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James Carroll's response from "Constantine's Sword :
" The role of Eugenio Pacelli ( the future Pope Pius XII ) in promoting the historic Code of Catholic Church Law, which he had be instrumental in creating :
Pacelli was one of two Vatican priests who spent more than a decade developing the Code of Canon Law, which was finally promulgated in 1917. [ Until then there had been no official body of law governing every aspect of Church life throughout the world]. Canon 218 defines the pope's authority as 'the supreme and most complete jurisdiction throughout the Church, both in matters of faith and morals and
in those that affect discipline and Church government throughout the world.'In Europe, where church and state were traditionally intermingled, with
much overlap of political and religious authority (schools, the appointment
of those bishops), the implementation of the new code required the
cooperation of governments, which led to Pacelli's next assignment. John
Cornwell, Pacelli's biographer, points out that the task of negotiating
treaties (concordats) that recognized the freshly claimed prerogatives of the
papacy fell to Pacelli. In 1917, shortly after his consecration as bishop, and
after having successfully concluded treaties with Serbia and other countries,
Pacelli was sent to Munich as papal nuncio. Cornwell writes that his 'principal
task in Germany was now nothing less than the imposition, through the
1917 Code of Canon Law, of supreme papal authority over the Catholic
bishops, clergy, and faithful.'To that end, he set out to renegotiate existing
concordats with the German regional states. Ultimately he hoped for a
concordat with the German nation itself, one that would solidify Vatican
power, especially in the matter of the appointment of bishops, which, as we
have seen, had dogged papal–German relations going back to the eleventh
century.The anti-Catholic suspicions of Protestants and liberals of the Weimar
Republic, which governed Germany from 1919 until 1933, were not the only
obstacle to the new definition of Church authority. Germany's bishops were accustomed
to holding sway in their own sphere, and the Catholic Center Party, soon
to be one of the most powerful institutions in Weimar, had always defined
itself as a defender of the Catholicpeople, not simply of the institutional
Catholic Church – a distinction that might not serve the Vatican's purposes
under the new code.Since the Kulturkampf, the Center Party had become a truly successful
political organization. In 1919, it drew six million votes, second only to the
Social Democrats. Occupying the contested middle ground in the mounting
chaos of the Weimar era, the Center would provide five chancellors in the
ten governments that came and went from 1919 to 1933." [p. 496]
. . . "But the leaders of the Center Party were not uniformly as malleable as
Pacelli wanted them to be. For example, they consistently ignored Pacelli's
and the pope's express wish that they keep the party out of coalitions with
the left-wing Social Democrats . Once the new Code of Canon Law was
imposed on German Catholics, with the approbation of the German state,
it would end such defiance.
The Cooperation between the Church and the Reich:[The preceeding ] is the fateful background to what followed when Hitler, soon after coming to power in early 1933, entered into treaty
negotiations with Eugenio Pacelli, by then the powerful cardinal secretary
of state." [p. 497 ]"A seismic shift had occurred in Catholic attitudes toward the Nazis, partly related to Hitler's having taken over the government, but also related to the
Vatican's eagerness to deal with the Fuehrer. Within a week of his first cabinet meeting, in early March 1933, Hitler received a friendly message from Pacelli, who was moving quickly to take
advantage of a long-awaited opportunity to achieve the Reichskonkordat. The
message included, as the Vatican envoy told Hitler, 'an indirect
endorsement of the action of the Reich chancellor and the government
against Communism.'Even an indirect endorsement meant everything to Hitler as he sought to
establish his legitimacy at home and abroad. In these early months of 1933,
Catholic leaders went from being Hitler's staunch opponents to his latest
allies. This transformation was dramatically symbolized by the fact that in
1932, the Fulda Episcopal Conference, representing the Catholic hierarchy
of Germany, banned membership in the Nazi Party, and forbade priests
from offering communion to anyone wearing the swastika; then, on March
28, 1933, two weeks after Pacelli offered his overture to Hitler, the same
Fulda conferees voted to lift the ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi
Party. The bishops expressed, as they put it, 'a certain confidence in the
new government, subject to reservations concerning some religious and
moral lapses.' Swastika bearers would now be welcomed at the communion
rail. Cornwell writes, 'The acquiescence of the German people in the face
of Nazism cannot be understood in its entirety without taking into account
the long path, beginning as early as 1920, to theReich Concordat of 1933;
and Pacelli's crucial role in it; and Hitler's reasons for signing it. The
negotiations were conducted exclusively by Pacelli on behalf of the Pope
over the heads of the faithful, the clergy, and the German bishops.'
