The Radical Muslims of Germany

If infidels who built the world don't fight back, then we all will die. Most Muslims don't read the Quran. There are no moderate muslims because the same Quran that told the radicals to kill non-muslims, also told the moderates the same thing. The difference, the Quran said if muslims don't kill they will be killed. Allah is the greastest deceiver, schemer, liar according to sura 3:54.
Why would a true god need to deceive humans. Insanity rules the day. The Bible god said love your enemies, the god of Islam said kill your enemies. Hitler said he respected Islam because they hated Jews and Christians like he did. Obama's ancestors also converted to Islam because they couldn't believe that one should love your enemies and love them so they became Muslims because it said kill your enemies. He saw Christians as weak! So did Hitler.
All churches are not Christians, but cults, e.g Jim Jones, David Koresh. Anybody can make a church or a cult. Muhammad did!

Btilly, isn't it true that Hitler worked closely with the then Pope of Christians (Pius XII) during his gass chamber operation? The Pope Pius XII joined hands with Hitler's mission of eradicating Jews. What was Jews fault? Christians hate Jews for not accepting Jesus as a messaih.

1) Video 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEATQF5lCYo This video will reveal the unholy nexus between Catholicism and Nazism

2) Watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tga2FX9Ai9c In this video, the Catholic priests are doing a Nazi hand salute along with Hitler's officials.

I am sure many know the nexus between the Pope and Hitler. Or do Catholics now say it is a conspiracy theory? ho ho ho

I only wish the Germans tke it seriously and give a good kick on this muslim ass Gharaballi. Whatever happened to the legendary efficiency and toughness of the Germans ?

i personally feel that with the recession will lead to a rise in the hatred for muslims all over europe. the reason being that while other people work hard to make a living, a vast majority of muslims do nothing and live on the tax-payers money.

Story of a pakistani cabbie in UK
Just the other day, an indian friend of mine took a cab driven by a pakistani driver. that guy had recently had a baby daughter and wanted to get his wife and daughter from pakistan to uK. He was lamenting that visa process has been made difficult but was atleast honest enough to blame it on fellow muslims. He was saying that muslims in UK have 5-6 children and stop working. They take up council housing and live life of benefits because of which genuine people like him( he is facing difficulties due to recession) are unable to make use of council benefits like housing.
The story is the same in most european countries. Muslims procreate like rats and then live off state benefits and this is causing quite a stir among people who know what is happening but the issue is that a vast majority of people are ignorant of how muslims are eating into their society like termites.

Ibrahim,
Yesterday, you claimed that you personally helped 500 fellow muslims leave islam. Would it not sound like a tall claim especially when you have not been able to inspire your own sister who I assume will be atleast as intelligent as you, if not better, to leave islam.

Editor,
Please block this forum pest AMIM. S(he) is spamming without any meaningful contribution to debate

What a bore. Typical of a muslim mindset. its become rather polarized that everyone else in the world thinks in a standard pattern and muslims think in their own set pattern.
such is their brainwashing over the years, that it stops thinking and reasoning on its own. everything is defined already. they r part of an assembly line production piece. excepting that all these are "defective pieces"

Wristycheam,
It is nothing new. They did what the paedophile did. Copy and then claim it to be his own..
e.g.
Bukhari :: Book 5 :: Volume 58 :: Hadith 279

Narrated Ibn 'Abbas:

When the Prophet arrived at Medina he found that the Jews observed fast on the day of 'Ashura'. They were asked the reason for the fast. They replied, "This is the day when Allah caused Moses and the children of Israel to have victory over Pharaoh, so we fast on this day as a sign of glorifying it." Allah's Apostle said, "We are closer to Moses than you." Then he ordered that fasting on this day should be observed.

Rationalist:

Pope Pius XII did at first try to expose Hitler, but the more he did the more Hitler killed Jews and Catholics. Hitler was into the occult, incest and Islam.
Hitler was pure evil and psychotic. He used the example of the Muslims from Turkey as they way to achieve glory and power as no one said a word when the Muslims killed over 1 million white Armenians Christians as infidels. Hitler said he copied the example of the Muslims in evil. He glorified the Muslims from Arabia and Turkey. Many Catholic evil ones did help Hitler kill Jews and Jehovah;s Witnesses. JW were all white and refused to hate Jews and kill them, so Hitler made them were purple in the camps. Hitler killed 25 million, six million were Jews. Muslims have killed over 500 million since Muhammad started on his Arabic mission of world conquest.SEX, MURDER AND POWER IS ISLAM AND ANY OTHER RIDICULOUS FEEBLE MINDED RELIGION. If God is love, why make people serve him. The Bible God said choose. If a man says he is doing it for God, HE LIES. God said he would do his OWN killing.
are muslims god? Jim Jones the kool-aid man was.

The Top Misconceptions About Islam and Muslims

1. Muslims are violent, terrorists, and extremists!

AMIM,
i had requested others not to respond to you but unfortunately you are stating wrong historical facts which just shows how deceitful or ignorant you are.
If what you have written above is your understanding of islam and allah does really exist(althoug i know he does not), you are are going to be hell fuel for sure.
you say:
"The synthesis of Eastern and Western ideas and of new thought with old, brought about great advances in medicine, mathematics, physics, astronomy, geography, architecture, art, literature, and history."

Nothing can be further from truth. Islam destroys local culture and anything associated with it as has been proven in most of the islamic countries.

" Many crucial systems such as algebra, the Arabic numerals, and also the concept of the zero (vital to the advancement of mathematics) , were transmitted to medieval Europe from Islam. Sophisticated instruments which were to make possible the European voyages of discovery were developed, including the astrolabe, the quadrant and good navigational maps."

lies lies and lies. The numerals are still called indo-arabic numerals but are actualy indian numerals which arabs stole and passed on as their own. 0 was invented by an Indian called Aryabhatta.
Even unani system of medicine is translation of ayurvedic system. I am yet to see a breakthrough research by so many of your islamic universties apart from suicide bombers if one may call that a break through research

I hope you have some shame still left in you and figure out how wrong you are places as well.

Dear Amim, we at FaithFreedom want you to participate in our discussion; however, copy pasting meaningless diatribe that is not even on subject does no one any good.

We want your input but please do it in an intelligent way.

If the subject is radical islam in Germany a post like your last one is worthless:

"The Top Misconceptions About Islam and Muslims
1. Muslims are violent, terrorists, and extremists!"

Please help us have a better FaithFreedom where ideas are exchanged instead of spamming every thread.

Thanks

Thank you very much for providing valuable insight into the evil deeds of radical Muslims in Germany. It is very sad but far from surprising to read that Muslims are preaching hate against non-muslims, in particular Jews. However, there are laws that forbid inciting hate and violence against people in Germany. It's called "Volksverhetzung". Verhetzen means to stir up or incite to violence. Please read § 130 Strafgesetzbuch (law of criminal justice) http://bundesrecht.juris.de/stgb/__130.html

§ 130 Volksverhetzung
(1) Wer in einer Weise, die geeignet ist, den öffentlichen Frieden zu stören,
1. zum Haß gegen Teile der Bevölkerung aufstachelt oder zu Gewalt- oder Willkürmaßnahmen gegen sie auffordert oder
2. die Menschenwürde anderer dadurch angreift, daß er Teile der Bevölkerung beschimpft, böswillig verächtlich macht oder verleumdet,
wird mit Freiheitsstrafe von drei Monaten bis zu fünf Jahren bestraft.

Now, this is really difficult to translate. I'll give it a try.

Whoever
1. incites hatred against parts of the people or however calls for violent acts or arbitrary acts against them, or
2. Whoever attacks human dignity by insulting, maliciously sluring or slandering parts of the people,
in a manner capable of disrupting public order,
is to be imprisoned for a term ranging from three months to 5 years.

I think you should consider getting legal council and bringing this matter to the German courts.

Regards,

Kikl

Kikl, thank you very much for this piece of information.
This is very useful to know. People in Europe should start excercising their rights and taking those thugs to courts. Prison is where they belong. Peace

rationalist wrote:

Btilly, isn’t it true that Hitler worked closely with the then Pope of Christians (Pius XII) during his gass chamber operation? The Pope Pius XII joined hands with Hitler’s mission of eradicating Jews. What was Jews fault? Christians hate Jews for not accepting Jesus as a messaih.

1) Video 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEATQF5lCYo This video will reveal the unholy nexus between Catholicism and Nazism

2) Watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tga2FX9Ai9c In this video, the Catholic priests are doing a Nazi hand salute along with Hitler’s officials.

I am sure many know the nexus between the Pope and Hitler. Or do Catholics now say it is a conspiracy theory? ho ho ho

What nexus between the Pope and Hitler? Dude that has been refuted by experts and scholars on this subject.

Dude next time you decide to make an accusation, do some scholarly research on the subject.

"www.myfathershouse.com/pdf/Pope-Pius-The-XII-Greatest-Friend-Of-the-Jews-During-The-Holocaust.pdf -

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1022494.html - 120k

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3308251/'Hitler's-Pope'-tried-to-help-Jews,-say-documents.html -

www.donfeder.com/articles/0509DalinBook.pdf

romanchristendom.blogspot.com/2008/10/pope-pius-xii-saviour-of-jews-in-europe.html - 269k

By the way my grandmother was a Jew.

Hitler not only went after the Jews, he also went after the Church ( and other groups of people ). He also tried to replace Christianity with his own brand of religion since he did not like religions that were "foreign" and he was also involved with the Occult.

www.excommunicate.net/hitler-the-ss-and-the-occult - 43k

www.geocities.com/Athens/parthenon/7069/hitler.html - 12k

www.stargods.org/Nazis_and_the_Occult.html - 61k

Hitler and Islam

www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/2543 - 49k

www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1923233/posts - 34k

usapartisan.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/islamofascism-hitler-muhammad-and-islam-andrew-g-bostom/ - 51k

Two of the websites I posted did not come up, so I am trying again.

http://www.romanchristendom.blogspot.com/2008/10/pope-pius-xii-saviour-o... - 269k
http://www.myfathershouse.com/pdf/Pope-Pius-The-XII-Greatest-Friend-Of-t...

