What if the Pope threatens to excommunicate Hitler?

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Hello Falecius,

My understanding is that the Church, while never espousing biological antisemitic views, still did not support the full integration of Jews into European political communities based upon national principles.

I would agree, and I don't see why that's reprehensible or in contradiction to its own teachings.

The Church in those days still held up the confessional (Catholic) state as the ideal to which its church-state understanding referred. (For that matter, Dignitatis Humanae never renounced that as a valid political ordering in Church teaching.) But it's one thing to say that Jews might not be desired as full members of the body politic, and another to say that they should be subject to unjust discrimination and abuse, or without basic juridical rights deriving from their dignity as men.

That distinction is, to be sure, out of favor in our enlightened times, at least outside the Middle East, where far more ruthless discrimination against Jews is practiced. But on its own terms, it made sense, and by the standards of the day, was even relatively enlightened.

It endorsed anti-judaism; it opposed the jews on religious grounds, not racial ones. It was deeply different in principle, but the result was that, on many respects, the attitude of the Vatican tolerated a vast grey zone - a grey zone where nasty things had room to happen.

Regrettably, I can't really disagree with that.

The scope and scale of those nasty things might be exaggerated today - but they did happen. Anti-Semitism was simply a common fact of life in much of the West until the last couple generations, in both Catholic and Protestant societies.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
You're accusing me of using a biased source while employing a notoriously anti-Catholic Jewish scholar yourself? Are you serious?
I noted Kertzer's excess in using nonpapal documents, but otherwise the book presents irrefutable evidence of Vatican publications from its own archives that demonstrate pretty rotten anti-Semitism. Paxton also pointed out problems with Kertzer's work, but ultimately concluded that the surfeit of evidence (again, from the Vatican's own publications) spoke for itself.
There's ample evidence of Pius XI's attitudes on anti-semitism - and not just Nazi race doctrine.
You're the only one who's focusing solely on Pius, as if he was the only Pope of importance. Pius XI said lots of things ranging from explicit support of totalitarianism to "maybe racism is bad," but whatever his personal feelings about Jews he did precious little to change Church policy, which was to engage in vitriolic anti-Judaism that was not unknown to metastasize into outright anti-Semitism.

If you have evidence of positive, explicit Vatican approval of Vichy anti-Semitic laws, by all means share it.
I'd be glad to.
Michael Marrus and Robert O. Paxton said:
On a number of occasions in 1940-1941, Cardinal Gerlier intervened on behalf of Jewish internees and, after the prompting of Abbé Glasberg, he protested against the terrible conditions at Gurs. By the summer of 1941, after a visit to Pétain, Gerlier began to stand out more conspicuously. In September he met with the regional director of the CGQJ, and the following month, in order to convey his misgivings, he received Xavier Vallat himself. Even at this point Gerlier had no objections to the principle of the Statut des juifs. According to Vallat's account, the cardinal called the commissioner-general "an excellent Christian" and said, "Your law is not unjust . . . but it lacks justice and charity in its enforcement." The worldly priest particularly understood the economic case against the Jews. "He did not agree to the racial viewpoint," reported the CGQJ regional director, "but on the other hand was extremely understanding from the economic and financial viewpoint. The Jewish problem exists, he told me; it is indeed inescapable, and I approve [of the anti-Jewish measures] within the framework of justice and freedom."

Did Cardinal Gerlier reflect a general disposition within the Church? Indirect evidence indicating precisely this situation comes from no less a source than the Holy See itself. During the summer of 1941, Pétain seems to have been troubled by critical opinions. He wrote on 7 August 1941 to his ambassador in the Vatican, Léon Bérard, asking for the papal view of Vichy's anti-Jewish measures. Bérard replied quickly, saying that he had heard nothing at the Vatican that might suggest disagreement. He promised to find out more. On 2 September, Bérard submitted a full report--a lengthy document of several closely typed pages, which could only have comforted the Marshal. Bérard's first point was that France's anti-Jewish program had hardly concerned the Vatican. "At no time did papal authority seem occupied or preoccupied with this part of French policy." The Church was fundamentally opposed to racist theories, being long committed to "the unity of mankind." Within human species, however, the Jews were not merely a religious community but a group with "ethnic . . . particularities." There was consequently every reason "to limit their activity in society and . . . restrict their influence." Important theological and legislative precedent on this point went back to Saint Thomas Aquinas. Therefore, reported Bérard, "it is legitimate to deny them access to public office; also legitimate to admit them only in a fixed proportion to the universities (numerus clausus) and the liberal professions."

Bérard noted that, by focusing on race, French law was in formal contradiction to the teaching of the Church: the latter "has never ceased to teach dignity and respect for the individual." Moreover, a racial interpretation was in conflict with the sanctity of the sacrament of baptism. The Holy See could not accept that a person who had duly converted to Catholicism, and had been baptized, was still a Jew because he had three Jewish grandparents. Church law was explicit: "a Jew who has been properly baptized ceases to be Jewish and joins the 'flock of Christ.'" This was "the sole point on which the law of 2 June 1941 [the second Statut des juifs] is in opposition to a principal espoused by the Roman church." Even so, Vichy got off lightly. "It does not follow from this doctrinal divergence that the Etat Française is threatened . . . with censure or disapproval." When it came to the exclusion of Jews from the civil service or the numerus clausus in certain professions and schools, "there is nothing in these measures that can give rise to criticism, from the viewpoint of the Holy See."