Pacelli's negotiations must be seen in the full context of the siege under
which Roman Catholicism had found itself in Europe in the previous
decades, but there was a distinction in his mind, and in his purpose,
between a defense of the Catholic Church in Germany and a defense of the
Vatican. Indeed, his disregard for the prerogatives of the local Church is
indicated by his readiness to ignore, and even to deceive, important
figures in its hierarchy. Whatever its stated goal, the effect of Pacelli's
maneuvering was hardly to advance the standing of the German Catholic
Church. 'When Hitler became Pacelli's partner in negotiations,' Cornwell
observes, 'the concordat thus became the supreme act of two
authoritarians, while the supposed beneficiaries were correspondingly
weakened, undermined, and neutralized.'The first true beneficiary was Hitler himself. TheReichskonkordat, agreed to on July 8,1933 was his first bilateral treaty with a foreign power, and as such gave him much-needed international prestige, whether the Vatican
intended it or not.
" (The Vatican newspaperL'Osservatore Romano published a statement on July 2 saying that the concordat should not be taken as a moral endorsement of
Nazism, and Pacelli would make the same point later.) Yet the price Hitler
demanded for the concordat was stiff: the complete withdrawal from
politics (and therefore from any possible resistance to the Nazis) of all
Catholicsas Catholics. In negotiations with German officials, Pacelli had
offered the 1929 Lateran Treaty between Italy and the Vatican as a model
for the concordat, and Hitler would surely have been aware that the pope
had agreed there to Mussolini's demand that the anti-fascist Catholic
political party,Partito Popolare, be suppressed. Bismarck had sought to
have the Vatican disown theCenter Party, which it refused to do.
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In his 2005 book,The Myth of Hitler's Pope, which purports to refute the scholars who point an accusing finger at Pope Pius XII, a rabbi named David Dalin, who teaches at the ultra-conservative Catholic Ave Maria University, argues on page 60 that
1) the Reich Concordat did NOT give any moral endorsement of Hitler's regime (because the Pope and the Vatican said that was not a consequence which they intended).
2) the demise of the Center party had nothing to do with the negotiations over the Concordat. And he offers as proof the statement by Carroll that " Even before the Concordat was formally signed, the Center Party
ceased to exist. It's hard to imagine any honest motive for Rabbi Dalin to misquote a passage which makes it clear that Carroll was arguing for the very opposite of what Dalin claims.
See more at Hitlerspope.html.
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Now Hitler made that a key demand, and the Vatican acquiesced. On July 4, in the final run-up to the agreement, the leader of the Center Party, Heinrich
Bruning, who had served as Germany's chancellor from 1930 to 1932,
consented 'with bitterness in his heart to dissolve the party.' Hitler wanted
the Center Party gone because it represented the last potential impediment
to his program. In truth, Pacelli wanted it gone for the same reason – for the
sake of his own program. But there is evidence that the unseemly rapidity
of the Center Party's demise startled Pacelli, and, perhaps, embarrassed
him. Even before the Concordat was formally signed, the Center Party
ceased to exist.As would quickly become clear, the Nazis were
prepared to stop at nothing to achieve their goals. Soon enough, blood
would be flowing in the streets, the opposition press shut down, and the
constitution abrogated. But in 1933, Hitler was not remotely what he would
become, and the connivance of the Roman Catholic Church in these months
of transition is part of what enabled him to emerge as a dictator. The
Catholic people – there were more members of Catholic youth associations
than there were of the Hitler Youth – were the last possible obstacle in
Hitler's way. [p. 498-499] As a baptized Catholic himself, he (Hitler) would have been intimately aware of the courageous and wily history of the victorious Catholic campaign during the
Kulturkampf. But instead of being called by the Church - by the pope
himself - to 'passive resistance,' as their parents and grandparents had
been, Catholics were encouraged to look for what they had in common with
Nazis. And they would find it. The Reichskonkordat effectively removed the German Catholic Church from
any continued role of opposition to Hitler. More than that, as Hitler told his
cabinet on July 14, it established a context that would be 'especially
significant in the urgent struggle against international Jewry.'The deep well of Catholic antisemitism would be tapped, to run as freely as any stream of hate in Germany. The positive side of the long-standing
ambivalence, which had again and again been the source of impulses to