"“Jews are the enemy of Allah,” declared Ismael Gharaballi during a service in a mosque in Bielefeld, Germany. “This is not only my belief, but also Allah’s conviction,” the Palestinian imam and Hamas activist declared, waving his Koran in the air. The congregation of about 200 thundered, “Allahu Akbar!”

If Jews are the enemy of Allah, then why did Allah create them? Better yet if Jews are the enemy of Allah, then can they worship him since Allah is suppose to be the same god as the one Jews worship?

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3308251/'Hitler's-Pope'-tried-to-help-Jews,-say-documents.html

Btilly and Marie, I presume you went through the videos that I sent. Why the hell the Nazis are kissing Pope Pius XII hands? Why the Church authorities doing a Nazi salute along with Hitler's henchmen? What was the need for the Pope to be with Hitler on many occasions. Didn't he know that Hitler was an evil person? Here is John Cornwell's book on Hitler's Pope.

http://www.tenc.net/analysis/hitlerspope.htm

The second video I posted shows the unholy nexus between the church and Pope. After that Muslims became closer to Hitler. In all research proves Hitler had nexus with extreme elements from Islam and Christianity.

Had there been a islamic allah, the muslims would not be blowing themselves up by detonating themselves with bombs made by infidels.
utlimately we all are different manifestations of energy and that is why if there is a GOD, it is within every particle, every being living or dead. We all were created from energy and when the sun dies millions and millions of years from now, all living beings will become the one with non-living matter

focussed

Ok, Focussed the thing is that convincing your own family is far more difficult than convincing outsiders. Firstly there is the hesitation of speaking on a matter as such due to the notion of hurting your own sister and family. Further more not every one is receptive to certain sorts of ideas. Maybe if my sister learns this stuff from elsewhere she will think about it, maybe she will feel my telling her so as as some sort of bossing over.
Besides there are numerous personal reasons which i cannot enumerate in this forum. In any case what I am saying is not a tall claim.
Try this sometime, strangers will take you more seriously than your own family. Especially if you can convince them of your case.

Try to reflect on what i said above. I mean imagine when i said day before that some of the commenst made by a commentor were derogadory. Atleast I felt so, that person responded with a volley of abuse and allegations.
Such people are not receptive to new ideas, no matter how intelligent they might be in real life. I am not saying that my sister wont be receptive to my ideas, but the thing is that she is pretty young and not every one can understand such problematic issues.
Of course it is not like i dont speak with her, but every time i bring the issue of islam she just does not want to speak about it. she would rather talk about issues like her carreer and future. There are political families where some members support an ideology which is opposite to the ideology of their family. I am not comparing myself with them, rather I am giving this as an analogy.
The people I helped come out of islam were not very educated people, as most eductaed people are convinced that they know best.
Infact these people were very simple people whom I convinced using simple thoughts. Like a fellow who is a washerman, i once asked him as to why allah created pigs if he later had label them as najassat. this and other very simple questions that got this fellow talking.
actually we dont need to discuss complicated issues like Fiqh and women's rights inorder to convince people, but very basic islamic injunctures. this is my approach. others might have different views, but in my personal experience i found such people easier to convince of the stupidity of islam. this is not a constant, it all depends on how receptive the other person is.

focussed, we have a saying in Kashmiri which rougly translated to english would read as:

" Some people are locks to evil and keys to good, and others are keys to evil an locks to good"

my purpose of saying so is that there are several muslims who need to be reached out. however people have their pre concived notions about muslims, and hence dont appoarch them with the truth. what they do is just label them and come to forums and spew their hatred. this what they are best at.
such people are keys to evil and locks to good, and we should not allow them to take over our thoughst.

rationalist wrote:

Btilly and Marie, I presume you went through the videos that I sent. Why the hell the Nazis are kissing Pope Pius XII hands? Why the Church authorities doing a Nazi salute along with Hitler’s henchmen? What was the need for the Pope to be with Hitler on many occasions. Didn’t he know that Hitler was an evil person? Here is John Cornwell’s book on Hitler’s Pope.
http://www.tenc.net/analysis/hitlerspope.htm

The second video I posted shows the unholy nexus between the church and Pope. After that Muslims became closer to Hitler. In all research proves Hitler had nexus with extreme elements from Islam and Christianity.

rationalist, I assume you never bothered to look at the websites where the connection between Pope Pius XLL and Hitler was refuted.

Dude the Nazis used the Catholic Church as one way to gain power, no they had no use for the Church.

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, both the Catholic and Protestant Churches supported him for reasons such these:

1. The Nazis claimed they would support "positive Christianity".

2. Catholics were opposed to Soviet Communism and it's anti religious ideology.

3. Many Christians supported the Nazis anti-Jewish stance.

However soon the Nazis began showing their true colors and started interfering in various Church matters such as religious education.

Pope Pius XLL was responsible for saving the lives of 860,000 Jews.

The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965

By Michael Phayer

Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis (2000)

Reviewed by Robert P. Lockwood

Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), as Secretary of State to Pius XI and as pope, faced Nazi Germany with a remarkable consistency. The Nazis considered him an implacable foe,1 and he was hailed both during and after World War II as the strongest voice – often the only voice – speaking out in Europe against the Nazi terror.2 The Church under his leadership is credited with saving more Jewish lives in the face of the Holocaust than any other agency, government or entity at the time.3 Pius’ combination of diplomatic pressure, careful but sustained criticism while maintaining an essential Vatican neutrality in war-torn Europe, as well as direct action through his nuncios and the local Church where possible, saved what some have estimated as 860,000 Jewish lives.4 If that estimate is accurate by only half, it remains a historic effort for a Church fighting without weapons against the most horrific campaign of genocide the world had yet seen.

www.catholicleague.org/research/catholic_church_and_the_holocaus.htm - 69k -

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mischedj/ct_vsnazis.html

You can read in The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 in it's entirety at: http://www.books.google.com

John Cornwell's books has been criticized by U.S. historian MARTIN DOORHY, a World War II specialist historian.

Here is a sample of his criticism of Cornwall's book.

It was impossible, he said, for Cornwell to have worked exhaustively in the Archives of the Secretariat of the Vatican State "for months", as claimed. Cornwell, he added, "has drawn most of his conclusions from secondary sources unfriendly to the Church."

Regarding Pius XII's work with European Jews, Doorhy pointed to "the 80 percent survival rate in Italy" as "far and away the highest rate" in any of the Nazi occupied countries," and the fact that the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, published in 1990 in Tel Aviv, and written mostly by Jewish scholars, credits Pope Pius XII with saving no fewer than half the Jews of Rome during the Nazi occupation. "Pius XII," he said, "saved more Jews than all the other church groups and rescue agencies combined."

I went through all the links sent by you. However, none of them refutes the ideological connection between Hitler and the Church at that time. Have you seen the videos I sent to you? Historically, Christians had hegemony towards Jews. You never answered
1. WHY NAZIS IN THEIR UNIFORMS WERE KISSING POPE PIUS XII?
2. WHY PIUS XII IS SEEN IN MANY PHOTOS WITH HITLER?
3. WHY THE CHURCH AUTHORITIES ARE DOING A NAZI SALUTE?

See below; you accept the connection between Church and Nazis.

You said: Dude the Nazis used the Catholic Church as one way to gain power, no they had no use for the Church.
I say: You accept that Nazis used the Church to gain power. Now, how can they use Church without the support from Pius XII?

You said: When Hitler rose to power in 1933, both the Catholic and Protestant Churches supported him for reasons such these:

1. The Nazis claimed they would support “positive Christianity”.

2. Catholics were opposed to Soviet Communism and it’s anti religious ideology.

3. Many Christians supported the Nazis anti-Jewish stance.

I say: The reason 3 quoted above sums it all. Christians, all along the history, hated Jews. Common Mary, you have accepted the dirty connection between the church and Nazi rule. It is good to know that both Catholics and Protestants supported Hitler for "Positive Christianity". Does that mean converting as many pagans as possible to save them from scorching hell?

You said: However soon the Nazis began showing their true colors and started interfering in various Church matters such as religious education.
I say: Huh.... Christianity emerged as a political outfit (council of Naecea). First the church, with the blessings of Pius XII, supported Hitler. Then Hitler backfired. What was the Pope doing then? Was he enjoying the gassing of Jews?

You say: Pope Pius XLL was responsible for saving the lives of 860,000 Jews.
I say: First he supported Hitler; Hitler killed 6 million Jews; then you say Pius XII saved Jews. Wow what a logic? If he was serious in his business as Pope, then he should have ordered his officials to back off from Hitler. The rosy picture is that all Church members are seen partying with Nazis. Your logic is Mohammadan in nature

POPE PIUS XII IS AS GUILTY AS HITLER

Rationalist:

The Vatican saluted to stay alive. How could the Pope help any Italian Jews dead. If the Pope had fought the Nazi, all of them would die. Nazis were/are Muslims. Muslims stormed the Vatican at one time. That is why the Vatican has a wall around it now - because of ISLAMIC MUSLIMS.

The Mafia was also started as an anti-Islamic group to fight Muslims.

Btilly, you can never change history! Pope Pius XII was the poodle of Hitler. These stupid Popes are the biggest joke in any sense because they consider themselves to be the messenger between God and humans.

The videos and Cornwell's book conclusively proves the dirty relationship between the church and Hitler. Pope Pius XII is as big a culprit as Hitler is. Muslims definitely copied Nazis agenda but only later.

Rationalist what connection between the Church and Nazism? There are 37,000 Church denominations out there, and while there were Churches that supported Nazism, there were also Churches that opposed the Nazis.

