographical evolution, the history of the churches during the Third Reich occurred early. Unlike most attacks on leading political and cultural figures, the attacks on the Churches were often aimed at the institutions themselves. Recent scholarship on Catholic resisters, on Catholics who became National Socialists, and on members of the German hierarchy (Berning, Jaeger, Frings, Gröber, and Bertram, for example) reveals that this trend to broader history-writing is complicated by the different biographies of the historical subjects.

In the volume under review, the contributions of different generations of historians reflect this evolution. The subject is Cardinal Lorenz Jaeger, Archbishop of Paderborn, 1941-1973. Before becoming archbishop, Jaeger had served as a regular army officer in World War One, then entered the seminary. He served as Dortmund’s youth pastor and teacher during the inter-war period. Upon the outbreak of World War II, Jaeger immediately volunteered as a military chaplain. Both in his capacity as a teacher and as a military chaplain, he had to pass background checks by Nazi authorities. Various contributors, however, note that, during Jaeger’s episcopal ordination process, the regime’s security authorities reported fundamental misgivings about his appointment. As early as 1935, authorities noted his rejection of Alfred Rosenberg’s Mythos des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. The Sicherheitsdienst [SD] and regional NSDAP offices considered him a threat to the regime. At the ministerial level, both sides tried to de-escalate conflicts in the broader context of the regime’s relations with the Catholic Church, especially in episcopal ordinations. So the Reich Minister of Church Affairs, Hans Kerrl, approved Jaeger’s ordination as Archbishop of Paderborn.

Historians disagree on Jaeger’s affinity for the Nazi regime before his ordination. Some take his service in World War One, his conservative nationalism, his anti-Bolshevism, and his immediate volunteering as a military chaplain as proof of his affinity to the regime. In the volume, several contributors convincingly prove that Jaeger was a nationalist and a conservative who promoted patriotism, opposed the Treaty of Versailles, and believed in the divinely ordained authority of the state. Those same contributors show, however, that Jaeger’s conservatism was akin to that of the resistance leaders against Hitler, such as Stauffenberg and Goerdeler. They also point to Jaeger’s insistence on the primary importance of faith and obedience to God among Catholic youth. Jaeger was a convinced Catholic and a proud German. Some contributors argue that one needs to understand the sensibilities of the times rather than judge Jaeger with presentist attitudes. These contributors argue that contemporary historians lack an awareness of how the times limited a priest or bishop’s freedom of action during the Nazi era. Others pointed out that Jaeger, like many bishops, adopted the idiom of the Third Reich without intending to convey the same racist message as the regime did. While Jaeger visited Israel and Jordan in 1964, there is no evidence of any statements by Jaeger concerning antisemitism and the Shoah. In the volume, the question of Jaeger’s own view of Jews and of the regime’s persecution largely goes unmentioned. This raises the question of whether there is no evidence to be found or if seemed irrelevant or, worse, unpalatable to the authors and editors?

The volume’s purpose and genesis pose questions of scholarly independence. Overall, the volume primarily consists of contributions defending Jaeger by pointing out his disagreements with the regime, his insistence on the Church’s role in forming young minds, and his ministrations to his archdiocesan flock despite all harassment and persecution by the regime. Given the volume’s creation circumstances, one would have hoped for additional critical voices. The book is the result of research commissioned by the archbishop of Paderborn in 2015, designed to respond to a civic petition to revoke Jaeger’s honorary citizenship in the city. The archbishop commissioned the Theologische Fakultät Paderborn, not the city’s university or the Katholische Hochschule Nordrhein-Westphalen at Paderborn.

Given that the Archdiocese sponsors the Theologische Fakultät, more independent voices would have been welcome. Nonetheless, several authors in the study note mistakes, poorly chosen language, ambiguous statements, and more to question the narrative of a staunchly anti-National Socialist bishop. In the discussions of Jaeger’s postwar tenure, the contributors are more willing to admit his shortcomings and blind spots. For example, Jaeger found it extremely difficult to contend with the radical changes in Germany, North-Rhine-Westphalia, and within the Church in the sixties and early seventies. Demands for greater lay participation, especially in denominational public schools, and for greater moral freedom in sexual morality challenged Jaeger, contributing to his resignation in 1973.

