Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (159 page)

Through three years of exceptionally brutal civil war in Spain, the Vatican perceived only Republican atrocities, which were indeed vile: clergy murdered, churches systematically torched and even corpses in graves exhumed and ridiculed. Nationalist propaganda lingered over Republicans' rape of nuns, though there is no documented case of this occurring, the prospect apparently offending Republican notions of military honour. What undoubtedly did take place was what one historian of the events has called 'the greatest anticlerical bloodletting Europe has ever known'. In the Andalusian diocese of Malaga, for instance, 115 out of 240 clergy were killed in the year before Italian troops seized the city in 1937. Often before their deaths, clergy were sexually tortured, or equally frequently posthumously mutilated, reflecting lay male neuroses about their celibate state and uncontrolled lusts, ancient fears which were a standard trope of anticlericalism.
⁴⁹
Rome took less notice of the fact that in the Basque country in the north of the peninsula, most clergy were on the side of local autonomy and the Republic against Franco's Nationalists, and that the Nationalists brutally punished them along with all the other enemies of the Falange.

When Franco was at last victorious in 1939, Pope Pius XII broadcast to the Spanish people, praising Spain because it had 'once again given to the prophets of materialist atheism a noble proof of its indestructible Catholic faith'. Pius XI's attempt to differentiate between Hitler and Mussolini was forgotten. No protests went up from the Vatican when Hitler invaded the helpless remnant of Czechoslovakia, and for a while the Catholic Church in Germany benefited accordingly.
⁵⁰
At least the Church did not advocate the restoration of the Spanish Inquisition alongside the continuing existence of the Holy Office in Rome; but it hardly needed to in the police state which was the Spain of the
Caudillo
Franco (
Caudillo
means what
Fuhrer
means in German). Franco's regime reasserted the Spain of the 1492 expulsion, against all that had happened in the peninsula over the last hundred years: Spain was conceived of as racially pure, deferential to paternalistic authority, corporatist, uniformly Catholic. The dictatorship was to last with only tactical modifications of its icy authoritarianism until the
Caudillo
's death in 1975, by which time developments in the Catholic Church made him an increasingly embarrassing relic of the past.

THE CHURCHES AND NAZISM: THE SECOND WORLD WAR

As Franco was savouring his triumph in 1939, all Western Churches, not merely Roman Catholics, were facing the consequences of Hitler's electoral manoeuvres in 1933. Protestants came to be as soiled by the situation as Catholics. Because of its close identification with the German Empire, State Protestantism found it very difficult to adjust to the 1918 defeat and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic, which at a stroke dismissed not just the Kaiser but all the crowned heads of the empire, who, if they were Protestants, had also been heads of their State Churches. Protestant leaders shared the general sense that an undefeated German army had been betrayed by enemies of the Reich. They overwhelmingly regarded the foundation of a Republic as part of that betrayal; feeling was particularly bitter in Prussia, where the successor in 1918 to the portfolio once held by Wilhelm von Humboldt as Minister of Education and Public Worship was an anticlerical Social Democrat, Adolf Hoffmann. It has been estimated that when the Weimar Republic came into existence in 1919, 80 per cent of its Protestant clergy sympathized with its enemies, and were monarchist and angrily nationalist. This was not a good basis for mounting a critique of Nazism, which drew on the same anger and turned it to its own uses.
⁵¹

One of the tragedies of the great tradition of liberal German Protestant theology was that some of its assumptions could turn some of its greatest practitioners into fellow-travellers with Nazi anti-Semitism. They were Lutherans: they naturally took as a basic assumption Luther's great theological contrast between Law and Gospel, or Judaism and Christianity. That had borne fruit in the nineteenth-century tradition of biblical scholarship, where, from the work of F. C. Baur onwards, scholars customarily analysed the Gospel as the product of conflict between Petrine Christians, who wished to remain close to Judaism, and Pauline Christians, who wished to take it in a new direction. In the case of Adolf von Harnack, this resulted in rejecting the whole of the Old Testament as not part of the canon of scripture, and an interest (albeit critical) in Marcion's ancient effort to do the same.
⁵²
For other scholars in the next generation, most notoriously the celebrated New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel, this led on to a welcome for Hitler's assumption of power, and to a number of anti-Semitic biases in one of the most monumental and still frequently consulted works of New Testament scholarship, the
Theological Dictionary of the New Testament
, of which Kittel was main editor.
⁵³