In other words the Christianity was not united with Nazism, since not all Churches were in league with the nazis. In order for there to be a nexus between the Nazis and Christianity, all Christian Churches would have to be in unity with each other for that to happen.

"Bonhoeffer And The German Churches' Response To Nazism
Thomas Ash

Nazi Germany's systematic murder and oppression of millions, in the concentration camps and in occupied territory, was, it is generally agreed, one of the most evil events in human history. Many find it hard to believe that it was perpetrated by ordinary human beings, in a country that was 95% church tax-paying Christian[1], yet imbibed Hitler's anti-semitic propaganda to such an extent that, by 1935, 5 million copies of Mein Kampf had been sold. Many prominent Nazis, including Hermann Göring and Wilhelm Kube, who killed thousands around Minsk, were active Christians, though others were anti-Christian nationalist neo-pagans. Most significant of all is the fact that Hitler himself was a Catholic (though of an unorthodox, semi-pagan variety) saying: "Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. " [2] He said "I am now as before a Catholic"[3] in private and even enforced school prayer on grounds of morality. Clearly, the response of the German churches to Nazism deserves examination.

The Roman Catholic church has been criticised particularly strongly of late, but actually led much of the initial opposition to Nazism, forbidding Catholics to vote for the Nazis and helping keep them out of power with its 'Centre' Party. But, in 1933 the papacy signed a Concordat with Germany ensuring Catholic autonomy and forbidding sterilization (a promise Germany soon broke). Catholic churches in Germany followed the papacy, so grassroots opposition from that quarter was crippled. The Pope and many others stayed silent, the 'Centre' party was liquidated and the Nazi party was opened to Catholics.

To be fair, Pope Pius XII - though seen as anti-semitic by many - did help save 80% of the Jews in Italy through diplomacy. [4] He was genuinely opposed to the Nazis, criticising them as "miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel" before he became pontiff. But he never made the sort of public protest that might have been helpful. Some individual priests spoke out, however, and Bishop von Galen helped slow down the implementation of euthanasia by vocally protesting. This makes the question of what the papacy could have achieved by condemning the Holocaust all the more pressing. Some contemporary Catholics maintain that it was in no position to do so as this would have brought persectution on itself, but this seems to underestimate the power of the church.

The story of the various Protestant churches is different, but equally unfavourable. They were not helped by their disunity, which made coordinated resistance difficult, but many amid the rank and file were actively anti-semitic themselves. Protestantism had gone with patriotism in Germany for almost 400 years, and in 1542 Martin Luther himself wrote a tract called Against The Jews and Their Lies which called them parasites and instructed Germans to "set their synagogues and schools on fire". To quote Franklin Littel, a Christian academic: "Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Death Camps - these were not accidental appearances in the heart of Christendom." [5] Distrust of "the Jews" was also very much a part of European culture at the time, and was lent support by the fact that some Christians saw the Jews as "Christ killers", a phrase Hitler himself used to great effect. Being both a Christian and a racist was certainly not impossible, as witness America in the 1950s.

Again, there were some individual pockets of hope (the Jehovah's Witnesses, for example), but many Protestants collaborated, serving in the SS and helping identify Jews, alongside Catholics. Another worrying fact is that Nazism had a positive appeal for many in the churches, as they agreed with its conservative social vision (for instance, its stance on homosexuals, who were sent to concentration camps with pink armbands) and saw it as a bulwark against Communism. Perhaps one of the most telling - and damaging - details is that where the Catholic and Protestant Churches did protest, it was often specifically on behalf of Jews who had converted to Christianity. This fitted in with the highly traditional, and very damaging, view of a closed 'sphere of moral obligation' which did not include non-Christians.

One example that is often cited as a glimmer of hope is the Confessing Church, which opposed Nazism. This was founded in 1934 by a group of Protestant pastors concerned about Nazi actions - in particular, their interference in church affairs. Many members - in particular the famous Dietrich Bonhoeffer - were outspoken in their insistence that the church should not condone Nazism, and refused to administer rites to party members. In 1937, the Confessing Church was banned and forced underground, with Martin Niemöller, its founder, imprisoned on Hitler's personal command. However, despite this seemingly heroic story, the Confessing Church was not all that could be hoped for. Niemöller called himself an anti-semite throughout the war, and though he opposed the ban on baptised Jews being priests and participating in services, the plight of those Jews who had not converted was not a major concern of the Church.

An exception to this was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Famous as a modern day martyr, Bonhoeffer recognised prejudice against the Jews as wrong and was determined to resist the Nazis, tragically being executed a few days before war ended in a concentration camp. So uncompromising was he that - despite his earlier pacifism - he participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Though this involved lying, disobedience and the prospect of murder - seemingly in violation of many Biblical commandments - Bonhoeffer has been held up as an example of how the Christian church should have behaved. So what ought the churches to have done in resisting Nazism? Was Bonhoeffer's approach an acceptable option for Christians, and if not what was?"

Jews fleeing from the Nazis were also taken in and hidden by Christians and Jewish children were hidden in convents, monasteries, and Catholic schools and many of these children live to testify their experience and now as adults, there are eternally grateful for the people who took them in.

www.bigissueground.com/atheistground/ash-germanchurchesnazis.shtml

The Confessing Church

The Confessing Church (German: Bekennende Kirche) was a Christian resistance movement in Nazi Germany. In 1933 the Gleichschaltung forced Protestant churches to merge into the Protestant Reich Church and support Nazi ideology. Opposition was forced to go "underground" to meet, and created the Pfarrernotbund that September. In 1934 the Barmen declaration, primarily authored by Karl Barth, with the input of other Confessing Church pastors and congregations, was ratified at the Barmen Synod through which it was re-affirmed that the German Church was not an "organ of the State" for the purpose of strengthening Nazi agendum but only subject to Christ and his mission.

Some of the leaders of the Confessing Church, such as Martin Niemöller, were sent to concentration camps, and some died there, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was sent to Tegel Prison, then to Buchenwald concentration camp, and later to Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he was hanged. Christians who did not agree with the Nazis were left without leadership. The Confessing Church engaged in various forms of resistance, notably hiding Jews[1] from the Nazi regime. The Confessing Church is a unique example of a crypto-Christian movement operating in a majority Christian country.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessing_Church.org

Also I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington and I have a book that commemorates the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Museum, which is more then a thousand pages long and gives a detailed and documented history about the entire Holocaust from the beginning, until after WWII ended and there was nothing mentioned about a supposed connection between the Church and Nazism. Oh and by the way the Nazis have upside down crosses on their graves , which is considered blasphemous.

Correction, Jews fleeing from the Nazis were also taken in and hidden by Christians and Jewish children were hidden in convents, monasteries, and Catholic schools and many of these children live to testify their experience and now as adults, there are eternally grateful for the people who took them in.

www.claremontmckenna.edu/hist/jpetropoulos/church/convents.html

www1.yadvashem.org.il/about_yad/what_new/pope_images/bognerEDELEA.pdf-

Here's something from the the Holocaust Museum in Washington

www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10006125 - 29k

www.jcrelations.net/en/?item=1451

www.adl.org/hidden/between_religions/hc_7-1-religious_transformation.asp - 28k

www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/hidden.html - 22k

www.voanews.com/english/2008-07-20-voa23.cfm - 34k

www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/christian_opposition_to_nazi_a.html - 28k

So tell me rationalist, if Christianity ( in it's entirety I mean ) had a hand in the murder of Jews, then why are the Jews eternally grateful to Christians for saving their lives?

As I said before, John Cornwell accusations have been refuted and here's a book written by a Jewish Rabbi to disprove Cornwell's claims.

The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XLL Rescued the Jews from the Nazis.

http://books.google.com

So tell me rationalist, if Pope Pius had a hand in the murder of the Jews, then why did a Jewish rabbit write a book to disprove those claims and why do Jews hold Pius in high regard and honor? Hmmm, maybe you are not the one who is rational, but rather irrational, because of your bias.

By the way the videos posted on youtube prove absolutely nothing, because anyone can make a video and pass it off as scholarly on that site. By the way watching videos on youtube does not make you an expert on this topic and in fact it shows how ignorant you are. As I said before John Cornwell's book has been refuted and the fact the you keep on claiming his false accusations are true, makes you look pitiful.

Marie, any Rabbi can write a book to say that church had nothing to do with Nazis. A Jewish MP from England supported the Palestinians and criticized Israel. Does that mean Isreal is wrong? Similarly, I have read the books written by Cornwall and Doroothy. To tell you the truth, Dorothy attacks Cornwall's personality than attacking the points the latter has proven. I am not saying all sects of Christianity were united with Nazis. However, the biggest domination of Christianity--- Catholicism-- was wholeheartedly united with the Nazis. When you see the Church authorities standing with the Nazis and do a Nazi salute, what can you expect out of it? You think the images of Nazis kissing the dirty hands of Pius XII are just a hogwash? Common, the Church, including the Pope, supported the Nazis to come to power and prosecute Jews. It is only later they realized their folly and then could have saved Jews. But my accusation still remains valid--- that is the church helped Hitler whole and soul. Therefore, POPE PIUS XII WAS HITLER'S PUPPY

Rationalist wrote:

Marie, any Rabbi can write a book to say that church had nothing to do with Nazis. A Jewish MP from England supported the Palestinians and criticized Israel. Does that mean Isreal is wrong? Similarly, I have read the books written by Cornwall and Doroothy. To tell you the truth, Dorothy attacks Cornwall’s personality than attacking the points the latter has proven. I am not saying all sects of Christianity were united with Nazis. However, the biggest domination of Christianity— Catholicism– was wholeheartedly united with the Nazis. When you see the Church authorities standing with the Nazis and do a Nazi salute, what can you expect out of it? You think the images of Nazis kissing the dirty hands of Pius XII are just a hogwash? Common, the Church, including the Pope, supported the Nazis to come to power and prosecute Jews. It is only later they realized their folly and then could have saved Jews. But my accusation still remains valid— that is the church helped Hitler whole and soul. Therefore, POPE PIUS XII WAS HITLER’S PUPPY"

Dude you have never even read the Rabbi's book, so how can you even say that?