In conclusion, Bérard reassured Pétain that the papacy would not make trouble over the issue. "As an authorized source at the Vatican told me, they don't intend to get into a fight over the Statut des juifs." Papal spokesmen had insisted upon two things, however. First, Vichy should not add to its anti-Jewish law any provision touching marriage. This was a point on which the Holy See felt that Mussolini had broken the Concordat of 1929, by imposing restrictions on marriage between Jews and non-Jews. According to the Church, marriage was a sacrament, and the State had no business regulating it by racial laws. Second, Vichy should take care that its laws be applied with due consideration "for justice and charity"--the precise words Gerlier had used in his meeting with Vallat. In particular, the Vatican felt concern about the liquidation of businesses in which Jews had an interest.

Pétain put this message to use at once. A few days after receiving it, he was at dinner with a number of diplomats, including Monsignor Valerio Valeri, papal nuncio in France. In the presence of the ambassadors of Brazil and Spain, the Marshal referred to Bérard's letter, telling them that the papacy had no serious objections to the anti-Jewish legislation. The nuncio, an opponent of the Statut des juifs, was embarrassed. When Valeri suggested that the Marshal must have misunderstood the intentions of the Holy See, Pétain replied good-humoredly that it was the nuncio who was out of line. Pétain offered to show Valeri the text of the letter. Valeri took him up on his offer. Writing to the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Maglione, Valeri protested that the anti-Semitic laws contained "grave indiscretions [inconvenienti]" from the religious viewpoint. He wondered openly who had given Bérard his information. Maglione thought the matter worth pursuing and looked into it. Bérard's sources, it turned out, were highly placed within the secretariat of state and included monsignors Tardini and Montini (the future Pope Paul VI). At the end of October, Maglione replied to Valeri, affirming the substance of Bérard's report but dissenting from what he thought were Pétain's "exaggerated deductions" from it. The feeling at the Vatican was that the Statut des juifs was "an unfortunate law [malaugurate legge]" which should be limited in interpretation and application. There is no record, however, of Pétain's having been told any of Maglione's conclusions.

Whatever this curious change signified, Vichy assumed Vatican support and acted on this assumption. Vallat had sent Bérard's report around to high officials as a circular. He brandished it in his conversation with Gerlier on 9 October; but at the time, the latter claimed not to have seen it. Shortly afterward, Vallat told the Vichy press to deny rumors of Vatican reservations about the government's anti-Jewish measures. "We are in a position to issue the most firm denial of these allegations; according to information taken from the most authoritative sources, its is clear that nothing in the laws passed to protect France from Jewish influence is in opposition to Church doctrine."

For about a year, indeed, everyone seems to have assumed that the Church's support for the existing legislation was solid, despite occasional dissent by individual clerics. One regional director of the CGQJ with a flair for analogy told an inquiring prefect that no one had any business protesting because the Church itself had counseled obedience.
 
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Hello Wolfpaw,

I noted Kertzer's excess in using nonpapal documents, but otherwise the book presents irrefutable evidence of Vatican publications from its own archives that demonstrate pretty rotten anti-Semitism.

Well, the difficulty here is, no one (me included) is arguing that you can't find examples of anti-semitic attitudes among Churchmen of the time. The question is what Church doctrine was, and as a corollary, what was official Vatican policy on its application.

Note the distinction: Vatican policy. Not what certain bishops in France may (or may not) have said or done. More on that in a minute.

Paxton also pointed out problems with Kertzer's work, but ultimately concluded that the surfeit of evidence (again, from the Vatican's own publications) spoke for itself.

And part of the problem is that Marrus and Paxton's work is over 30 years old, and thus without access to a lot of the documents of Pius XI and Pius XII's pontificates that have only recently been released to scholars.

You're the only one who's focusing solely on Pius, as if he was the only Pope of importance. Pius XI said lots of things ranging from explicit support of totalitarianism to "maybe racism is bad," but whatever his personal feelings about Jews he did precious little to change Church policy, which was to engage in vitriolic anti-Judaism that was not unknown to metastasize into outright anti-Semitism.

I happened to focus on the later years of Pius XI's pontificate, simply because that was when the Vatican was first forced to confront fascist race doctrines and develop a response, and this was done primarily in the context of the working relationship of both Popes of the era: Pius XI (1922-1939) and his Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who succeeded him as Pius XII. It's the most important period, and the period for which, at any rate, the most information is now available from the Vatican for examination. And the reality is: There's plenty of statements on the record in this period condemning anti-Semitism, either directly from Pius XI, or from Vatican organs like Civilta Catholica.