This intellectual background gave a superficial plausibility to the setting up of a Protestant body calling itself the German Christians, a movement supporting the aim of the Nazis to eliminate Jewish influence from the Church, and seeking to become the voice of German Protestantism. Once more it drew on an aspect of the German Protestant past, the search for reunion among Protestant Churches, which had a perfectly respectable history, but which was now perverted towards open racism. In order to account for the Saviour's origins in Galilee, German Christians suggested that the area had been an enclave of Aryan ethnic identity. Besides this borrowing from a great deal of nineteenth-century anthropological speculation and scholarship sometimes of alarmingly respectable provenance, they appealed to a selection of opinions of Luther (such as his intemperate remarks about the Jews and his theme of obedience to superior powers) in order to justify their rewriting of the faith.
⁵⁴
With Nazi backing, they did well in State Church elections in July 1933, and their most prominent pastor, Ludwig Muller, gained the title
Reichsbischof
.

Who could have the imagination or the courage to stand up to the insidious mixture of seduction and intimidation? One theologian, Karl Barth, had the advantage as a Swiss of coming from outside German Protestantism, and also from a Reformed Protestant tradition, which had much more in its theological heritage than German State Lutheranism to encourage the Church into an independent or critical stance towards temporal power. Barth had been enraged by the liberal Protestant establishment's subservience to the German Empire, and as the First World War became ever more destructive, his anger had fed his perception of fraudulence in the tradition stemming from Schleiermacher, with its affirmation that reason opened a path to understanding of the divine.
⁵⁵
Barth's
Commentary on Romans
, published in 1919, drew out of Paul the theme which had successively transfixed Augustine of Hippo, Luther and Calvin: humanity, its reason utterly fallen, could only reach God through divine grace mediated in Jesus Christ. Unsurprisingly, the veteran liberal scholar Adolf von Harnack was one of Barth's first opponents, while among those junior clergy seized by Barth's critique of liberalism was one of Harnack's own students in Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
⁵⁶

The Swiss Reformed pastor and the well-connected young Lutheran Bonhoeffer were among a significant number of Reformed and Lutheran Protestants, mostly of the younger generation, who decided in 1931 that they must make an ecumenical stand against the growing nationalism of their society. Spurred by the apparent growth of the German Christians after Hitler's seizure of power, the dissidents made common cause in 1933-4 to form a 'Confessing Church'. In May 1934 the Church issued a declaration at a synod in the unglamorous industrial city of Barmen, presenting its Evangelical and Reformed faith against the 'destructive errors of the German Christians and the present national church government'. Among the array of Bible texts which it mustered, a notable absentee was the call to unequivocal obedience in Romans 13.1 which had so dominated the thought of the magisterial Reformers: 'Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God'. Instead, the declaration fixed on obedience under the text 'Fear God, honour the Emperor' (I Peter 2.17).
⁵⁷
Despite its apparent loyalism, this command has a rather more ambiguous or double quality than Romans 13.1. The balance to be struck made witnessing to Christian truth in the Confessing Church not merely dangerous, but problematic.