Dude did you ever occur to you that maybe the Pope had relations with the Nazis in order to not draw attention to his work of saving the Jews. You forgot the fact the Vatican is located in Rome and it was located in Rome during WWII and Rome was under the control of a fascist government and was allied with Nazi Germany. To publicly condemn the atrocities committed by the Nazis would have been a disaster for Pius and the Church in their efforts to help the Jews.

This is well documented by Jewish scholars like Joseph Lichten

There is considerable documentation in support of Pope Pius' fear that a formal statement would worsen, not improve, conditions for the persecuted. Ernst von Weizsacker, the German ambassador to the Vatican during World War II, wrote in his memoirs:

Not even institutions of worldwide importance, such as the International Red Cross or the Roman Catholic Church saw fit to appeal to Hitler in a general way on behalf of the Jews or to call openly on the sympathies of the world. It was precisely because they wanted to help the Jews that these organizations refrained from making any general and public appeals; for they were afraid that they would injure rather than help the Jews thereby.2

Pius XII's silence, let us remember, extended to persecutions of Catholics as well. Despite his intervention, 3000 Catholic priests were murdered by the Nazis in Germany, Austria, Poland, France, and other countries; Catholic schools were shut down, Catholic publications were forced out of print or strictly censored, and Catholic churches closed. The possibility of a public statement from the Vatican moved German Foreign Secretary Joachim von Ribbentrop to wire von Weizsacker on January 24, 1943:

Should the Vatican either politically or propagandistically oppose Germany, it should be made unmistakably clear that worsening of relations between Germany and the Vatican would not at all have an adverse effect on Germany alone. On the contrary, the German government would have sufficient effective propaganda material as well as retaliatory measures at its disposal to counteract each attempted move by the Vatican.3

Pius learned precisely how firm this German threat was from the protest of the Dutch bishops against seizures of the Jews, for immediately following that protest and, as later confirmed by an SS officer, in direct answer to it, the Nazis stepped up their anti-Jewish activities in the Netherlands; a week after the pastoral letter was read at all the masses in Holland, the SS rounded up every priest and monk and nun who had any Jewish blood whatever, and deported them to concentration camps.4 Pius and his bishops and nuncios in Nazi-occupied or -dominated countries knew that, like a sane man faced with a gun-carrier threatening to shoot, Hitler and his cohorts could not be considered civilized human beings. As Archbishop Andrea Cassulo, papal nuncio in Romania, said in June, 1942, I must proceed cautiously because [my actions] could ruin, instead of being useful to, so many wretched persons whom I must often listen to and help.5

Actions of the Holy See
The Action of the Holy See
for the Jews of Europe:
Romania

By 1944, as the end of the war approached, the Vatican was thoroughly aware of the Nazis' ruthlessness and intransigence, especially toward the Jews. The evaluation of Msgr. Domenico Tardini, secretary of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, is typical. On August 7, the papal official transmitted to the German ambassador an Allied appeal on behalf of foreigners or stateless persons, mostly Jews, located in camps in Northern Italy. At the requests of the American and British governments, the Holy See asked the German government to permit them to be gathered and sent to a port on the Adriatic coast, from which Allied ships would transport them to Southern Italy or Africa. The proposal, which emanated particularly from Myron C. Taylor, was issued just a few weeks after the July 20 attack on Hitler's life. According to Tardini, the Allied refugee specialists believed that, under the existing circumstances, the Nazis might be disposed to a concession, an act of clemency. Tardini himself did not think so. After handing the proposal to von Weizsacker, he recorded: "I told him I thought otherwise. The Nazis will get worse, the worse things are going for them." Nevertheless, telegrams in support of the project, as unrealistic as it may have been — went to the papal representatives in Berlin and Berne.

Still, there was a chance to provide some help to the threatened Jewish communities in the Balkans. This, then, was the scene of an intensive "war of telegrams" during 1944 in Romania, Slovakia and Hungary. The Apostolic Nuncio in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, was Msgr. Andreas Cassulo, who had previously secured relief for the Jews deported to Transnistria, a new Romanian province annexed from the Soviet Union in 1941 which had become a veritable penal colony. The nuncio's relations with the Jewish community, and especially with the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Alexander Safran, were close and confident. On January 22, 1944, Cassulo reported to his superiors the latest preoccupations of the Romanian Jews and the role that the Holy See might play. The time seemed opportune to secure the withdrawal of all Jews in Transnistria back to the center of the country, which was known as "the Kingdom". If they remained where they were, they would be in danger of falling into the hands of the retreating Germans. It was also proposed that the many orphans in this group might be sent to Palestine.

Not waiting for instructions, the nuncio immediately began diplomatic maneuvers, asking the government to raise the age limit of the orphans from 12 to 16, thereby increasing the number eligible for the exodus to Palestine. Soon after, the Grand Rabbi of Jerusalem asked the Holy See to intervene in a similar manner, but having already acted, the nuncio pointed out that further Vatican action would be superfluous. In a March 16 report to the Vatican, he said the government seemed ready for conciliation and that it would do even more were it not afraid of the reaction of the country's anti-Semites. The nuncio informed the Vatican that the civilian administration of Transnistria had been dismantled and that the population, including the Jews, "will be evacuated this side of the Nistra," that is, to safety beyond the reach of the Germans.

As for the orphans, on July 11, the nuncio informed Rome that the first Romanian refugee ship had arrived in Istanbul carrying 250 children from Costanza. Other ships would bring more refugees, he said, "and in this way the difficult question, which gave us so much work in the past, is reaching a successful solution." Naturally, he said, the gratitude of the Jewish community in Romania is felt deeply. Rabbi Herzog of Palestine also sent his thanks to the nuncio.

Obviously, one should not suppose that whatever positive results were gained through these initiatives were due solely, or even largely, to any reputed Vatican "influence". To do so would be to underestimate the vast and intensive activity of the Jewish organizations themselves. Yet the gratitude of the Jewish leaders, such as Rabbi Safran, was no less sincere and justified.

The Holy See's support was also sought in another, less efficacious attempt to evacuate Jews from Romania to Palestine. The Jewish organizations had secured the services of a Turkish vessel, the Tari, to shuttle refugees between Costanza and Istanbul-Haifa. The International Red Cross, however, insisted that the ship first obtain a guarantee of safe passage from the Germans. The Vatican instructed Nuncio Orsenigo to solicit the Foreign Ministry for such a guarantee. Unfortunately, though, at that same time, the Germans learned that the Turks, responding to Allied pressure, had refused to deliver chromium to the Reich, so the Tari was not allowed to sail. Notwithstanding Turkish policy, it is doubtful in any case that Berlin would have conceded safe passage to the Tari.

Italian Military Internees in Germany

In 1944, a new aspect of the Pope's concern for prisoners of war arose in response to the plight of Italian soldiers who had been brought to Germany after the Armistice in September of 1943. Their condition received scant attention in the world press, but they constituted a new category of "war's victims". They were not regarded as prisoners of war but as "military internees"; that is, they had no recognized rights under the Geneva Red Cross Conventions. The Allies refused to permit passage of material assistance destined for them, because the distribution was not under Red Cross supervision. And in the last year of the war, when supplies were short in Germany even for civilians, what help could they expect from local resources, even supposing good intentions on the part of their captors?

On December 23, 1943, Cardinal Maglione, the Pope's secretary of state, had formally asked German Ambassador Ernst von Weizsacker if the Reich government would permit Vatican assistance to the Italian internees. No answer was ever given. In the meantime, innumerable inquiries and appeals from distraught relatives in Italy were forwarded by the Vatican to the nuncio in Berlin. The nuncio reported to his superiors that the foreign ministry told him to apply to the special office for interned military set up by the Republic Fascist embassy — whose government, of course, the Holy See had not recognized. Nuncio Orsenigo asked if he might not, despite the non-recognition and in view of the desperate situation, approach this office. In fact, Msgr. Orsenigo was able to visit camps or labor battalions where Italians were detained, especially in the vicinity of Berlin.

Even the repatriation of those seriously handicapped and unfit for any war purpose encountered agonizing difficulties. One of the charitable projects to which the Nuncio Orsenigo devoted himself was the return of Italy of those badly in need of medical attention, especially victims of tuberculosis and malaria. On February 7, 1944, Cardinal Maglione wrote the nuncio: "The Holy Father, in his charitable and ardent solicitude to relieve the sufferings of those sons of his and bring some consolation to the families, so sorely tried in their dearest affections, is firmly resolved to try every possible way to obtain that Italian soldiers interned in Germany should be treated humanely, and that those in precarious conditions of health should be repatriated promptly."

Orsenigo said he then appealed on general humanitarian grounds, without getting any answer except that the internees had the Italian Republican Fascists to help them and that they received letters and packages from home. In the meantime, repatriation encountered further difficulties. On April 13, 1944, Orsenigo said he heard that some repatriated volunteers had simply deserted and gone into hiding once they found themselves in Italy. On May 19, the nuncio happily informed the Vatican that the first transport of disabled men had left for Italy. But on September 7, the nuncio reported to his regret that the German government had "completely suspended" the repatriations — to avoid the hostile comments, he was told, cause by the distressing condition of these unfortunates. No more sick or wounded would be allowed to leave Germany.

"The consequences of these measures," reported Orsenigo, "are disastrous and cruel; in the camp infirmaries languish numerous seriously ill persons who call out for their families."

