Second, the Catholic Church nurtured an attitude generally adverse to Enlightenment ideas and values, including the assertion of individual rights and the ideal of shared governance. As a result of its struggle in the aftermath of the French Revolution and under the influence of a series of very conservative popes in the nineteenth century, Catholicism came to view many of the progressive developments of modern life as threats to the validity of traditional life and meaning. Catholics had become deeply suspicious of revolutionary change, including changes in the way a society governs itself. Even though Catholic political influence was a strong part of the Weimar experience through the Catholic Center Party, there was a persistent view among many Catholics that democracy was part of a modern secular conspiracy hostile to the Church. There was at the same time a tendency to identify all forms of liberalism with atheism and modern corruption.
Third, it was common at that time, on the eve of National Socialist rule, to hear fearful voices warning of Bolshevism. Catholics were not, of course, alone in their concern about the far left. Many middle- and upper-class Germans feared that communists would take over and dismantle the economic structure and then go on to throw Germany into social chaos in their effort to achieve some alien, Marxist-Leninist ideal. But Catholics had an extra and obvious religious concern, namely that Marxist atheism would overwhelm the church and the people of faith. There was, in addition, a fourth factor in the well-documented fact of Nazi force and intimidation against the Catholic church: the brutal strategies that National Socialists used against the church's youth organizations, the physical and literary attacks against its priests, the bureaucratic obstruction of the Catholic press and schools, and open harassment of Catholic political groups, especially from February 1933 until the collapse of the Center Party and the creation of a Concordat agreement in July 1933.
Each of these four factors, now widely accepted by historians, was a powerful force militating against Catholic resistance; together they spelled a devastating barrier to any effective dissent, especially if there developed at the same time an attractive, internal Catholic counterargument to the church's initial resistance to Nazism. This essay will argue that such a counterargument did develop, providing a rationale for Catholic acceptance of Nazi rule.
There is, moreover, a fifth and possibly decisive explanation for the Catholic capitulation-a factor that should be mentioned, even though it is not widely acknowledged, probably because it is so controversial and potentially intimidating. This explanation points to the apparent division in the Catholic church in Germany itself. Was the German Catholic hierarchy deeply concerned about maintaining the fabric of Catholicism in Germany? Would they be able to hold the church together if they did not come to terms with Nazism, given the strong support for the Nazi movement among rank-andfile Catholics? Such questions suggest a deep dilemma between resistance to National Socialism at the risk of schism, on the one hand, and compromise with National Socialism in order to maintain the church's national unity, on the other. Actually, since Catholic decisions in this larger political sphere were made in the Vatican, this choice fell more to the papacy than to the German bishops themselves. This explanation assumes an expectation within the Church's leadership that they would risk a substantial apostasy among German Catholics if some working relationship could not be established with the Third Reich.
Would German Catholics have defied a statement from Rome ruling that Catholics must oppose the Third Reich and work against the very state so many of them supported? Is it credible that fear of such a rejection of papal initiative was the real driving force behind the German bishops' actions? Did they fear a popular Catholic backlash? Did they fear that such a division with Rome would result in an independent national church if they and the Vatican did not come to terms with Hitler? This theory, though compelling in many respects, does not yet enjoy the documentation or the consensus accorded to the first four reasons mentioned above. However, we can safely assume that these five factors, in whole or in part, brought German Catholicism into an undeniably official and popular relationship with National Socialism.
Beyond Capitulation to Accommodation
As persuasive as this set of reasons may seem for explaining the dramatic change in the Catholic attitude toward National Socialism in 1933, it accounts for a capitulation more effectively than for an accommodation. Yet, in fact, the real change that many Catholics advocated and in large part succeeded in achieving involved an enthusiastic accommodation or affirmation of National Socialist ideals. The standard rationale tells us why the Catholic church buckled, but it does not indicate why a substantial part of the church swung so thoroughly toward National Socialism, or what historical and theological reasons they had for such an affirmation.
This is the real question, namely, the question of what convinced so many Catholics that National Socialism could be their friend and ally. If the church had been dragged to capitulation by coercion and raw Nazi power alone, there would be less suspicion about its complicity today and little need for further historical or theological analysis. Reality, however, is otherwise. The evidence demonstrates wide Catholic enthusiasm for the Nazi movement, even if it stopped short of the kind of reconciliation and endorsement seen in the Protestant German Christian Movement. Tighter organizational integration and internal controls within Catholicism made such a complete endorsement much more difficult to express; nonetheless, the evidence shows that from ordinary parish life up to the conferences of German bishops there was a growing acceptance of and, in some circles, great enthusiasm for the Nazi cause.
This shift to accommodation might have rested, to be sure, on a founda tion of political calculation and perceived necessity. But this would have satisfied neither the broader Catholic mind nor the Catholic intellectuals. Such an accommodation needed a distinctively Catholic justification of National Socialism. In the dense and disciplined atmosphere of early-twentieth-century Catholicism in Germany, such a substantial shift would have to be grounded in a clear theological and historical justification. Such a shift in Catholic attitude required a persuasive theological rationale for the compatibility of Catholicism and National Socialism. This is precisely what emerged in the middle months of 1933.