protect Jews, would now be eliminated, allowing the negative side to
metastasize. 'This was the reality,' Cornwell comments, ' of the moral abyss
into which Pacelli the future Pontiff ' - he would become Pius XII in 1939 -
'had led the once great and proud German Catholic Church.' " [Hitler's Pope, p. 499-500 ]
"The concordat's significance to Hitler at that crucial moment is hard to overemphasize. 'The long drive against the alleged atheistic tendencies of our Party is now silenced by Church authority,' one Nazi Party organ crowed. 'This represents an enormous strengthening of the National Socialist government.' We saw thatL'Osservatore Romano had refuted (or denied) the claim that the concordat meant Church approval of Nazism, but the German bishops made it seem otherwise. [p. 504 ]The full import of the Vatican agreement with the Third Reich was perhaps best described by a later dispatch from those same bishops. They sent it from their formal meeting at Fulda two eventful years later. On August 20, 1935, the prelates defended Pius XI (1922-1939) by presuming to remind Hitler that His Holiness had 'exchanged the handshake of trust with you through the concordat - the first foreign sovereign to do so. . . Pope Pius XI spoke high praise of you . . . Millions in foreign countries, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, have overcome their original mistrust because of this expression of papal trust and have placed their trust in your regime.' Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich, in a sermon in 1937, declared,
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'At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat, expressed its confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the new government abroad.'
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(Lewy, Guenter (2000).The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, p.90)
"Hitler had other reasons for welcoming the concordat, one to do with his plans for the army, and the other with his plans for the Jews. A 'secret annex' to the treaty, finalized some months after the promulgation and not publicized, granted Catholic clergy an exemption from any conscription imposed on German males in the event of universal military service. Since Germany was still expressly forbidden by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles to raise a large army, Hitler could regard this provision as the Vatican's tacit acquiescence before a campaign of German rearmament. As Papen wrote to Hitler at the time, this provision was important for Germany less 'for the content of the regulation than for the fact that here the Holy See is already reaching a treaty agreement with us for the event of general military service.” Papen concluded his brief on the secret annex with a note of smug ingratiation. 'I hope this agreement will therefore be pleasing to you ”.We noted earlier that an article in the July 2,1933, issue ofL'Osservato, Romano had insisted that no Vatican endorsement of Nazi teaching should be inferred from the Concordat, but Hitler himself saw it otherwise. The treaty with the Holy See had both spiritual resonance and political implication, for it was a world-stage rebuttal to those who accused him of being anti-religious, and it established diplomatic recognition for the famously neutral Vatican at a time when other powers were still eyeing him with suspicion." [p. 505]
"Especially in hindsight, defenders of the Vatican's readiness to enter into such a treaty with Hitler insist that it was nothing more than realpolitik. diplomacy designed to safeguard the political and social rights of Catholics in a hostile climate, a way in which the Church hoped to temper Nazi extremes to the benefit of all concerned. In this view, Pacelli’s own wariness at the time of the treaty is emphasized. But is it conceivable that Pacelli would have negotiated any such agreement with theBolsheviks in Moscow? Gordon Zahn, the American scholar of Hitler-era German Catholicism, reports that Cardinal Faulhaber and other bishops dismissed such a notion, and in the act defined the concordat as a Church endorsement of the Nazi regime. Pacelli's defenders say he wanted the treaty as a basis for future protests against Nazi excesses, and indeed the Church would use it as such. But to Catholics in Germany at that pivotal time including leaders like (Bishop) Bornewasser, the concordat was, and would remain the soul of a compliant Catholic conscience that saw the way clear to support Hitler and his program. Even after the true nature of that program was laid bare, and after numerous provisions of the treaty had violated, the Vatican would never repudiate the concordat. Many bishops and priests, even through the paroxysms of the war, cited the intact Vatican treaty as a sign of the Third Reich's ongoing legitimacy, allowing – no requiring - German Catholics to carry out its orders.Despite