04-19-2018, 02:14 AM
(04-18-2018, 04:34 PM)Echo Wrote: For anyone interested, here are two reviews of a book provocatively titled Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism.
http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.j...1-gardiner
Quote:Even the title Hastings has chosen is misleading. It would have been more accurate to call the book Anti-Papal Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism because the Catholics whom Hastings discusses rejected the pope and used religion to promote eugenics. Rather than referring to Nazi Catholics as “anti-papal,” Hastings calls them “anti-ultramontane,” “religious,” and “Reform” Catholics. These three adjectives were the euphemisms German Catholics used in that era to hide their hostility to Rome. Employing the same terms today obfuscates the truth, which is that these were disloyal Catholics. Hastings admits that these Catholics were disciples of Johann Döllinger, a Munich theologian excommunicated in 1871 for refusing to accept Vatican I’s dogma of papal infallibility, and that they followed him in regarding loyalty to the pope as “anti-German” and in believing that Germans had to reinterpret Catholic theology for the modern age. In one respect they didn’t follow Döllinger: They saw that “a nationalistic reform of the church could best be brought about by remaining explicitly inside the church,” and hence they avoided excommunication “at all costs.” Like certain of today’s politicians, these anti-papal Catholics professed their “religious loyalty” to the Church as a “broader spiritual community spanning the centuries.” Yet, through periodicals like the Beobachter they distanced their movement from the larger “anti-Christian” völkisch movement. Both the Jesuit Augustin Bea and Bavarian Minister of the Interior Franz Schweyer warned them about the anti-Christian “pathology” inherent in Nazism.
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otc.cfm?id=600&repos=6&subrepos=2&searchid=1822711
Quote:Note: Although Derek Hastings’ study falls well outside the normal range of recommendations for CatholicCulture.org, Catholicism & The Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity & National Socialism is a sound scholarly account of the links between Modernist Catholicism and National Socialism up until 1923. Though the book is provocatively titled, Hastings knows the difference between orthodoxy and Modernism. Specialists will find his work valuable.
I am told that it was the Jews themselves who asked him not to make those types of pronouncements as they resulted in reprisals. It was the Dutch condemnation that resulted in the arrests that had Sr Benedicta of the Cross (aka Edith Stein) arrested.