A small but sophisticated group within the Catholic theological community began to work in parallel with political forces to convince both the church's episcopal leadership and lay Catholics that National Socialism was not only acceptable to Catholics but necessary. Their project was narrow in scope, and it only operated for a brief period. But it would be a mistake to see in this brief flash of attention only some marginal movement, for these individuals performed two vital functions. They built bridges between Catholicism and Nazism that made it possible for well-educated, thinking Catholics to shift from resistance to the Nazis to acceptance of Nazis, and they also effected this in an absolutely critical period, March to September of 1933. During this period, National Socialism was consolidating and cementing its social control over the German people and its political authority vis-a-vis the shattered Weimar Republic. This is also the period when much of the potentially effective institutional resistance, including that of the Catholic church in Germany, was being neutralized. It was a time when well-reasoned historical and theological bases for Catholic support of National Socialism could have an extraordinary effect, well beyond the influence and attention such theological thought would have had in normal times.
Because of their prestige and influence with both the bishops and the wider Catholic population, five Catholic theologians merit special attention, even though only one can be discussed in any detail here. Each of these theologians played an effective role in this change from resistance to accommodation. Of the five, the two most famous at that time were Karl Adam of Tubingen and Karl Eschweiler in Braunsberg. Michael Schmaus was a third, who, while growing in his influence, was then very early in his career. Theodor Brauer is almost entirely ignored today but was then a well-known professor of practical theology at
Cologne, a man whose writings were widely read in Catholic lay circles. Finally, there was Joseph Lortz, who became one of the premier Catholic historians in the twentieth century and who, although he was still early in his career, had already written the most widely read church history text in Germany. Each of these men had a telling effect on the shift in the relationship between Catholicism and National Socialism, but it is Lortz who may be seen as the most pivotal figure, both because of the scope of his argument and because of its persuasive appeal to the Catholic intellectual community.
As a prelude to a closer look at Joseph Lortz, it is helpful to understand that he had a distinctive importance in 1933. Lortz was the leader of a small academic circle in Braunsberg that took on the goal of changing German Catholic attitudes toward the Nazis. He was instrumental in starting, as part of the work of this circle, a publication series, Reich and Kirche (Imperial State and Church), which argued the compatibility of Catholicism and National Socialism in that particularly critical time of mid-1933. This series of pamphlets was, in fact, the first Catholic theological promotion of an accommodation with National Socialism after the Nazi accession to power in January 1933. Lortz also developed his view of National Socialism in complete continuity with his historical-theological scholarship. Finally, in that critical summer of 1933, Lortz wrote a widely read pamphlet that, in a carefully constructed series of arguments, appealed precisely to those conservative, educated Catholics who wanted to support the National Socialist movement but had not yet found a theological and intellectual justification for doing so.
Lortz's Background and Theological Context
Joseph Lortz was born in Grevenmacher, Luxembourg, on 13 December 1887. He decided in his teenage years to prepare for the priesthood and began the study of theology and philosophy in Rome in 1907. He then continued his education in Fribourg, Switzerland, from 1911 to 1913 and was ordained in Luxembourg in 1913. After doctoral studies in Bonn, where he completed a dissertation on Tertullian in 1920, Lortz went to Wiirzburg to study under the well-known church historian Sebastian Merkle and to assist him in research. While in Wbrzburg, from 1923 to 1929, Lortz completed his postdoctoral studies and at the same time served as an instructor and pastor to students in the university.
In 1929, he received an appointment as a professor of church history at the State Academy of Braunsberg in East Prussia. Here Lortz gained his initial prominence as the author of a textbook widely used in university and seminary curricula: The History of the Church front the Standpoint of the History of Ideas. This text became not only the foundation for his scholarly career but also a key presuppositional piece to his understanding of the church's positive relationship to the National Socialist movement. Although Lortz wanted to become Merkle's successor at Wurzburg, this opportunity did not open to him, and in 1935, he accepted an appointment to the Catholic Faculty at the University of Munster, a position that he held until the end of the war.
After the war, Lortz was barred from continuing as a professor in a state university. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and he was unsuccessful in clearing himself of this tainted political record before the Allied tribunals, despite his protestations that he had abandoned both the party and the Nazi cause in the mid-1930s.6 In 1950 he was able, however, to receive an appointment as director of a new, quasi-official, scholarly institute in Mainz, the Institute for European History. Under his direction this became one of the leading centers for historical research in Germany, particularly in the field of western religious history and, most specifically, in medieval and reformation church history. While director of that institute and until his death in 1975, Lortz resumed a very active publishing career in church historical studies, especially as a pioneer in Catholic studies of Martin Luther and the Reformation. Once again he gained a position of international academic and intellectual renown.