Jaeger’s most vigorous opponent was Rudolf Augstein, publisher of the influential post-war periodical Der Spiegel. In 1965, the journal launched a full-fledged attack on Jaeger. Der Spiegel claimed that, as a military chaplain and archbishop who “got along” with the Nazi regime, Jaeger had forfeited the moral legitimacy of his office. Der Spiegel based its criticism on Guenter Lewy’s The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, which was published in German in 1965. Lewy’s work included several erroneous interpretations of his sources, including one about a sermon by Jaeger. Der Spiegel made this false interpretation the basis of an article seeking to undermine Jaeger. Jaeger’s attorneys achieved a clarification by Der Spiegel and changes to Lewy’s manuscript by the German publisher. In the 1973 elections, Augstein again published critiques of Jaeger’s past during the Third Reich. However, the publisher received support neither from the left-wing political parties nor from any other news media.

Several contributors argue that the criticism of Jaeger’s position in the sixties and early seventies colored historians’ analysis of his actions during the Nazi period. On the other hand, other historians, foremost Joachim Kuropka, refuse to acknowledge any mistakes or missteps on Jaeger’s part during the Nazi period or later. Kuropka, in particular, succeeds in undermining the arguments of Jaeger’s most ardent critics, Wolfgang Stüken und Peter Bürger, by dissecting their analysis of the archival evidence. Unfortunately, Kuropka undermines the effectiveness of his fight with unnecessary polemics against Jaeger’s critics. Fortunately, the volume’s final essay by Dietmar Klemke offers scholars an honest analysis of Jaeger’s achievements. Klemke points out both moments in which Jaeger resolutely contradicted the Nazi regime and those in which Jaeger fell short of the expectations one might have of a Catholic bishop. Klemke argues that Jaeger should have known that opposition to bolshevism does not necessitate the support of the Nazi regime. Ultimately, Klemke argues that Jaeger belongs in a gray zone of individuals whose actions and attitudes during the National Socialist period are ambiguous.

This description seems an accurate assessment of clergy from Pius XII to many a parish priest and lay Catholic. There are those, such as the “brown priests” whom Kevin Spicer has identified, or Alfred Delp, who resisted the Nazi regime while insisting on Germany’s profound cultural mission. Catholic individuals like Jaeger, Delp, Galen, and many others find approval for their criticism of and sacrifice against the Nazi regime while beholden to patriotic, nationalist, and religious values that make them seem less than heroic in our age.

While the purpose of this volume was to intervene in the Paderborn city council’s decision on whether or not to repeal Jaeger’s honorary town citizenship, the emphasis on Jaeger’s early encouragement of ecumenicism and his role in including an opening to ecumenicism in the decisions of Vatican II, discussed in the essays by Detlef Grothmann and Dina von Fassen, and by Klemke, bears further research. Similarly, Grothmann and von Fassen noted that Jaeger’s activities concerning the diocesan territories in the Soviet zone of occupation bear further investigation.

Review of Michael Hesemann, Der Papst und der Holocaust: Pius XII. und die geheimen Akten im Vatikan

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of Michael Hesemann, Der Papst und der Holocaust: Pius XII. und die geheimen Akten im Vatikan (Stuttgart: Langenmüller, 2020). 448 pages. ISBN 978-3-7844-3449-0.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

Michael Hesemann, an independent scholar who has published several works on Pius, on Hitler’s view of religion, and on the Armenian genocide, offers a new contribution to the ongoing “Pius Wars,” the continuing scholarly debate about the degree to which Pope Pius XII opposed national socialist Antisemitism and how much he did to assist persecuted Jews. The spectrum of opinion in this debate reaches from hagiographic apologists such as Michael Feldkamp to vehement critics such as Susan Zuccotti, not to mention Ralf Hochhuth’s early attack on Pius in “The Deputy.” Hesemann makes a case for Pius’s sincere concern for Jewish suffering and his active, pragmatic support for rescue measures. He offers little new insight but amasses a large volume of evidence in the pope’s favor. This work could be a valuable contribution to the discussion, were it not for occasional disparaging comments against those with opposing viewpoints and a failure not only to make his case but engage and disprove the opposing case.