the contrasts with the city's earlier prelates, it is probably no surprise that one of Hitler's most enthusiastic backers in 1933 should have been the bishop of Trier [Bornewasser]. Taking the long view, many Catholics saw the Vatican–Berlin agreement as promising a return to the “Sacrum Empirium” [Holy Empire] that had been given its first expression by Trier's own Constantine, and that had reached its apogee under the Holy Roman Emperor, whom Trier served as an elector. The shadow of Constantine had never fully lifted from Trier. TheAula Palatina, the enormous throne hall of his otherwise ruined palace, had been restored, as we saw, and transformed by the Prussians into a Lutheran church. The golden cross that hung in the vast imperial basilica had never seemed more full of implication. “In hoc signo”: Constantine's vision had changed the religious and martial nations forever.“Cross and Eagle”, about which we will see more, was the name of the Catholic group - consisting of bishops, priests, theologians, and politicians, including Papen - that saw the advent of the Third Reich as a way to restore the medieval ideal of a united throne and altar. That ideal had been lost to the hated forces of Enlightenment liberalism, which, as Catholics told themselves, invariably led to godless Bolshevism. If Hitler was anything, wasn't he the enemy of that?" [p. 506]"Catholic euphoria was widespread in the summer of the concordat. TheTe Deum (official hymn of thanksgiving) was sung in Catholic churches across the country. Once the treaty was formally ratified by both governments in September, a pontifical Mass was celebrated by the papal nuncio (Pacelli) in an overflowing cathedral in Berlin. Above the worshipers, flags emblazoned with the papal colors and the swastika hung side by side. It was a long way - although a short time - from the prohibition of the Nazis' wheel of a broken cross in church. The preacher at the Berlin Cathedral that day praised Hitler as 'a man marked by his devotion to God, and sincerely concerned for the well-being of the German people.' At least one bishop enlisted in the SS. Obviously, these churchmen had been deluded by Hitler, and they had deluded themselves." [p. 507]
But the Catholic Church made no attempt to revoke the Concordat and its loyalty clause during the Nazi regime. Indeed,the 1933 Concordat is the only diplomatic accord negotiated with the Nazi regime that remains in force anywhere in the world." [ from The Great Scandal, relations between the Roman Catholic Church and Nazism ]
The legend of Horst Wessel
Horst Wessel was a young Nazi who was assassinated for unknown reasons in 1930, before the Nazis came to power, and then made into a glorious martyr and a substitute for Jesus of Nazareth. Here's one example of the use the Nazis made of this "martyr":
The official song of the Hitlerjugend (‘Youth of Hitler’)
at the Reichsparteitag 1934:
"We are Hitler’s joyous youth,
What need we Christian virtue!,
Our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler
Is always our redeemer!
No wicked priest can hinder us,
To sense that we are Hitler’s children;
We follow not Christ but Horst Wessel,
Away with incense and holy water!
The Church can go hang for all we care,
The Swastika brings salvation on Earth.."
[ The lyrics appear to have changed considerably over the years. The above are quoted by Joseph Wulf, Literatur und Dichtung im Dritten Reich (Gütersloh: Sigbert Mohn Verlag, 1963), p. 299.]This was the organization that Catholics who had belonged to Catholic youth groups were allowed to join once Hitler came to power, the group that the future Pope Benedict XVI belonged to. How weak the Catholic clergy must have been to have accepted such humiliation without more of a fight!
See much MORE about this topic at :
www.CatholicArrogance.Org/RCscandal.html
www.Concordat Watch is a great site overseeing all of the concordats the Catholic Church has established throughout the world to exert its influence in any number of countries.
www.SpirituallySmart.com/nazi.html has a lot of great material, some of which I have used on this page.
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Between 1797 and 1809, a struggle between Pope Pius VI (1775-1799) and Napoleon, who emerged from the French Revolution as the emperor of France, resulted in the occupation of Rome by French troops, the removal of Pope Pius VI to France - where he died in 1799 - the annexation of all of the papal states into "the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy" and proclamation by Napoleon that the pope, Pius VII (1800-1823), no longer had any form of temporal authority. When Pius VII responded by excommunicating Napoleon himself and everyone else connected with this outrage, he was immediately arrested and removed to imprisonment in France. The entire Italian peninsula was under French control from 1809 to 1813 when Napoleon was defeated at Leipzig.