As we look for the origins of Lortz's attraction to Nazism, it is important to note three foundational concerns that emerged early in his work. For Lortz, atheistic communism (Bolshevism), Enlightenment individualism, and a general religious-cultural fragmentation were the three disastrous elements in modern life which, he believed, led to a "postmedieval civilization." On the basis of these concerns, Lortz saw not just a compatibility between Catholicism and National Socialism but the possibility therein of religious renewal and mutual reinforcement. He saw in the Nazi movement the kind of aggressive resistance to communism that would protect the rights of the church and ensure its defense. He was also attracted to the "socialist" dimension of the movement, understood as an assertion of the priority of the community over the individual. This represented for him a reversal of the excessive focus in modernity on the autonomy of the person that developed under the influence of Enlightenment thought. Finally, and most important, Lortz wanted to affirm what he saw in the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP): a force to bring back an integration of nation and church, of German culture and Christianity. This would recreate the synthesis he viewed as the genius of medieval Christendom, now lost in modernity, a loss he deeply regretted. The National Socialists, while no lovers of the church, to be sure, could nonetheless be strong agents of the church's deepest interests and simultaneously the protectors of Germania.
Each of these three focal points remained central in Lortz's thought. Even though he later would claim disenchantment, even rejection of Nazism, he never renounced or qualified his commitment to this threefold foundation. Any inquiry about Lortz, especially in his relation to the Nazis, must examine these three elements in some detail. It should also indicate how these affirmations related to the so-called Jewish question and how they were influential in the contest for Catholic recognition and popular acceptance of the National Socialist regime.
The key to Lortz's approach to Nazism is that he developed his historical scholarship within a theological vision. The strength of his assessment for Catholic readers arose from his attempt to integrate National Socialist ideology with his historical-theological conception of Catholicism. Lortz had come to early attention in Braunsberg because of his effort to set the history of the church within the context of intellectual history and to tie his historiography to a neoscholastic view of the nature of the Church, both of which were clearly reflected in his widely used textbook The History of the Church from the Standpoint of the History of Ideas.- He now approached National Socialism within the same intellectual framework, employing three important assumptions. First, Lortz believed history should be written in the service of theology. Both his general historical work and his special studies in the Reformation were grounded in this theological vision, which assumed God's providential role to be fundamental to history. Thus, the church established by God had to be understood as part of a theological reality beyond history, grounded in the ultimate mystery of God. Second, Lortz had an extraordinarily high view of this church as a transcendent reality. Influenced by M. J. Scheeben, Emile Mersch, Sebastian Merkle, and perhaps Romano Guardini, his description of the church as mysterium framed a view of the church as an objective, sacred entity. It was an organism of truth and holiness in history, yet paradoxically caught in sinful rebellions of political, social, intellectual, and religious dimensions. His view of God's providential will in history joined with his belief in the transcendent role of the church led to Lortz's third judgment, so provocative for many in his time. Lortz saw an inner theological necessity for spiritual renewal that had its counterpart in an outer historical necessity for political and social reform. There was for him a natural connection between the objective truth of the church and the true unity of society. More important, he came to see a logical connection between the redemptive role of Catholicism and the social and political reforms sought by National Socialism.
Lortz's Stance within the 2933 Crisis of Catholicism
Although Lortz quickly threw his support to National Socialism in the Catholic contention over relations with the Party in 1933, this was not really a new or pioneering step. In fact, it had
direct continuity with his research and writing and occupied a fully integrated place within his efforts to identify the essence of ecclesiastical history. First published in 1932, his church history text illustrates a desire to move beyond the usual chronological narrative of events and catalog of traditional themes and theological terms. In the fore word, Lortz sets forth this intention: "What I am attempting to restore here is the actual history [of the church], in its diversity of structure and its complex but [I want] to do so in such a way that ideas emerge as the dominating power."" Lortz's assessment of the history of ideas reflected his belief that the church was on a perilous course, visibly evident in modern life but rooted in a long and tragic history. He thought he saw a long-term postmedieval path toward the disintegration of church and society, resulting largely from subjectivism and a subjectivist liberalism. He detected the beginnings of this dissolution as early as the twelfth century: "Since the end of the thirteenth century, no, actually already in the middle of the twelfth century a disintegration begins to occur, which (seen as a whole) again and again misled people away from the Church. In fact, a seven-hundred-year demolition process lies behind
Lortz understood this disintegration as a developing crisis already evident at the height of the Middle Ages. Even during the thirteenth century, the glorious age of scholasticism and gothic achievement, he identified the beginnings of a movement in the church away from medieval ecclesiastical universalism toward secular nationalistic thought. He found in the scholastics a nascent dissolution of the harmony between faith and reason, a manifestation of subjective criticism. He noted the roots of secularized interests, increasingly evident within the church itself and the growing penetration of a worldly spirit. He added to this litany his perception that even in the genuine elements of reform, that is, the growing conciliar movement, there was a spreading infection of nationalistic and democratic ideas regarding laicization and the distribution of authority. Thus, Lortz's study of church history, especially in his strongest area of medieval Christian thought, provided an early, framing negativism about modernity, which he maintained as a thesis right through his analysis of the nineteenth century.
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