The Confessing Church experienced the difficulty of all well-intentioned Christians in a state dominated by an evil whose dimensions were difficult to believe, certainly to anticipate. The Barmen Declaration made no reference to the plight of the Jews (something for which Barth three decades later expressed personal regret). The Confessing Church only took an official stand on the question of racial discrimination via its ecclesiology (that is, its theology of the Church): it refused to accept that the State could determine Church membership by excluding through racist legislation ethnic Jews who had become Christians. Many Confessing Church members felt that such Christians ought to have their own separate parishes.
⁵⁸
Virtually all members also continued to feel it their duty to support the lawfully elected German government. One of the senior figures in the movement was Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran pastor and former submarine commander, whose natural conservatism and patriotism wrestled uneasily with his sense of revulsion at Nazi violence and illegality. He had voted for the Nazis in the sequence of elections which brought them to power, and his brother Wilhelm, also a Confessing pastor, was a member of the Party, though neither fact prevented the Niemollers' arrest in 1937. In April 1938 a majority of the Confessing Church's clergy were still ready to sign an oath of loyalty to Hitler as Fuhrer in the wake of his annexation of Austria.
⁵⁹
All were making decisions in a situation which positively invited moral confusion. The Nazis could never be consistent in their support of any Christian body, however closely it aspired to align itself to the Party; they were extremely good at spreading favours around as it suited them. So the small Free Church bodies in Germany, such as the Methodists and Baptists, found that the Nazis ended the discrimination that the old State Churches had maintained against their work; Hitler even paid for a new pipe organ in one Methodist church. In their pleasure at the Third Reich's encouragement of family life and campaigns against modern decadence, the German Free Churches failed to notice that they were being used to conciliate hostile opinion in their British and American sister Churches .
⁶⁰

And so as Europe fell into general war in 1939, very many Christians both Protestant and Catholic found it all too easy to fall into complicity with Nazism. There is admittedly a difference between positive support and confused mixtures of inaction and protest or even resistance. In the former category might fall those German army chaplains who were present at mass killings by the German Army after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Presiding over the German atrocities in Ukraine as its chief administrator was Erich Koch, among the most long-standing members of the Nazi Party, but also a devout Protestant who was sometime President of the Provincial Synod of the Lutheran Church in East Prussia, a great patron of
Reichsbischof
Muller.
⁶¹
One of the most unlovable churches in the world is the Martin Luther Memorial Church in the south Berlin suburb of Mariendorf. This parish church planned by nationalist Lutherans in the 1920s was taken over by the Nazis when they came to power and made into a prestige project (see Plate 48). Although its swastikas have been carefully chiselled out of the sculptures, the storm trooper carved on the font deprived of his rifle and the bust of Hitler removed, the Lutheran Church has found it hard to know what to do with this egregious place of worship, whose pipe organ was first played at a Nazi Nuremberg rally, and its future remains in doubt - in an unfortunate perversity of fate, Allied bombing spared it amid the city's devastation.

Just as difficult to excuse were the regimes emerging in the wake of Hitler's conquests which combined fervent religious commitment with enthusiasm for their own scaled-down version of Hitler's murderous racism. In Slovakia, the recovery of Slovak identity had been led by Catholic clergy, and was consciously directed against a new Czech domination after 1918. When Hitler destroyed Czechoslovakia, the Slovakian puppet regime he installed was led between 1939 and 1945 by Monsignor Jozef Tiso, who continued to act as a Catholic parish priest during his presidency, and was responsible for implementing deportations of Jews and Roma (gypsies) at Nazi bidding. In Croatia, Ante Pavelic ran a self-consciously Catholic regime, devoted to ridding a multi-ethnic state of Jews, Roma and Orthodox Serbs (though, curiously, not of Protestants or Muslims). His sadistic methods shocked even the Nazis. Nor did the Catholic Church condemn the forced conversions of the Orthodox which were part of Pavelic's programme. A Franciscan friar, Sidonje Scholz, visited concentration camps, offering Serbs conversion or death. When he was killed by Serb resisters, the newspaper sponsored by Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb described Friar Scholz as a 'new martyr who died in the name of religion and for Catholic Croatia'. A significant number of Catholics in neighbouring Slovenia were sickened by the Croatian atrocities and drew up a protest demanding public condemnation from the Pope; it reached the Vatican in 1942 and had no public result.
⁶²
Similar very explicit reports from Polish church leaders about Nazi outrages against the population of occupied Poland likewise left the Vatican uncomfortably wrestling with the problem of how best to make a public response.