Various Catholic Heroes of the Holocaust

by Elizabeth Altham

Przemysl, Poland, 1944: Two SS men knock at the door of Stefania Podgorska, a Catholic seamstress. Her cottage is wanted for personnel of the field hospital across the street; she and her younger sister, Helena, have two hours to move out, on pain of death. The challenge of finding a new place to live is a bit stiffer than the SS men can imagine: Stefania, seventeen, is sheltering thirteen Jews in her little house.She spends nearly two hours running from house to ruined house. After occupation by the Germans, the Soviets and the Germans again, there is nothing left that she could even make shift in. She returns home. Her guests beg her to escape with Helena, who is only seven.

Eva Fogelman, a psychotherapist whose father was rescued by Lithuanian Catholics, has written a splendid book about people who saved Jews,Conscience and Courage. In it she reports Stefania's own account of what happened next. Stefania asked her guests to pray with her. She knelt before a picture of Jesus and Mary.

"And I asked God not to let us be killed. Help, somehow. I cannot leave this apartment. I cannot leave thirteen people for a certain death. I will be alive if I go, but thirteen lives will be finished—children too, and young people. I asked God, 'Help, somehow.' "And…I heard a voice, a woman's voice. It was so beautiful, so nice, so quiet. She said to me, 'Don't worry. Everything will be all right. You will not leave your apartment. You will stay here, and they will take only one room. Everything will be all right. I am with you.' And she told me, 'Be quiet. I'll tell you what to do.' She said, 'Send your people to the bunker a hidden space in the attic. Open the door. Open the windows. Clean your apartment and sing.'"

Stefania obeyed the voice. Her neighbors came and remonstrated with her: the SS would surely kill her. She continued to clean her house, and to sing. Ten minutes later, an SS man arrived—smiling. It was a good thing, he said, that she had not moved, because they needed only one room; she could keep the rest.

There were more close calls before the Soviets finally liberated Przemysl (and there had been many before this one), but Stefania and Helena Podgorska and the thirteen Jews all survived the war.

Eva Fogelman interviewed more than three hundred rescuers, and checked their stories with the Jews they saved and with official records. She wanted to understand what motivated people to risk their lives to help others. She concluded that in many cases the critical motive was religious faith: the conviction that Christ would want them to do this.

http://www.piusxii.hismercy.ca/index.html - 16k

If the Catholic Church was wholeheartedly in support of the Nazis, then why did Catholics hide Jews in monasteries, convents, and in their homes, when it was very dangerous to help the Jews flee from the Nazis? Why did Priest and Nuns attack Nazi policies if there was a connection between the Church and the Nazis? Why did the break the Concordate and abolish the Catholic Youth League, force Catholic Children to join Hitler Youth, order Crucifixes taken out of Churches, and abolish Catholic Newspapers? Why did the Nazis sent Catholic Priests and Nuns who opposed Nazi policies, concentration camps, if the Catholic Church and the Nazis where in league with each other?

If you want to convince me the Catholic Church was connected with the Nazi, then you will need a lot more then three videos on Youtube and one book, because there is a hell of a lot more information out there, then your three videos and one book out there that proves that was no connection between the Catholic Church and the Nazis. If you don't have anymore information then what you already have, then don't bother to continue having this discussion with me, because there is no chance you will convince me to your point of view. I need hardcore facts in order to believe in your accusations, not opinions and false information.

I forgot to mention this book, The other Victims: First-Person stories of Non-Jews persecuted by the Nazis by Ina R. Friedman. This book has a chapter of Catholics and other Christians who were persecuted by the Nazis.

http://www.books.google.com

Rationalist wrote:

"You think the images of Nazis kissing the dirty hands of Pius XII are just a hogwash? Common, the Church, including the Pope, supported the Nazis to come to power and prosecute Jews."

Dude you are beginning to sound pathetic.

Marie, I am not here to convince you, but facts remain facts irrespective of however you try to put them under carpet. Read your comments at the starting of this discussion. You have accepted that there was a nexus between Catholic church and Nazi Germany. This is what you said "When Hitler rose to power in 1933, both the Catholic and Protestant Churches supported him for reasons such these:

1. The Nazis claimed they would support “positive Christianity”.

2. Catholics were opposed to Soviet Communism and it’s anti religious ideology.

3. Many Christians supported the Nazis anti-Jewish stance "

Reason 3 quoted by you sums up the hatred Christians have for Jews. If the Church repented for supporting Hitler, that is another story. The fact that still remains undisputed is the nexus between the church and Hitler....

Here are other well researched books:

1. Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives That Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church by Peter Godman
2. "Silence Means Consent".(role of Vatican and Pope Pius XII during World War II): An article from: Midstream by Pierre Ferrand
3. Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell
4. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965: by Michael Phayer

The videos are not the only proofs available.

No I did not say there was a nexus, I said there were Churches that supported the Nazis. There's a difference in terminology.

This is the enclycicle Pope Pius had smuggled in to Nazi Germany.

MIT BRENNENDER SORGE (On the Church and the German Reich)

Encyclical Promulgated on 14 March 1937

To the Venerable Brethren the Archbishops and Bishops of Germany and other Ordinaries in Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See.
Venerable Brethren, Greetings, and Apostolic Blessing.

1.It is with deep anxiety and growing surprise that We have long been following the painful trials of the Church and the increasing vexations which afflict those who have remained loyal in heart and action in the midst of a people that once received from St. Boniface the bright message and the Gospel of Christ and God's Kingdom.

2. And what the representatives of the venerable episcopate, who visited Us in Our sick room, had to tell Us, in truth and duty bound, has not modified Our feelings. To consoling and edifying information on the stand the Faithful are making for their Faith, they considered themselves bound, in spite of efforts to judge with moderation and in spite of their own patriotic love, to add reports of things hard and unpleasant. After hearing their account, We could, in grateful acknowledgment to God, exclaim with the Apostle of love: "I have no greater grace than this, to hear that my children walk in truth" (John III. 4). But the frankness indifferent in Our Apostolic charge and the determination to place before the Christian world the truth in all its reality, prompt Us to add: "Our pastoral heart knows no deeper pain, no disappointment more bitter, than to learn that many are straying from the path of truth."

3. When, in 1933, We consented, Venerable Brethren, to open negotiations for a concordat, which the Reich Government proposed on the basis of a scheme of several years' standing; and when, to your unanimous satisfaction, We concluded the negotiations by a solemn treaty, We were prompted by the desire, as it behooved Us, to secure for Germany the freedom of the Church's beneficent mission and the salvation of the souls in her care, as well as by the sincere wish to render the German people a service essential for its peaceful development and prosperity. Hence, despite many and grave misgivings, We then decided not to withhold Our consent for We wished to spare the Faithful of Germany, as far as it was humanly possible, the trials and difficulties they would have had to face, given the circumstances, had the negotiations fallen through. It was by acts that We wished to make it plain, Christ's interests being Our sole object, that the pacific and maternal hand of the Church would be extended to anyone who did not actually refuse it.

4. If, then, the tree of peace, which we planted on German soil with the purest intention, has not brought forth the fruit, which in the interest of your people, We had fondly hoped, no one in the world who has eyes to see and ears to hear will be able to lay the blame on the Church and on her Head. The experiences of these last years have fixed responsibilities and laid bare intrigues, which from the outset only aimed at a war of extermination. In the furrows, where We tried to sow the seed of a sincere peace, other men—the "enemy" of Holy Scripture—oversowed the cockle of distrust, unrest, hatred, defamation, of a determined hostility overt or veiled, fed from many sources and wielding many tools, against Christ and His Church. They, and they alone with their accomplices, silent or vociferous, are today responsible, should the storm of religious war, instead of the rainbow of peace, blacken the German skies.

5. We have never ceased, Venerable Brethren, to represent to the responsible rulers of your country's destiny, the consequences which would inevitably follow the protection and even the favor, extended to such a policy. We have done everything in Our power to defend the sacred pledge of the given word of honor against theories and practices, which it officially endorsed, would wreck every faith in treaties and make every signature worthless. Should the day ever come to place before the world the account of Our efforts, every honest mind will see on which side are to be found the promoters of peace, and on which side its disturbers. Whoever had left in his soul an atom of love for truth, and in his heart a shadow of a sense of justice, must admit that, in the course of these anxious and trying years following upon the conclusion of the concordat, every one of Our words, every one of Our acts, has been inspired by the binding law of treaties. At the same time, anyone must acknowledge, not without surprise and reprobation, how the other contracting party emasculated the terms of the treaty, distorted their meaning, and eventually considered its more or less official violation as a normal policy. The moderation We showed in spite of all this was not inspired by motives of worldly interest, still less by unwarranted weakness, but merely by Our anxiety not to draw out the wheat with the cockle; not to pronounce open judgment, before the public was ready to see its force; not to impeach other people's honesty, before the evidence of events should have torn the mask off the systematic hostility leveled at the Church. Even now that a campaign against the confessional schools, which are guaranteed by the concordat, and the destruction of free election, where Catholics have a right to their children's Catholic education, afford evidence, in a matter so essential to the life of the Church, of the extreme gravity of the situation and the anxiety of every Christian conscience; even now Our responsibility for Christian souls induces Us not to overlook the last possibilities, however slight, of a return to fidelity to treaties, and to any arrangement that may be acceptable to the episcopate. We shall continue without failing, to stand before the rulers of your people as the defender of violated rights, and in obedience to Our Conscience and Our pastoral mission, whether We be successful or not, to oppose the policy which seeks, by open or secret means, to strangle rights guaranteed by a treaty.

6. Different, however, Venerable Brethren, is the purpose of this letter. As you affectionately visited Us in Our illness, so also We turn to you, and through you, the German Catholics, who, like all suffering and afflicted children, are nearer to their Father's heart. At a time when your faith, like gold, is being tested in the fire of tribulation and persecution, when your religious freedom is beset on all sides, when the lack of religious teaching and of normal defense is heavily weighing on you, you have every right to words of truth and spiritual comfort from him whose first predecessor heard these words from the Lord: "I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not: and thou being once converted, confirm thy brethren" (Luke XXII. 32).

7. Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who "Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom VIII. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.

8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community—however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things—whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

9. Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.

