Christians in Germany

Extract

The debates in the House of Lords, within recent weeks, on the future of Germany shows the acuteness of the difficulty that will face the Allies in victory. The divisions in France are problem enough, but the pacification of Germany is far more serious. The Peers evidently grasped the problem ; no one has yet come forward with a possible solution. The conundrum is as baffling a one as any statesman has had to answer. The Nazi Party have succeeded in corrupting a high percentage of a vast people. They have set up an effective machine which exploits the evil tendencies—to be found in every people—of proud nationalism and of the false values of materialism. This paganism subjects truth to action so that what benefits the one nation is true, what does not is false. Like the Communists, the Nazis have given themselves the liberty to tell lies and break promises as it suits their purpose, a fact which should cause us no surprise, since it consists with their principles. This has reduced all the good elements in German society to defenceless impotence. The new paganism has even found men and women who were ready to propagate its doctrines in Christian words : the ‘German Christians’ thought to unite a garbled version of Christ’s teaching with that of Hitler and Rosenberg. Worst of all, the machinery was constructed so as to deprive the youth of the nation of truth and saturate it with the inhuman worship of blood and race. Pius XI wrote in his famous encyclical on the Church in Germany : ‘Thus to have ushered in the betrayal of the eternal principles of an objective morality ... is a sin against the future of the people, whose bitter fruits the coming generations will taste.’