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How Did the Holocaust Happen in a Nation that was 94% Christian?


I just finished reading two very informative and important books -- Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 by Raul Hilberg and The Holocaust, The Church, and the Law of Unintended Consequences by Anthony J. Sciolino. Thought I would share a few quotes with you.

“Religious affiliation in Nazi Germany 40 percent Roman Catholic and 54 percent Protestant – a nation that was 94 percent Christian. Nazi Germany was more Christian than the United States of America.

How could one of the worst catastrophes in human history have started in one of the most Christian countries of Christian Europe, birthplace of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation?

Father Michael McGarry, a Paulist priest and rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem articulates this most disconcerting reality:

`We Christians need to remember that studying the Shoah (Holocaust) is not simply reading about what happened to the Jews, but what some Christians – some still worshiping, others long drop-outs from the Church – did to the Jews. The Shoah is part of Christian history. It is part of our history if we are Christian. This is frightening, this is sickening, this is, for many, unbelievable. But the first thing we Christians need to recognize is that we study the Shoah because it is part of our history, as well as part of Jewish history. Not only do we study what happened to them but what happened to us Christians.’

The Roman Catholic Church is the oldest continually functioning institution in the world and, for most of its history, one of the world’s most powerful. It helped shape secular institutions, civil law, literature, music, art, and architecture, and influenced rulers of empires, kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms, and nation states. The papacy is the oldest continuing absolute monarchy in the world, ruling over the Papal States in central Italy for eleven centuries. To countless millions of Catholics, the pope is the vicar of Christ, God’s deputy on earth, the infallible interpreter of divine revelation and scripture. But to nonbelievers, among them Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, John Knox, and Cotton Mather, he was the Antichrist.”
(The Holocaust, The Church, and the Law of Unintended Consequences By Anthony J.  Sciolino © 2012 iUniverse, Bloomington, IN; pp. xix, 2, 18, 129)

“Neither the Protestant nor the Catholic churches presented a uniform response to the catastrophe. In Germany the Lutheran churches were inactive. . . . At the head of the Roman Catholic Church, speaking for the Church, the pope was reluctant to make any gesture, even after being informed by the Allies about the extermination camps.”

(Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 By Raul Hilberg © 1992; Harper-Collins Publishers, Inc., New York, NY; pp. 262, 264)

It would be good to recall the words of Edmund Burke if we should find ourselves in that position:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference. (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke)

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