10. This God, this Sovereign Master, has issued commandments whose value is independent of time and space, country and race. As God's sun shines on every human face so His law knows neither privilege nor exception. Rulers and subjects, crowned and uncrowned, rich and poor are equally subject to His word. From the fullness of the Creators' right there naturally arises the fullness of His right to be obeyed by individuals and communities, whoever they are. This obedience permeates all branches of activity in which moral values claim harmony with the law of God, and pervades all integration of the ever-changing laws of man into the immutable laws of God.

11. None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket" (Isaiah XI, 15).

12. The Bishops of the Church of Christ, "ordained in the things that appertain to God (Heb. V, 1) must watch that pernicious errors of this sort, and consequent practices more pernicious still, shall not gain a footing among their flock. It is part of their sacred obligations to do whatever is in their power to enforce respect for, and obedience to, the commandments of God, as these are the necessary foundation of all private life and public morality; to see that the rights of His Divine Majesty, His name and His word be not profaned; to put a stop to the blasphemies, which, in words and pictures, are multiplying like the sands of the desert; to encounter the obstinacy and provocations of those who deny, despise and hate God, by the never-failing reparatory prayers of the Faithful, hourly rising like incense to the All-Highest and staying His vengeance.

13. We thank you, Venerable Brethren, your priests and Faithful, who have persisted in their Christian duty and in the defense of God's rights in the teeth of an aggressive paganism. Our gratitude, warmer still and admiring, goes out to those who, in fulfillment of their duty, have been deemed worthy of sacrifice and suffering for the love of God.

14. No faith in God can for long survive pure and unalloyed without the support of faith in Christ. "No one knoweth who the Son is, but the Father: and who the Father is, but the Son and to whom the Son will reveal Him" (Luke X. 22). "Now this is eternal life: That they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent" (John XVII. 3). Nobody, therefore, can say: "I believe in God, and that is enough religion for me," for the Savior's words brook no evasion: "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father. He that confesseth the Son hath the Father also" (1 John II. 23).

15. In Jesus Christ, Son of God made Man, there shone the plentitude of divine revelation. "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets last of all, in these days hath spoken to us by His Son" (Heb. I. 1). The sacred books of the Old Testament are exclusively the word of God, and constitute a substantial part of his revelation; they are penetrated by a subdued light, harmonizing with the slow development of revelation, the dawn of the bright day of the redemption. As should be expected in historical and didactic books, they reflect in many particulars the imperfection, the weakness and sinfulness of man. But side by side with innumerable touches of greatness and nobleness, they also record the story of the chosen people, bearers of the Revelation and the Promise, repeatedly straying from God and turning to the world. Eyes not blinded by prejudice or passion will see in this prevarication, as reported by the Biblical history, the luminous splendor of the divine light revealing the saving plan which finally triumphs over every fault and sin. It is precisely in the twilight of this background that one perceives the striking perspective of the divine tutorship of salvation, as it warms, admonishes, strikes, raises and beautifies its elect. Nothing but ignorance and pride could blind one to the treasures hoarded in the Old Testament.

16. Whoever wishes to see banished from church and school the Biblical history and the wise doctrines of the Old Testament, blasphemes the name of God, blasphemes the Almighty's plan of salvation, and makes limited and narrow human thought the judge of God's designs over the history of the world: he denies his faith in the true Christ, such as He appeared in the flesh, the Christ who took His human nature from a people that was to crucify Him; and he understands nothing of that universal tragedy of the Son of God who to His torturer's sacrilege opposed the divine and priestly sacrifice of His redeeming death, and made the new alliance the goal of the old alliance, its realization and its crown.

17. The peak of the revelation as reached in the Gospel of Christ is final and permanent. It knows no retouches by human hand; it admits no substitutes or arbitrary alternatives such as certain leaders pretend to draw from the so-called myth of race and blood. Since Christ, the Lord's Anointed, finished the task of Redemption, and by breaking up the reign of sin deserved for us the grace of being the children God, since that day no other name under heaven has been given to men, whereby we must be saved (Acts IV 12). No man, were every science, power and worldly strength incarnated in him, can lay any other foundation but that which is laid: which is Christ Jesus (1 Cor. III 11). Should any man dare, in sacrilegious disregard of the essential differences between God and His creature, between the God-man and the children of man, to place a mortal, were he the greatest of all times, by the side of, or over, or against, Christ, he would deserve to be called prophet of nothingness, to whom the terrifying words of Scripture would be applicable: "He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them" (Psalms II. 3).

18. Faith in Christ cannot maintain itself pure and unalloyed without the support of faith in the Church, "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. III. 15); for Christ Himself, God eternally blessed, raised this pillar of the Faith. His command to hear the Church (Matt. XVIII. 15), to welcome in the words and commands of the Church His own words and His own commands (Luke X. 16), is addressed to all men, of all times and of all countries. The Church founded by the Redeemer is one, the same for all races and all nations. Beneath her dome, as beneath the vault of heaven, there is but one country for all nations and tongues; there is room for the development of every quality, advantage, task and vocation which God the Creator and Savior has allotted to individuals as well as to ethnical communities. The Church's maternal heart is big enough to see in the God-appointed development of individual characteristics and gifts, more than a mere danger of divergency. She rejoices at the spiritual superiorities among individuals and nations. In their successes she sees with maternal joy and pride fruits of education and progress, which she can only bless and encourage, whenever she can conscientiously do so. But she also knows that to this freedom limits have been set by the majesty of the divine command, which founded that Church one and indivisible. Whoever tampers with that unity and that indivisibility wrenches from the Spouse of Christ one of the diadems with which God Himself crowned her; he subjects a divine structure, which stands on eternal foundations, to criticism and transformation by architects whom the Father of Heaven never authorized to interfere.

19. The Church, whose work lies among men and operates through men, may see her divine mission obscured by human, too human, combination, persistently growing and developing like the cockle among the wheat of the Kingdom of God. Those who know the Savior's words on scandal and the giver of scandals, know, too, the judgment which the Church and all her sons must pronounce on what was and what is sin. But if, besides these reprehensible discrepancies be between faith and life, acts and words, exterior conduct and interior feelings, however numerous they be, anyone overlooks the overwhelming sum of authentic virtues, of spirit of sacrifice, fraternal love, heroic efforts of sanctity, he gives evidence of deplorable blindness and injustice. If later he forgets to apply the standard of severity, by which he measures the Church he hates, to other organizations in which he happens to be interested, then his appeal to an offended sense of purity identifies him with those who, for seeing the mote in their brother's eye, according to the Savior's incisive words, cannot see the beam in their own. But however suspicious the intention of those who make it their task, nay their vile profession, to scrutinize what is human in the Church, and although the priestly powers conferred by God are independent of the priest's human value, it yet remains true that at no moment of history, no individual, in no organization can dispense himself from the duty of loyally examining his conscience, of mercilessly purifying himself, and energetically renewing himself in spirit and in action. In Our Encyclical on the priesthood We have urged attention to the sacred duty of all those who belong to the Church, chiefly the members of the priestly and religious profession and of the lay apostolate, to square their faith and their conduct with the claims of the law of God and of the Church. And today we again repeat with all the insistency We can command: it is not enough to be a member of the Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God, either in innocence or in sincere repentance. If the Apostle of the nations, the vase of election, chastised his body and brought it into subjection: lest perhaps, when he had preached to others, he himself should become a castaway (1 Cor. IX. 27), could anybody responsible for the extension of the Kingdom of God claim any other method but personal sanctification? Only thus can we show to the present generation, and to the critics of the Church that "the salt of the earth," the leaven of Christianity has not decayed, but is ready to give the men of today—prisoners of doubt and error, victims of indifference, tired of their Faith and straying from God—the spiritual renewal they so much need. A Christianity which keeps a grip on itself, refuses every compromise with the world, takes the commands of God and the Church seriously, preserves its love of God and of men in all its freshness, such a Christianity can be, and will be, a model and a guide to a world which is sick to death and clamors for directions, unless it be condemned to a catastrophe that would baffle the imagination.

20. Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt "the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John III. 8): "of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. III. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world.

21. In your country, Venerable Brethren, voices are swelling into a chorus urging people to leave the Church, and among the leaders there is more than one whose official position is intended to create the impression that this infidelity to Christ the King constitutes a signal and meritorious act of loyalty to the modern State. Secret and open measures of intimidation, the threat of economic and civic disabilities, bear on the loyalty of certain classes of Catholic functionaries, a pressure which violates every human right and dignity. Our wholehearted paternal sympathy goes out to those who must pay so dearly for their loyalty to Christ and the Church; but directly the highest interests are at stake, with the alternative of spiritual loss, there is but one alternative left, that of heroism. If the oppressor offers one the Judas bargain of apostasy he can only, at the cost of every worldly sacrifice, answer with Our Lord: "Be gone, Satan! For it is written: The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and Him only shalt thou serve" (Matt. IV. 10). And turning to the Church, he shall say: "Thou, my mother since my infancy, the solace of my life and advocate at my death, may my tongue cleave to my palate if, yielding to worldly promises or threats, I betray the vows of my baptism." As to those who imagine that they can reconcile exterior infidelity to one and the same Church, let them hear Our Lord's warning:—"He that shall deny me before men shall be denied before the angels of God" (Luke XII. 9).

22. Faith in the Church cannot stand pure and true without the support of faith in the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. The same moment when Peter, in the presence of all the Apostles and disciples, confesses his faith in Christ, Son of the Living God, the answer he received in reward for his faith and his confession was the word that built the Church, the only Church of Christ, on the rock of Peter (Matt. XVI. 18). Thus was sealed the connection between the faith in Christ, the Church and the Primacy. True and lawful authority is invariably a bond of unity, a source of strength, a guarantee against division and ruin, a pledge for the future: and this is verified in the deepest and sublimest sense, when that authority, as in the case of the Church, and the Church alone, is sealed by the promise and the guidance of the Holy Ghost and His irresistible support. Should men, who are not even united by faith in Christ, come and offer you the seduction of a national German Church, be convinced that it is nothing but a denial of the one Church of Christ and the evident betrayal of that universal evangelical mission, for which a world Church alone is qualified and competent. The live history of other national churches with their paralysis, their domestication and subjection to worldly powers, is sufficient evidence of the sterility to which is condemned every branch that is severed from the trunk of the living Church. Whoever counters these erroneous developments with an uncompromising No from the very outset, not only serves the purity of his faith in Christ, but also the welfare and the vitality of his own people.