I am absolutely mystified by some of your characterizations of Pius XI. At what point did he endorse "totalitarianism?" You're going to have to do a lot better than to cite his qualified support for Franco, who was never a totalitarian by any reasonable definition of the word, but who was certainly fighting those who were - and who were waging from the outset a war of extermination against the Church in Spain, killing over seven thousand priests and religious alone. His reign is fairly peppered with denunciations of new-grown totalitarian regimes, and for that matter authoritarian ones with such tendencies, such as in the USSR, Republican Spain, Mexico, Italy and Germany (links are far from exhaustive). More to the point, I am not sure what "change" in "Church policy" you were expecting him to make. He could hardly endorse the Old Covenant of the Jews as suddenly salvific, and no Pope since has done so, either (nor does Nostra Aetate, regardless of what some observers have assumed). It is hard to square your characterization of Pius XI with the man who said, "Mark well that in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our Patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the lofty thought which that fact expresses. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible."

Who else in that day made such vigorous denunciations of totalitarianism and anti-Semitism? Not many. And there's ample evidence that many Jewish leaders of the time recognized that - and were grateful.

Finally, we turn to your excerpt from Marrus and Paxton regarding Vichy France and the Church. The evidence cited is . . . damned thin. We have a letter from Petain's ambassador to the Vatican, Léon Bérard, which supposedly relates conversations the latter had with certain high-ranking officials in the Secretariat of State. There's no other verification of what they might have said. And it is astonishing to think that Montini, who oversaw Church Asylum's efforts to hide and protect Jews from the Holocaust, who would help craft Nostra Aetate, and who would be the first Pope to visit a synagogue, would have endorsed such a law. The only official document cited by Marrus and Paxton is a letter from the Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, who describes the law as "unfortunate" and deprecated Bérard's "exaggerations." Petain (and his much more anti-Semitic underlings) may well have felt that he was acting with the Vatican's imprimature, but his subjective belief hardly makes it so.

So I don't see how anything cited here counts as Vatican or papal endorsement of Vichy anti-Semitic statutes.

P.S. On other point - I skipped past it in my last response - Paxton is in error. He declared in his article that "On the other hand, the language of the mass for Good Friday identified the Jews as "the deicide people" who had killed Christ." The term "deicide people" appears nowhere in the Good Friday liturgy as it existed at the time (the 1920 editio typica), not any expression would could be equated to it. The so-called "Good Friday prayer for the Jews" as it existed then simply said "Let us pray also for the faithless Jews (Oremus et pro perfidis Judæis): that Almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen." The Jews are certainly declared to be without faith, as understood in the Christian sense; but there is no imputation of collective guilt in that prayer, which was, in fact, from a very ancient sacramentary source.

The prayer has been not without controversy, to be sure; in 1960, John XXIII removed the word perfidis from the prayer, mainly because it was too often being misunderstood or mistranslated as treacherous, as opposed to simply without the faith. But the proper understanding of perfidis has nothing to do with a collective guilt "deicide" on the part of the Jewish people.
 
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Hello eighthgear,

Catholic leaders in Germany will be split: some will stand by the Pope, and get bumped off by the SS or SA (depending on when it is that Hitler gets excommunicated).

I agree - it would really depend on when the excommunication would have been handed down.

But at whatever point he did so, Catholics - and many Jews - would have paid a heavy price for it. Whatever Hitler's ultimate fate. An earlier excommunication would have been more successful; but in Hitler's early years, it was less obvious to most just what Hitler was about.
 
No matter whether the pope survives this and how the different fascist - and sometimes catholic-fascist as in Italy, Slovakia or Croatia - regimes react, this won't have much effect on the war. The catholic church as a whole will suffer a lot more prosecution, though.

After the war, however, we'd have a catholic church that actively resisted fascism. A catholic church with far more martyrs, quite some of them high in the church hierarchy. The overall view of the catholic church would be far better ITTL up until today. Especially in Germany, where you probably still have had collaborating Protestant churches.

Another interesting aspect would be catholic partisan movements. My guess is that in many countries, catholic/nationalistic partisan movements would by far outnumber leftist groups. That could have interesting implications after the war as well...
 
Hitler was an Occultist. Occultism was very popular in Germany at the time there were many esoteric cults and even traveling magicians (I mean real magic) which went from town to town. People were actually more open minded then then they are now.

One of the interesting thing about the Nazi takeover was that this is the first time in the modern era that an esoteric cult basically took over a country so that the leadership did not come from the religious mainstream even in a nominal capacity. Of course you could be Christian and be a member of the party but most of the leadership did not hold Christian beliefs themselves.

As for German society religion wasn't that important anymore that is why the whole Catholic-Protestant difference was meaningless to modern Germany. So if the Pope excommunicated Hitler he wouldn't care and neither would the German public.
 

Sabot Cat

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Dude... this thread was more than a year old.
Let dead topics rest in peace!

Their post is also completely factually wrong. Germany was a stronghold for Christianity, and Hitler at least publicly espoused Christian views. Himmler was the Occultist, and he didn't really find much sympathy for his esoteric views with Hitler, if I recall correctly.
 

CalBear

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Back to the grave zombie! With Salt and Blood I bind thee to the earth to rise no more!
 
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