Holy War

As soon as the Olympic Games were over last year. Dictator Hitler got down in earnest to a rigorous anti-Catholic campaign. Catholic confessional schools were suppressed at Wuerttemberg, in the Saar, in the Palatinate, and a State Youth Law suppressed surviving Catholic Youth organizations by ordering all children to join the Brown Shirt Hitler Youth.

The Catholic clergy were up in arms. Pastoral letters flew like autumn leaves protesting that the school campaign was a breach of the Vatican-Nazi Concordat (TIME, July 17, 1933). Hitler, however, had a trump card. He had long been lining up "evidence" to prove that German Catholic monasteries were hotbeds of immorality. In a climactic, triumphant effort to squelch Catholicism on Aryan soil he threw all the immorality trials into the courts at the same time. He hoped that wholesale convictions would destroy the prestige of the Catholic Church for good, that the Reich's 2,000,000 or so Catholic children would be transformed without a hitch into little Brown Shirts.

Official figures, published in Germany, reveal that more than 1,000 lay brothers and "numerous" priests were fortnight ago on trial or awaiting trial for immorality. Fifty-three had already been convicted. Suddenly Nazi State police swooped down on a Catholic boys' seminary at Heiligenstadt in Thuringia, closed it because of "wretched moral conditions prevailing among the youthful inmates."

The resentment of Catholic Germans burst out as far as it dared. Catholic attorneys, while admitting that isolated instances of immorality existed, protested that many of the accused had already been punished by the Church, that the Government was using evidence picked up during earlier proceedings against monks and nuns accused of violating money transfer restrictions.

From Chicago, fuel was heaped last week onto the already blazing fire. The heaper was Chicago's erudite, 64-year-old Roman Catholic Archbishop, George William Cardinal Mundelein, who started life on Manhattan's lower East Side and early won renown as a youthful orator. Before 500 Catholic prelates and priests assembled for the quarterly diocesan conference at Quigley Preparatory Seminary, Cardinal Mundelein tore into the Nazi Government: "The fight is to take the [2,000,000 German] children away from us. ... Perhaps you will ask how it is that a nation of 60,000,000 people, intelligent people, will submit in fear and servitude to an alien, an Austrian paperhanger, and a poor one at that, I am told. . . . During and after the World War the German Government complained bitterly of the propaganda aimed at it by the Allies concerning atrocities perpetrated by German troops. Now the present German Government is making use of this same kind of propaganda against the Catholic Church and is giving out through its crooked Minister of Propaganda stories of wholesale immorality in religious institutions in comparison to which the War time propaganda is almost like bedtime stories for children."

This clerical thunder whipped Reich bigwigs and the Nazi press into a lather of fury. Through its news agency the Government roared: "The Vatican must decide whether it will allow the improper utterances of one of its servants to go unpunished or call him to order. . . ." Stormed Der Augriff: "Mundelein's challenge was made in a tone hitherto reserved for the wildest street agitator. He insults not only the German Minister [Goebbels] but the head of the State and the entire people including German Catholics."

In his summer villa at Castel Gandolfo, sick Pope Pius XI, instead of calling Cardinal Mundelein to order, received 150 German Catholic pilgrims, patted them on their spiritual backs. Speaking in German with a quavering voice he declared: "I am glad to see you, while at home there is being fought out a battle so unjust, so bitter and so inimical to conscience and religion. . . . The presence of you, dear children, here means that you wish to remain firm in your religion. . . . Tell your people that the Pope prays for them, daily, daily, daily."

It was not surprising that the Pope refused to crack down on Cardinal Mundelein. First, they are close friends. The first Eucharistic Congress ever to meet in the U. S. met in Chicago in 1926. That Cardinal Mundelein was chosen to organize this Congress was considered a special Papal tribute. Second the Cardinal had "a mass of accumulated evidence that could no longer be overlooked." Third, the Cardinal, who lives simply, has fine collections of coins and incunabula, is one of the Catholic Church's most successful money-raisers.

Ecclesiastical dignitaries over the country applauded Cardinal Mundelein's denunciation. Somebody saw to it that a New York tabloid got a full page of pictures showing the ordered life of a Berlin monastery. Vatican churchmen declared that the Cardinal "had every right to speak his mind."

Osservatore Romano, semi-official Vatican newsorgan, published reports from German Catholic sources charging that Hitler's State police had closed and confiscated 18 Catholic printing plants, "a dolorous echo of the Holy Father's encyclical" (TIME, March 29). Among the victims were reported such famed firms as Regensberg of Munich, Bachem of Cologne. The Pope was reported to have finished his "White Book," a stack of evidence to show that Hitler, not the Vatican, has violated the Vatican-Nazi Concordat. It looked as though the Church was campaigning in as big a way as the Third Reich.

Professor Friedrich Schonemann of the University of Berlin, onetime instructor at Harvard, tried to quiet the Nazi howling. He declared: "I think it is rather foolish and at the same time dangerous on the part of a certain section of the German press to indulge in wholesale criticism of the United States. [Because of] long continued British propaganda plus in recent years skilful Communist and Jewish propaganda . . . public opinion in America could be mobilized for war against Germany within a few hours."

The Nazis, however, were out for blood. They seized on District Attorney Geoghan's charges of moral laxity in Brooklyn high schools (TIME, May 24) to prove that under "Jew LaGuardia there is wholesale bootlegging of contraceptives" and "unheard of things among Brooklyn high school students."

In Washington newly-appointed German Ambassador Dr. Hans H. Dieckhoff made a "vigorous and energetic" protest to the State Department, through Embassy Counselor Dr. Hans Thomsen. The protest however was "informal" because it was not specially sponsored from Berlin, but "followed automatically in the wake of the Ambassador's duties." Result: the State Department had no need to commit itself to a reply.

By week's end it looked as though Dictator Hitler was somewhat alarmed by the formidable Catholic batteries ranged against him. Rumors rustled through Berlin that he contemplated withdrawing the present German Ambassador to the Vatican (Dr. Diego von Bergen) and replacing him by the ablest diplomat in the Reich, Catholic Franz von Papen. It was von Papen who negotiated the Concordat with the Holy See in 1933 and the Austro-German pact (TIME, July 20).

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