23. You will need to watch carefully, Venerable Brethren, that religious fundamental concepts be not emptied of their content and distorted to profane use. "Revelation" in its Christian sense, means the word of God addressed to man. The use of this word for the "suggestions" of race and blood, for the irradiations of a people's history, is mere equivocation. False coins of this sort do not deserve Christian currency. "Faith" consists in holding as true what God has revealed and proposes through His Church to man's acceptance. It is "the evidence of things that appear not" (Heb. II. 1). The joyful and proud confidence in the future of one's people, instinct in every heart, is quite a different thing from faith in a religious sense. To substitute the one for the other, and demand on the strength of this, to be numbered among the faithful followers of Christ, is a senseless play on words, if it does not conceal a confusion of concepts, or worse.

24. "Immortality" in a Christian sense means the survival of man after his terrestrial death, for the purpose of eternal reward or punishment. Whoever only means by the term, the collective survival here on earth of his people for an indefinite length of time, distorts one of the fundamental notions of the Christian Faith and tampers with the very foundations of the religious concept of the universe, which requires a moral order.

25. "Original sin" is the hereditary but impersonal fault of Adam's descendants, who have sinned in him (Rom. V. 12). It is the loss of grace, and therefore of eternal life, together with a propensity to evil, which everybody must, with the assistance of grace, penance, resistance and moral effort, repress and conquer. The passion and death of the Son of God has redeemed the world from the hereditary curse of sin and death. Faith in these truths, which in your country are today the butt of the cheap derision of Christ's enemies, belongs to the inalienable treasury of Christian revelation.

26. The cross of Christ, though it has become to many a stumbling block and foolishness (1 Cor. I. 23) remains for the believer the holy sign of his redemption, the emblem of moral strength and greatness. We live in its shadow and die in its embrace. It will stand on our grave as a pledge of our faith and our hope in the eternal light.

27. Humility in the spirit of the Gospel and prayer for the assistance of grace are perfectly compatible with self-confidence and heroism. The Church of Christ, which throughout the ages and to the present day numbers more confessors and voluntary martyrs than any other moral collectivity, needs lessons from no one in heroism of feeling and action. The odious pride of reformers only covers itself with ridicule when it rails at Christian humility as though it were but a cowardly pose of self-degradation.

28. "Grace," in a wide sense, may stand for any of the Creator's gifts to His creature; but in its Christian designation, it means all the supernatural tokens of God's love; God's intervention which raises man to that intimate communion of life with Himself, called by the Gospel "adoption of the children of God." "Behold what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed on us, that we should be called and should be the sons of God" (1 John III. 1). To discard this gratuitous and free elevation in the name of a so-called German type amounts to repudiating openly a fundamental truth of Christianity. It would be an abuse of our religious vocabulary to place on the same level supernatural grace and natural gifts. Pastors and guardians of the people of God will do well to resist this plunder of sacred things and this confusion of ideas.

29. It is on faith in God, preserved pure and stainless, that man's morality is based. All efforts to remove from under morality and the moral order the granite foundation of faith and to substitute for it the shifting sands of human regulations, sooner or later lead these individuals or societies to moral degradation. The fool who has said in his heart "there is no God" goes straight to moral corruption (Psalms XIII. 1), and the number of these fools who today are out to sever morality from religion, is legion. They either do not see or refuse to see that the banishment of confessional Christianity, i.e., the clear and precise notion of Christianity, from teaching and education, from the organization of social and political life, spells spiritual spoliation and degradation. No coercive power of the State, no purely human ideal, however noble and lofty it be, will ever be able to make shift of the supreme and decisive impulses generated by faith in God and Christ. If the man, who is called to the hard sacrifice of his own ego to the common good, loses the support of the eternal and the divine, that comforting and consoling faith in a God who rewards all good and punishes all evil, then the result of the majority will be, not the acceptance, but the refusal of their duty. The conscientious observation of the ten commandments of God and the precepts of the Church (which are nothing but practical specifications of rules of the Gospels) is for every one an unrivaled school of personal discipline, moral education and formation of character, a school that is exacting, but not to excess. A merciful God, who as Legislator, says—Thou must!—also gives by His grace the power to will and to do. To let forces of moral formation of such efficacy lie fallow, or to exclude them positively from public education, would spell religious under-feeding of a nation. To hand over the moral law to man's subjective opinion, which changes with the times, instead of anchoring it in the holy will of the eternal God and His commandments, is to open wide every door to the forces of destruction. The resulting dereliction of the eternal principles of an objective morality, which educates conscience and ennobles every department and organization of life, is a sin against the destiny of a nation, a sin whose bitter fruit will poison future generations.

30. Such is the rush of present-day life that it severs from the divine foundation of Revelation, not only morality, but also the theoretical and practical rights. We are especially referring to what is called the natural law, written by the Creator's hand on the tablet of the heart (Rom. II. 14) and which reason, not blinded by sin or passion, can easily read. It is in the light of the commands of this natural law, that all positive law, whoever be the lawgiver, can be gauged in its moral content, and hence, in the authority it wields over conscience. Human laws in flagrant contradiction with the natural law are vitiated with a taint which no force, no power can mend. In the light of this principle one must judge the axiom, that "right is common utility," a proposition which may be given a correct significance, it means that what is morally indefensible, can never contribute to the good of the people. But ancient paganism acknowledged that the axiom, to be entirely true, must be reversed and be made to say: "Nothing can be useful, if it is not at the same time morally good" (Cicero, De Off. II. 30). Emancipated from this oral rule, the principle would in international law carry a perpetual state of war between nations; for it ignores in national life, by confusion of right and utility, the basic fact that man as a person possesses rights he holds from God, and which any collectivity must protect against denial, suppression or neglect. To overlook this truth is to forget that the real common good ultimately takes its measure from man's nature, which balances personal rights and social obligations, and from the purpose of society, established for the benefit of human nature. Society, was intended by the Creator for the full development of individual possibilities, and for the social benefits, which by a give and take process, every one can claim for his own sake and that of others. Higher and more general values, which collectivity alone can provide, also derive from the Creator for the good of man, and for the full development, natural and supernatural, and the realization of his perfection. To neglect this order is to shake the pillars on which society rests, and to compromise social tranquillity, security and existence.

31. The believer has an absolute right to profess his Faith and live according to its dictates. Laws which impede this profession and practice of Faith are against natural law.

Parents who are earnest and conscious of their educative duties, have a primary right to the education of the children God has given them in the spirit of their Faith, and according to its prescriptions. Laws and measures which in school questions fail to respect this freedom of the parents go against natural law, and are immoral. The Church, whose mission it is to preserve and explain the natural law, as it is divine in its origin, cannot but declare that the recent enrollment into schools organized without a semblance of freedom, is the result of unjust pressure, and is a violation of every common right.

32. As the Vicar of Him who said to the young man of the Gospel: "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments" (Matt. XIX. 17), We address a few paternal words to the young.

33. Thousands of voices ring into your ears a Gospel which has not been revealed by the Father of Heaven. Thousands of pens are wielded in the service of a Christianity, which is not of Christ. Press and wireless daily force on you productions hostile to the Faith and to the Church, impudently aggressive against whatever you should hold venerable and sacred. Many of you, clinging to your Faith and to your Church, as a result of your affiliation with religious associations guaranteed by the concordat, have often to face the tragic trial of seeing your loyalty to your country misunderstood, suspected, or even denied, and of being hurt in your professional and social life. We are well aware that there is many a humble soldier of Christ in your ranks, who with torn feelings, but a determined heart, accepts his fate, finding his one consolation in the thought of suffering insults for the name of Jesus (Acts V. 41). Today, as We see you threatened with new dangers and new molestations, We say to you: If any one should preach to you a Gospel other than the one you received on the knees of a pious mother, from the lips of a believing father, or through teaching faithful to God and His Church, "let him be anathema" (Gal. I. 9). If the State organizes a national youth, and makes this organization obligatory to all, then, without prejudice to rights of religious associations, it is the absolute right of youths as well as of parents to see to it that this organization is purged of all manifestations hostile to the Church and Christianity. These manifestations are even today placing Christian parents in a painful alternative, as they cannot give to the State what they owe to God alone.

34. No one would think of preventing young Germans establishing a true ethnical community in a noble love of freedom and loyalty to their country. What We object to is the voluntary and systematic antagonism raised between national education and religious duty. That is why we tell the young: Sing your hymns to freedom, but do not forget the freedom of the children of God. Do not drag the nobility of that freedom in the mud of sin and sensuality. He who sings hymns of loyalty to this terrestrial country should not, for that reason, become unfaithful to God and His Church, or a deserter and traitor to His heavenly country. You are often told about heroic greatness, in lying opposition to evangelical humility and patience. Why conceal the fact that there are heroisms in moral life? That the preservation of baptismal innocence is an act of heroism which deserves credit? You are often told about the human deficiencies which mar the history of the Church: why ignore the exploits which fill her history, the saints she begot, the blessing that came upon Western civilization from the union between that Church and your people? You are told about sports. Indulged in with moderation and within limits, physical education is a boon for youth. But so much time is now devoted to sporting activities, that the harmonious development of body and mind is disregarded, that duties to one's family, and the observation of the Lord's Day are neglected. With an indifference bordering on contempt the day of the Lord is divested of its sacred character, against the best of German traditions. But We expect the Catholic youth, in the more favorable organizations of the State, to uphold its right to a Christian sanctification of the Sunday, not to exercise the body at the expense of the immortal soul, not to be overcome by evil, but to aim at the triumph of good over evil (Rom. XII. 21) as its highest achievement will be the gaining of the crown in the stadium of eternal life (1 Cor. IX. 24).

