When Joseph Goebbels plotted his abuse campaign against the church, the bishops at that time did not drop to their knees.
By Hubert Hecker.
(kreuz.net) In the years 1936/37 Reich propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels († 1945) battled -- national-socialist-morality criminal cases against the church with enormous press campaigns.
Goebbels - a lapsed catholic and a notorious adulterer - pursued several goals. Thus he presumed "thousands and thousands and thousands of church sex offenders".
With this lie he wanted to drive a wedge between the Clergy and Laity. The believers should be estranged from their hierarchy.
The numbers of those leaving the Church went up promptly in the years 1937 and 1938.
The withdrawing were however mainly Nazi Party members and marginal Catholics.
The Catholic people did not let themselves be impressed by the lies of the Anti-Catholic propaganda Minister.
The believers gathered only more closely around their priests and bishops and participated more intensively in their slandered Church.
Bishops: Truth instead of Cringing
The German bishops did not put their heads into the sand. They met the propaganda of the Goebbels media with courage and referred to the small number of misdemeanours in the church:
In the diocese Paderborn from 9.380 priests and religious and in 1937 six persons had been condemned.
From the 14,300 religious persons in the Diocese of Münster, seven persons had been punished.
Eight condemnations came from the Archdiocese of Munich's 11,250 secular priests and religious-- nearly always because of homosexuals' misdemeanours.
A Forerunner of "We are Church"
The Goebbels' press fight tried to pull in the Pope into the invented "moral swamp of the Roman church“ as well, in order to undermine the confidence of Catholics in their Roman Shepherds.
A sect around the magazine "the Rome-free Catholic" - a forerunner of the today's Anti-Church group of sects `We are Church' - grumbled on 16 June 1936:
"Thus the joint responsibility for the exposed monstrosity rests completely on Rome."
The magazine 'Rome-Free Catholic' was close to at that time the Nazi friendly Old-Catholic Church in the German Reich.
The Nazi Daily `West Deutscher Beobachter' headlined on 3 July 1936 "Vatican circles wrap themselves in silence“.
This tactical assumption is gladly repeated at present by media swarm.
The Mortally Hated Church
The German bishops did not go to its knees before the coordinated Nazi press.
The citizen of Berlin bishop Konrad von Preysing († 1950) wrote in his Pastoral Address on 7 May 1937:
"This very loud press front wants to strike the mortally despised church to destruction."
"One wants to declare the reputation of the Pope and the German bishops for Christianity and freedom of conscience in our German Fatherland."
"The Church's enemies use the morality of legal cases against priests and religious", in order to undermine the authority of the Pope and his words.
Only before - in March 1937 - Pope Pius XI had two months in the encyclical "Mit Brennender Sorge" frontally attacked the ideology of National Socialism.
Naturally the Nazis hated Celibacy Too
The German press coordinated by the National Socialists was made to represent the obscenities, much discussed by Goebbels, as "symptoms of the unnatural system" of the Church.
Goebbels' fight was directed - similarly as today - particularly against celibacy.
It was put together with "the Catholic bourgeois morality " as reactionary and outdated way of life.
Goebbels trumped up rare misdemeanours of individual clergyman, in order to provoke a general demoralization in the Clergy - as if he would never again be "in this frightening and infuriating extent able to determine the entire cultural history of mankind."
The Church Becomes Triumphant
The Bishops did not let Nazi propaganda sit idly. Thus Msgr von Preysing said clearly in his Pastoral Address:
„The Church's enemies use indecent assaults on Catholic clergyman in order to approach their goal: to exterminate the public believers of Christianity in Germany, unrestrainedly, without consideration for truth, justice and freedom of conscience."
In the conclusion he explained his Pastoral Letter:
"My Dear Children! Do not let yourself be confused in the faith or in the eternal mission of the Church."
"The Church of Christ will also victoriously overcome decline, error and vice in its own ranks as in the past."
"You will also triumph powerfully over the great droves and the more powerful the attacking opponent - the gates of hell will not be overcome by them. “
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