The Catholic Fascist dictators of the 20th Century
Belgium's Leon Degrelle
Croatia's Ante Pavelic
Bohemia-Moravia's Emil Hacha
Germany's Adolf Hitler
Italy's Benito Mussolini
Portugal's Antonio Salazar
Slovakia's Fr. Josef Tiso
Spain's Francisco Franco
Sudetenland's Konrad Henlein
Vichy-France's Pierre Laval
Vichy-France's Henry Petain
The Roman Catholics in Nazi Germany's Leadership
"Among the many Nazi leaders who were Roman Catholics, in addition to Adolf Hitler, were Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Rudolf Hoess, (not to be confused with Hitler's Deputy Fuëhrer and secretary, Rudolf Hess). Hermann Goering, on the other hand, had mixed Catholic - Protestant parentage, while Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, and Adolf Eichmann had Protestant backgrounds. Not one of the top Nazi leaders was raised in a liberal or atheistic family.
To be sure, the Roman Catholic Church wants to distance itself from all of these monsters now, but it made no attempt to do so at the time, when it could have made a tremendous impact. We only know of two individuals that Hitler killed personally, his wife Eva Braun, and himself. To kill ten million other people, Hitler needed millions of helpers. He didn't get those helpers from some planet in outer space like Mars. He got about two thirds of them from the two thirds of Germans who belonged to the Protestant churches and the other third from the third of Germans who identified themselves as Roman Catholics. The clergy all knew how much Hitler needed all of these helpers and how mad it would have made him if they were to tell the millions of their sheep how horribly sinful it was for them to have any part in the Jewish Holocaust. And the pope himself deliberately chose not to inform the consciences of his German subjects. As Lewy reported,
"When Dr, Edoardo Senatro, the correspondent of L'Osservatore Romano in Berlin, asked Pius XII whether he would not protest the extermination of the Jews, the Pope is reported to have answered, "Dear friend, do not forget that millions of Catholics serve in the German armies. Shall I bring them into conflicts of conscience?" The Pope knew that the German Catholics were not prepared to suffer martyrdom for their Church; still less were they willing to incur the wrath of their Nazi rulers for the sake of the Jews whom their own bishops for years, had castigated as a harmful influence in German life." ... The failure of the Pope was a measure of the Church's failure to convert her gospel of brotherly love and human dignity into living reality."" |