The most important contribution of Hesemann’s work is its exhaustive collection of all evidence and arguments that portray the pope’s record in a positive light. A frequently cited problem was the vague and diplomatic language used in the pope’s statements and writings; Hesemann points to contemporary sources that clearly understood the pope’s intent. Referring to Pius’ first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, which includes a reminder about human fraternity and about the right of the victims of war and racism to human compassion, Hesemann points to the New York Times, which reported that the pope “condemned dictators, those who break international agreements, and racism.” Furthermore, the Times reported that while such a condemnation had been expected, “only few observers had expected the condemnation to be so clear and unequivocal” (104). Hesemann’s evidence suggests that Pius was not only not silent but that readers understood his guarded speech as he intended.

Beyond the question of papal ambiguity and silence, Hesemann devotes much of the work to proving that the pope was active and vocal about the holocaust. Addressing the pope’s supposed inactivity during the holocaust, Hesemann lists many instances in which the pope quietly directed that financial resources, albeit limited, be provided to help those persecuted by the National Socialists. At the same time, Hesemann shows that this aid extended beyond Catholics whom the national socialist regime considered Jewish. The examples he provides show that his assistance was reactive rather than systematic. In light of the immense need, the Vatican necessarily limited its expenditures in aid to those persecuted. Hesemann also argues that reliable information about persecutions, especially about mass murder, was challenging to obtain. According to him, Pius learned of the true extent of the genocide only after the war. (212) On the same page, however, Hesemann argues that the pope received eyewitness accounts proving the systematic nature of the murders in the East “already a few weeks before the Wannsee Conference.” (212). Thus, in January 1942, the pope knew the National Socialists were murdering according to a concrete plan. How then, as Hesemann describes a few pages later, in September 1942, could Monsignor Montini (later Pope Paul VI) have honestly told American envoy Myron Taylor that the Holy See did not possess information “confirming this grave information?” (216). To argue that the pope knew about violence, terror, and massacres, but not about the extent of the genocide seems farfetched.

Hesemann devotes an entire chapter to “the ‘wise silence’ of the pope.” (220). Pius’ silence was the result of bitter experience, claims Hesemann. Pius himself claimed that any public statements condemning Antisemitism and the holocaust were counterproductive. To each one, the national socialist regime responded with increased persecution. (208) The most robust case for reticence was the Dutch experience under occupation. Beginning in 1941, the Dutch had publicly protested against German antisemitic measures. Each time, the Germans had responded with enormous levies and additional arrests. When deportations began in 1942, the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht ordered his protest read in all churches. (222) Within days, all Dutch Catholics whom the occupation forces considered Jewish were deported, among them Carmelite religious Edith Stein. According to the pope’s housekeeper, upon hearing the news, the pope immediately burned the draft of the public protest he had intended to make in support of the Bishop of Utrecht. German responses to Radio Vaticane’s regular reports about atrocities against Catholics led to arrests of priests, executions, and more. (231) In response to the pope’s Christmas broadcast of 1942, in which he condemned the suffering of innocents, including those persecuted based on race, the German Foreign Office threatened the pope with reprisals in Germany, should such “interference” occur again. (241). Hesemann makes a strong case that a broad, explicit public condemnation of the genocide would have wrought much suffering. However, one must ask if safeguarding the moral integrity of the Catholic Church’s leader might not have been worth the price in the scope of the crimes committed, preserving the moral integrity of the leader of the Catholic Church might not have been worth the price?