35. We address a special word of congratulation, encouragement and exhortation to the priests of Germany, who, in difficult times and delicate situations, have, under the direction of their Bishops, to guide the flocks of Christ along the straight road, by word and example, by their daily devotion and apostolic patience. Beloved sons, who participate with Us in the sacred mysteries, never tire of exercising, after the Sovereign and eternal Priest, Jesus Christ, the charity and solicitude of the Good Samaritan. Let your daily conduct remain stainless before God and the incessant pursuit of your perfection and sanctification, in merciful charity towards all those who are confided to your care, especially those who are more exposed, who are weak and stumbling. Be the guides of the faithful, the support of those who fail, the doctors of the doubting, the consolers of the afflicted, the disinterested counselors and assistants of all. The trials and sufferings which your people have undergone in post-war days have not passed over its soul without leaving painful marks. They have left bitterness and anxiety which are slow to cure, except by charity. This charity is the apostle's indispensable weapon, in a world torn by hatred. It will make you forget, or at least forgive, many an undeserved insult now more frequent than ever.

36. This charity, intelligent and sympathetic towards those even who offend you, does by no means imply a renunciation of the right of proclaiming, vindicating and defending the truth and its implications. The priest's first loving gift to his neighbors is to serve truth and refute error in any of its forms. Failure on this score would be not only a betrayal of God and your vocation, but also an offense against the real welfare of your people and country. To all those who have kept their promised fidelity to their Bishops on the day of their ordination; to all those who in the exercise of their priestly function are called upon to suffer persecution; to all those imprisoned in jail and concentration camps, the Father of the Christian world sends his words of gratitude and commendation.

37. Our paternal gratitude also goes out to Religious and nuns, as well as Our sympathy for so many who, as a result of administrative measures hostile to Religious Orders, have been wrenched from the work of their vocation. If some have fallen and shown themselves unworthy of their vocation, their fault, which the Church punishes, in no way detracts from the merit of the immense majority, who, in voluntary abnegation and poverty, have tried to serve their God and their country. By their zeal, their fidelity, their virtue, their active charity, their devotion, the Orders devoted to the care of souls, the service of the sick and education, are greatly contributing to private and public welfare. No doubt better days will come to do them better justice than the present troublous times have done. We trust that the heads of religious communities will profit by their trials and difficulties to renew their zeal, their spirit of prayer, the austerity of their lives and their perfect discipline, in order to draw down God's blessing upon their difficult work.

38. We visualize the immense multitudes of Our faithful children, Our sons and daughters, for whom the sufferings of the Church in Germany and their own have left intact their devotion to the cause of God, their tender love for the Father of Christendom, their obedience to their pastors, their joyous resolution to remain ever faithful, happen what may, to the sacred inheritance of their ancestors. To all of them We send Our paternal greetings. And first to the members of those religious associations which, bravely and at the cost of untold sacrifices, have remained faithful to Christ, and have stood by the rights which a solemn treaty had guaranteed to the Church and to themselves according to the rules of loyalty and good faith.

39. We address Our special greetings to the Catholic parents. Their rights and duties as educators, conferred on them by God, are at present the stake of a campaign pregnant with consequences. The Church cannot wait to deplore the devastation of its altars, the destruction of its temples, if an education, hostile to Christ, is to profane the temple of the child's soul consecrated by baptism, and extinguish the eternal light of the faith in Christ for the sake of counterfeit light alien to the Cross. Then the violation of temples is nigh, and it will be every one's duty to sever his responsibility from the opposite camp, and free his conscience from guilty cooperation with such corruption. The more the enemies attempt to disguise their designs, the more a distrustful vigilance will be needed, in the light of bitter experience. Religious lessons maintained for the sake of appearances, controlled by unauthorized men, within the frame of an educational system which systematically works against religion, do not justify a vote in favor of non-confessional schools. We know, dear Catholic parents, that your vote was not free, for a free and secret vote would have meant the triumph of the Catholic schools. Therefore, we shall never cease frankly to represent to the responsible authorities the iniquity of the pressure brought to bear on you and the duty of respecting the freedom of education. Yet do not forget this: none can free you from the responsibility God has placed on you over your children. None of your oppressors, who pretend to relieve you of your duties can answer for you to the eternal Judge, when he will ask: "Where are those I confided to you?" May every one of you be able to answer: "Of them whom thou hast given me, I have not lost any one" (John XVIII. 9).

40. Venerable Brethren, We are convinced that the words which in this solemn moment We address to you, and to the Catholics of the German Empire, will find in the hearts and in the acts of Our Faithful, the echo responding to the solicitude of the common Father. If there is one thing We implore the Lord to grant, it is this, that Our words may reach the ears and the hearts of those who have begun to yield to the threats and enticements of the enemies of Christ and His Church.

41. We have weighed every word of this letter in the balance of truth and love. We wished neither to be an accomplice to equivocation by an untimely silence, nor by excessive severity to harden the hearts of those who live under Our pastoral responsibility; for Our pastoral love pursues them none the less for all their infidelity. Should those who are trying to adapt their mentality to their new surroundings, have for the paternal home they have left and for the Father Himself, nothing but words of distrust, in gratitude or insult, should they even forget whatever they forsook, the day will come when their anguish will fall on the children they have lost, when nostalgia will bring them back to "God who was the joy of their youth," to the Church whose paternal hand has directed them on the road that leads to the Father of Heaven.

42. Like other periods of the history of the Church, the present has ushered in a new ascension of interior purification, on the sole condition that the faithful show themselves proud enough in the confession of their faith in Christ, generous enough in suffering to face the oppressors of the Church with the strength of their faith and charity. May the holy time of Lent and Easter, which preaches interior renovation and penance, turn Christian eyes towards the Cross and the risen Christ; be for all of you the joyful occasion that will fill your souls with heroism, patience and victory. Then We are sure, the enemies of the Church, who think that their time has come, will see that their joy was premature, and that they may close the grave they had dug. The day will come when the Te Deum of liberation will succeed to the premature hymns of the enemies of Christ: Te Deum of triumph and joy and gratitude, as the German people return to religion, bend the knee before Christ, and arming themselves against the enemies of God, again resume the task God has laid upon them.

43. He who searches the hearts and reins (Psalm VII. 10) is Our witness that We have no greater desire than to see in Germany the restoration of a true peace between Church and State. But if, without any fault of Ours, this peace is not to come, then the Church of God will defend her rights and her freedom in the name of the Almighty whose arm has not shortened. Trusting in Him, "We cease not to pray and to beg" (Col. I. 9) for you, children of the Church, that the days of tribulation may end and that you may be found faithful in the day of judgment; for the persecutors and oppressors, that the Father of light and mercy may enlighten them as He enlightened Saul on the road of Damascus. With this prayer in Our heart and on Our lips We grant to you, as a pledge of Divine help, as a support in your difficult resolutions, as a comfort in the struggle, as a consolation in all trials, to You, Bishops and Pastors of the Faithful, priests, Religious, lay apostles of Catholic Action, to all your diocesans, and specially to the sick and the prisoners, in paternal love, Our Apostolic Benediction.

Given at the Vatican on Passion Sunday, 14 March 1937.

The Catholic Church did repent for not doing enough to save the Jews, although there is that interesting situation with that Bishop who denies the Holocaust ever existed.

By the it is not a fact that the Church wholeheartedly supported the Nazis and that is why the debate is still going on about Catholicism's involvement with Nazi Germany. The only facts that are known is there were Christians who supported the Nazis and Christians who opposed them and while there were Catholics who did support the Nazis, there were also Catholics who opposed them. Another fact is there are Jews who are grateful for Pius for saving there lives and that is why he was up for canonization a few years ago, but a few Jewish groups objected and sense then the Vatican has been studying the archives, to answer the question of Pius's involvement with the Nazis.

Rationalist you are aware those author's based there research on volumes of archives that are not complete records?

That is why the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released this press statement:

Press Releases
October 22, 2008
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM STATEMENT ON POPE PIUS XII RECORDS

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum views with concern recent indications that definitive conclusions are being drawn regarding the record of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust. Such pronouncements, and any actions that might follow, can only be substantiated when the archives of the Vatican from this period are fully opened to the public for in-depth scholarly research.

Over a quarter century ago, the Vatican published eleven volumes of selected archival material from the Holocaust period. However, these volumes are not a complete record of the Vatican’s actions during the Holocaust.

In recent years, the Museum has enjoyed a cooperative relationship with the Vatican Archives, thanks in particular to the decision of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to open to researchers major archival collections relating to the rise of Nazism in Germany. Copies of many of these records can now be consulted at the Museum and conclusions for the pre-war period are possible.

Recognizing the urgency imposed by the advanced age of Holocaust survivors who deserve definitive answers, the Museum encourages the Vatican to follow up this gesture with a decision to make full and complete access to all of its archives from the Holocaust period its highest priority. The Museum stands ready to participate in any way to achieve this goal.

A living memorial to the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum strives to inspire leaders and citizens to confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity and strengthen democracy. Federal support guarantees the Museum’s permanence, and donors nationwide make possible its educational activities and global outreach. For more information, visit www.ushmm.org.

That is why the theory of a connection between the Catholic Church and the Nazis was not mentioned when I visited the museum about ten years ago and there is nothing mentioned about this theory in that book I bought commemorating the ten year anniversary of United State Holocaust Museum.

Because the Museum sent out a press release and is involve in the research of the Vatican's involvement with the Nazis.

Sorry but the theory that Pope Pius supported the Nazis is not a fact.

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