The book’s argument falters when Hesemann presents an image of Pope Pius XII as a friend of Jews, perhaps “the church leader best-disposed to Jews during his lifetime.” (61). For example, the author points to a Jewish childhood friend with whom Pius was close and whose emigration to Palestine he facilitated in 1938. More generally, Hesemann’s case for Pius’ pro-Jewish attitudes and activities during his time as nuncio in Germany relies on the testimony of Pinchas Lapide and Nahum Sokolow. Problematic are claims that Pius XII condemned the Reich pogrom of 1938 because he “must have approved and possibly even dictated himself” the Osservatore Romano’s critical response to this violent persecution. To claim that there was “no leading Catholic clergyman other than Eugenio Pacelli who opposed Hitler and National Socialism as early and as uncompromisingly” is an audacious claim. (92) Sometimes, even among the best historians, the desire for a particular “past” colors one’s work. There is no doubt that Hesemann gathered much evidence to support his case. In the cases mentioned above, the evidence presented by Hesemann broadly supports his argument. Still, a more solid foundation of evidence is needed to support some of the claims made convincingly.

The publisher’s jacket cover promises “the first publication in German of these explosive [brisant] documents.” Anyone expecting full-length explosive and previously unpublished documents will, however, be disappointed. In only two cases does Hesemann claim to offer documentary evidence he newly discovered. For example, he found a message of January 9, 1939, in which Pius, still Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli, appealed to all leading archbishops to create structures to welcome Catholic refugees whom the Third Reich considered Jews. Pius XII claimed that about 200,000 individuals the regime considered Jewish fell into this category. Hesemann points out that this number exceeded the number of Catholics persecuted as Jews, which meant that Pius sought to create opportunities for practicing Jews. (79-80, 148)

Hesemann’s summary of post-war Jewish expressions of gratitude is exhaustive but not novel. Several significant document editions appear in the citations. However, his archival research is limited to records in the Vatican Secret Archives, specifically those of the nunciatures in Munich and Berlin and the apostolic delegation in Turkey. The documents Hesemann found in the Vatican Secret Archives generally are not new. Of the relevant scholarly literature used by Hesemann, some appeared recently, but a good number of the works are outdated. Even fifty years ago, Father Ludwig Volk, SJ, who had seen the Secret Archives, warned that this collection contained no smoking guns.

In part because Hesemann relies on questionable scholarship, his work lacks judiciousness. For example, he describes Hochhuth’s play as the result of a KGB plot (18) without mentioning that this claim stems from a largely unverifiable work by former Romanian secret police officer Ion Pacepa. Hochhuth did not need the KGB’s help writing “The Deputy.” Even were this assertion correct, it is not surprising that the Soviet bloc sought to embarrass the Vatican, nor does such a connection change the content or impact of the play. Hesemann dismisses rather than engages the work of Michael Phayer, Susan Zuccotti, and others. Accusing David Kertzer of inventing the claim that Pius XI did not want to publish an encyclical that would offend Hitler is a scholarly accusation that deserved a much more detailed explanation. In general, Hesemann undermines his work by this combination of disparaging scholars with contradictory opinions and failing to disprove their claims.

Beyond the corpus, the book includes a preface by Father Peter Gumpel, Ph.D., SJ, deeply involved in the canonization process of Pius XII. In the acknowledgments, Hesemann thanks Pope Benedict XVI for his encouragement and leading German curial officials for their help as he wrote the manuscript. While the preface and acknowledgments do not predetermine the book’s conclusions, they suggest that Hesemann would have felt the need to be all the more critical of his sources and their arguments to avoid the appearance of prejudice.

Reading the work without context, one seems to see a convincing case for an actively engaged pope, one who opposed National Socialism at every turn but whom experience had taught to be diplomatic and to act “under the radar,” without openly condemning his powerful enemies. Such a reality would have been an almost ideal papacy. This wishful thinking is not exclusive to Hesemann. It seems that, at least for now, the “Pius Wars” will continue to obstruct objective scholarship.

Review of Wilfried Loth. “Freiheit und Würde des Volkes:” Katholizismus und Demokratie in Deutschland

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 3 (September 2021)

Review of Wilfried Loth, “Freiheit und Würde des Volkes:” Katholizismus und Demokratie in Deutschland, Religion und Moderne, Vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2018). ISBN 978-3-593-50838-2.

By Martin R. Menke, Rivier University

Wilfried Loth is a well-known German historian. In addition to research on nineteenth-century German Catholicism, he has also published on the early Cold War, on the history of France, and on European unification. In this collection of fourteen previously published essays, Loth analyzes Catholics’ contributions to the development of democracy in Germany since the mid-nineteenth century. Loth offers a nuanced analysis based on an impressive command of the scholarly literature and archival sources. He argues that while the institutional Church opposed modernity until after World War II, lay Catholics, especially those organized in political parties, contributed significantly to the development of modern democracy in Germany.

Loth argues that much relevant scholarship has rested on Rainer Lepsius’ theory of a closed Catholic milieu, largely dominated by ultramontane clergy.[1] According to Loth, instead of a stereotype of German Catholicism dominated by clergy and uniform in thought and practice, German Catholics learned early that defending modern goals such as the constitutional order, a responsible ministry, and the defense of civil rights was the best way to defend Catholic faith and values against in a secularized world. Loth’s analysis represents a strain of scholarship dating back to Margaret Lavinia Anderson’s Practicing Democracy: Elections and Culture in Imperial Germany and including Margaret Stieg Dalton’s Catholicism, Popular Culture and the Arts in Germany, 1880-1933, as well as Mark Edward Ruff’s The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany, 1945-1965, and others. [2]

One might question why a collection of Loth’s articles, which are generally well known, is needed. In the introduction, Loth warns that, “a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, western pluralism, parliamentary democracy, and European unification suddenly no longer belong to the secure elements of the social order in Germany and Europe.”(9) Loth blames this decline on the alienation of social elites, middle strata and lower classes. He claims that reviewing the contribution of German Catholics to the country’s democratization might be useful to the development of a vigilant and self-asserting democracy, which the national Catholic convention of 2018 demanded. Keeping this admonition in mind lends the essay additional coherence.

In the first essay, Loth reviews the ultramontane attitude of the nineteenth-century Catholic hierarchy. Rather than considering Leo XIII, author of rerum novarum, as a modernizer, Loth reminds the reader that the church rejected all Catholic organizations beyond the control of the hierarchy, which impeded the social integration of Catholics. By the early twentieth century, however, German Catholics desired full integration into the majority society. To this end, the Center Party, the Volksverein, and the Görresgesellschaft were founded to further the Catholic laity’s political interests free of the hierarchy, to educate the lower classes, and to create a forum for Catholic scholars and intellectuals. Loth argues in his second essay that Bismarck’s Kulturkampf did more for Catholic unity than the ultramontane faction could ever have done.

In the third chapter, Loth convinces the reader that assumptions about a coherent and homogeneous Catholic milieu are erroneous. This is both Loth’s most important and most controversial contribution to scholarship, first made in his Habilitationsschrift of 1984. He describes a Catholic bourgeoisie bent on emancipation in the Reich, populist tendencies among peasants and freeholders, as well as among the petit bourgeoisie, and finally, a Catholic labor movement. In this essay in particular, Loth offers such a nuanced and differentiating analysis to prove generalizations about “the” Catholic milieu become impossible. Rather, it is resistance against discrimination that brings Catholics together in support of the Center Party as the broadest Catholic organization.

In the fourth essay, Loth addresses the milieu thesis more directly, again with notable differentiation. He distinguishes between frequenting the sacraments and the liturgies on the one hand and living a life of Catholic daily practices and habits. What milieu may have formed would arise regionally to defend against discrimination. After 1945, the milieu disappeared completely. Loth concludes, “Political Catholicism and Catholic milieu constituted transitional phenomena. If these were created to resist modernity, Catholics instead ended up helping shape modernity.”(107)

In the following essay on the priest Georg Friedrich Dasbach, as in the essays on the resister Nikolaus Groß and on the Center Party’s colonial politics, Loth inserts case studies to illustrate his broader arguments. Father Dasbach established a publishing enterprise in which he supported small freeholders. His calls for reform led to a Prussian state repression against him. Dasbach’s engagement for small freeholders, vintners, and the miners of the Saar brought him the disapproval of Catholic notables. Against the wishes of the Center Party leadership, the voters returned him to the Reichstag with 92 percent of the vote. This man’s fight against both state repression and the Catholic elites demonstrates the impossibility of a homogeneous Catholic milieu.

In the sixth essay, Loth describes the work of late nineteenth-century Catholic social thinkers such as Georg Hertling, Father August Pieper of the Volksverein, and the future Reich labor minister, Father Heinrich Braun, who openly rejected ultramontane attitudes and demanded Catholic teaching be rendered effective in laws to protect workers and their families. Loth further discussed the Volksverein in a separate chapter. He explains its transitional character to facilitate the entry of Catholic workers into the broader trade union movement. It began as an organization to protect Catholic workers from socialist temptations, then briefly became the voice of Catholic labor as a whole. After World War One, however, Catholic workers no longer needed the Volksverein as interdenominational Catholic unions now provided an attractive venue for the political and social formation of workers. Analyzing Catholic unions more specifically in a separate essay, Loth explains the eventual victory of Catholic workers over the ultramontane pressures of the hierarchy. Despite near-condemnation from Rome, the Christian unions prevailed and thrived until 1933.

The ninth essay is probably the least satisfactory, largely because it addresses too great a time span. Loth addressed the development of political Catholicism from the Wilhelmine empire to the end of Weimar. Of the thirty pages of the essay, only five are devoted to the Weimar period before 1930. Loth concisely summarizes the Center Party’s struggles against the ultramontane hierarchy, against increasingly marginalized Catholic notables and nobles, and against the distrust of the Reich’s leadership. Loth convincingly argues that the Center drove towards the establishment of responsible government in a parliamentary democracy even before 1914. He cites the Center’s role in colonial politics, in the military budget. While in 1912, Matthias Erzberger, one of the Center’s young hotheads, openly demanded parliamentary democracy, the Center’s leaders avoided risking an open break with the government. Soon, however, the party’s labor wing demanded more radical measures to protect its interests, which amounted to reforms limiting the power of the dynasty, the nobility, and other elites. In this chapter, Loth argued the Center Party downplayed its demands for parliamentary government in 1918 due to the rapidly evolving constitutional crisis. One might argue, however, that by late summer, the Center’s role in the mixed committee of political parties (the Interfraktionelle Ausschuß) in the Reichstag amounted to the that of a party with governing responsibility, especially in uncovering the navy’s falsification of data claiming great achievements in submarine warfare and then, after August 1918, exercising de facto legislative and increasingly executive power. Also, describing the 1920’s, Loth exaggerates the degree to which the Center Party leadership adopted utopian notions of organic corporatism and revived medieval Reich. In fact, the Center focused primarily on quotidian demands and needs until 1933, perhaps too much so. Loth further argues that Heinrich Brüning, the last Center Party chancellor, actively sought to exclude the SPD from government, which is questionable. Loth agrees with Larry Eugene Jones and others that German parliamentary democracy ended in 1930, not later.

The essay on colonial politics is oddly placed between the essay on the role of the Catholic Center Party before 1930 and the chapter on 1933. Loth claims that Catholic support for colonial expansion reflected the end of Catholic rejection of capitalism. Furthermore, Loth argues that Catholics supported colonialism to demonstrate loyalty to the Reich’s leadership and as a means to exploit its crucial role in the Reichstag. Colonial politics, however, alienated small freeholders and workers from the Center. The burden of naval armaments and the fear of social decline led many Catholics to reject Germany’s drive for global influence.

In a crucial chapter on the rise of National Socialism, Loth adopts the arguments generally accepted today. Neither the Church nor the party chairman, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, sacrificed the party for the concordat. Loth does argue, however, that while Kaas and the hierarchy did not stab the party in the back, they did not explore possible alternatives to supporting the Enabling Act or negotiating the Concordat.

In an essay on the Catholic resistance to the National Socialist regime, Loth largely summarizes well-known scholarship about the internal divisions in the German hierarchy. He criticizes the Church for not doing more to mobilize German Catholics against the regime. Here again, Loth adds an essay illustrating his point. This time, he focuses on the Christian union official Nikolaus Groß. Groß opposed the regime and eventually collaborated with members of the Abwehr in the planning of the July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, for which Groß paid with his life.

In a last essay, published in 2012, Loth summarizes the argument made in this volume. He emphasizes the ambiguity between the anti-modern ultramontane positions of much of nineteenth century Catholic leaders on the one hand and the development of lay Catholic movements and initiatives on the other. The latter, Loth argues, stemmed from the laity, not the hierarchy, with the intention both of securing Catholic rights in a modern secular world but increasingly also to shape the values and policies of that world. German Catholicism became an advocate for workers, for Poles, Alsatians, for peasants and small freeholders. The Kulturkampf resulted in German Catholics’ advocacy of the civic rights and equality for all Germans, which led the Center Party to the defense of parliamentary democracy in the Wilhelmine period and to participation in many Reich cabinets of the Weimar Republic. Resistance to National Socialism led Catholics to prize cooperation of all democratic forces, regardless of religious identity. After 1945 all over Europe, Catholics actively participated in Christian Democratic parties, which in turn contributed much to the development of post-war democracy. Loth concludes, “In the long run, the ideas of solidarity and subsidiarity in contemporary debates about the future of the social welfare state in continental Europe can be considered a legacy of Catholic experience.” Loth hopes this experience and these principles will contribute to remedies for the weakening of state instruments across Europe.

While in a collection of essays representing the span of Loth’s career one cannot expect new archival discoveries or interventions in contemporary scholarly debates, this volume nonetheless serves useful ends. Loth reminds the reader of the milieu-debate, still smoldering among scholars of German Catholicism. By his argument against a homogeneous, national, and persistent milieu, Loth gives one the impression that those who insist on the existence of a milieu might be those who wish to simplify German Catholicism in order to offer over-generalized critiques.[3] Loth himself, however, limits his argument against the existence of a milieu by referring to regional milieux created against outside pressures. Kicking off this debate, by his own admission unintentionally might be Loth’s greatest scholarly legacy. Loth also argued that the Center’s contribution specifically and German Catholicism generally to the parliamentarization and thus to the democratization of Germany is one of its most unrecognized merits. In this volume, now published three years, ago, Loth reminds Germans how dear the price paid for the establishment of parliamentary democracy and the firm commitment to civil rights has been. To support his warning about the endangerment of parliamentary democracy in the early twenty-first century, Loth’s work analyzes the historical example of the alienation between Catholic nobles, notables, and middle class from Catholic workers and small freeholders, which eventually contributed to the collapse of Germany’s first attempt at parliamentary democracy. It might be beneficial for colleagues teaching German history and the history of Christianity in history to integrate his analysis into their lectures.

Notes:

[1] M. Rainer Lepsius, “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur. Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft” in Wilhelm Abel et al., eds. Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Friedrich Lütge (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1966).

[2] Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Margaret Stieg Dalton, Catholicism, Popular Culture and the Arts in Germany, 1880-1933 (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), and Mark Edward Ruff, The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany, 1945-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

[3] Loth includes Olaf Blaschke among those whose use of the milieu concept is problematic. See Olaf Blasche, Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, eds. Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus, Mentalitäten, Krisen (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2000).