Betrayal

by Robert P Ericksen

  Unexpectedly, however, when he arrived at his analysis of the twentieth century, still in this same original edition of the History of the Church, Lortz rather suddenly broke into a very different voice, speaking of a number of steps toward recovery:

  It goes without saying that an age does not end abruptly on any fixed date or in such an absolute way so as not to influence the following age. The transformation in men's minds is never entirely a constructive one and, thus, the subversive elements which characterized the nineteenth century are still at work. But insofar as [our present situation] is constructive, it is so in reaction against those spiritual factors and attitudes to life which laid the foundation of the modern age, which fashioned modern development and then dominated it until the turn of the century. The new trend is (a) Philosophically, a turn from doubt, hypercriticism, historicism, or subjectivism, to a form of objectivism in one form or another (with a basis in phenomenological philosophy). (b) Ethically, the trend is from unrestrained freedom to authority, from the egoism of individualism to communal thinking. (c) Politically, the liberal and democratic idea together with its most concrete political manifestation, parliamentarianism, is yielding to the principle of leadership in the form of dictatorship, or government without parliamentary majorities, or nonparty government (Fascism, Nazism). (d) Religiously, there is a better understanding of the value of institutional religion, of the value of a church as such, and an appreciation also of the unique character of religion and its special claims."'

  When one reads Lortz's sentiments from 1933 in the context of his ideas on postmedieval history, there is no surprise in finding that he welcomed the Nazi seizure of power as a "turning point" of major significance for the cultural and religious history of the German people. He spoke of the "fundamental kinship" between the church and National Socialism, the shared antipathy toward the erosion of morality, the common respect for law, and the protection of communal values. He saw in the National Socialist accent on national unity prospects for a deeper religious unity within the German church.

  Lortz had a growing conviction that only a dramatic political change, one with great unifying force, could overcome the deep legacy of division and disintegration. In "National Socialism and the Church," the textual supplement from 1933, Lortz envisioned that National Socialism would prove the occasion for "nothing less than the crowning achievement of the church's developmental direction throughout the whole of the nineteenth century."" At last, the church would be in a position to reassert itself religiously and spiritually, because of a compatible political environment, because of the timely rise of a new force in German life. Thus, Lortz writes: "A comparison of the conclusions of our analysis of the nineteenth century until our time with the fundamental thought and emphases of National Socialism shows to what an extraordinary degree and sense the Nazi movement has become the fulfillruent of our time."" Lortz had found the renewed vision that had been lost at the very height of the Middle Ages. He saw the recipe for reform in a return to the medieval synthesis of Christianity and culture.

  Nonetheless, Lortz still had not specified how this connection between the church and National Socialism could be concretely interpreted, especially in light of the strong hostility that characterized so much of the Catholic attitude toward the Nazis. This was the project to which he turned in the summer of 1933 in Konigsberg. As the Nazi Party continued to consolidate its control of German society and as Lortz continued to recognize the possibilities and advantages of a close relationship, he decided to use the occasion of an academic lecture to formulate these views more thoroughly. From this lecture emerged the central piece that brought Lortz into the Nazi Party and into the forefront of the Catholic reconciliation with the Nazi effort.

  The Catholic Approach to National Bocialisn

  Lortz appears to have started work on a lecture, which he had been invited to give to Konigsberg students, very soon after Hitler came to power. He probably began this work in February 1933, well before the demise of the Center Party and before the public became aware of negotiations toward a Concordat. He later claimed that this lecture reflected a continuity between his thinking on National Socialism and revisions in his church history text in the early months of 1933, and there is no reason to doubt him. Although Lortz was clearly not in the center of Catholic discussion in those days-actually he was tucked away in the marginal intellectual arena of Braunsberg-he intended this lecture for a wider audience. Subsequently published as the first pamphlet in the series Reich and Kirche, this lecture emerged as probably the first public theological assessment of the new Nazi regime by a major Catholic figure. It became a significant part of the controversy over how Catholics were to relate to National Socialism, and it propelled Lortz into the forefront of the debate, bringing him a degree of notoriety that would come back to haunt him after the war.

  Under the title "The Catholic Approach to National Socialism," Lortz's Konigsberg lecture caused both widespread interest and a storm of protest. It came out just at a time when many Catholics wanted to give unhindered, unrestricted support to the new regime but were burdened by continuing church strictures and by fresh memories of discrimination and persecution. At the same time, many other Catholics were shocked by its attempt to bridge what they had assumed for so long were unbridgeable differences. It was not a long piece, less than thirty pages, and intended to be a popular and readable tract for Catholic laity. Each of its three sections can be reviewed quite briefly.

  In the first section, Lortz reflected upon the persistent political tension and strife between the various organizations of the Catholic church and the National Socialist movement. He recognized that this history had been more than difficult, filled as it was with mutual hostility, recrimination, even violence. Yet he appealed to Catholics to recognize that the political reality of their situation forced an acceptance of National Socialism not only as the dominant political power in Germany but as the very state itself. Instead of bemoaning this fact, Lortz recalled the twin political threats of recent times: the communist menace and the threat of national dissolution through parliamentary chaos. Although National Socialism clearly promised to remove these two most disastrous threats, Catholics have persisted, according to Lortz's claim, in a failure to see the inherent value that Nazism possessed and presented politically. "There was especially a genuine, even tragic ignorance of the forceful, positive power, ideas, and plans of National Socialism, as they had been authentically set down in Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, and had been generally available as early as 1925. For this omission, we all bear our part of the guilt. We [Catholics] openly take it upon ourselves in the sense of the concept of sacrifice for the sake of the whole people for whom we have given so much in so many ways.""

  Catholicism had been wrong in its judgments, blinded by partisan political loyalties and the distracting misunderstandings that some leaders used to avoid a confrontation with the true enemies. Moreover, National Socialism was no longer merely a political movement, it was now the actual basis for national unity and stability: "National Socialism today is not only the legitimate holder of state power in Germany. It is, only a few short months after the succession of power, the German state itself. This state stands in a truly decisive battle for the rescue of the entire people in this present circumstance. It has made its peace with the Church.... It is striving in an effort heretofore unknown in Germany for the realization of an inner unity of all the common people. In an obviously urgent way, such an exercise is producing in German Catholicism, out of the most diverse regions, an agreement with National Socialism which comes from within. This task will be decisive for the Church in Germany and no less so for National Socialism."" Thus, Catholics cannot realistically continue to think in terms of a separate political destiny. If Catholics give up such a hope, they would enjoy the prospect of cultural and communal influence and join the larger social unity so indispensable for German salvation.

  In the second section of his lecture, Lortz went to the heart of
the matter by listing specific ways that Catholicism and National Socialism are compatible. He returned to the phrase he had used earlier in the supplement to his church history text, recalling Catholics to certain points of "fundamental kinship." First among these is the common opposition to communism (Bolshevism), liberalism, and relativism. Actually, in Lortz's wider historical perspective of the roots of the modern era and the history of the church since the sixteenth century, the principle threats were liberalism and relativism, in which communism represented the central demonic example. The deeper intellectual and theological issue, however, was subjectivism, which has already been noted as Lortz's main culprit in the erosion of western thought and life or, perhaps more to his thinking, in the dissolution of Christian civilization. The intellectual and social movements that centered on the individual person as subject had become for Lortz the root of modernist problems. Here Lortz remained in complete continuity with his writings in ecclesiastical history, especially his History of the Church. This disaster of subjectivism became, as noted above, the key to his understanding of the failure of later medieval Christendom and the heart of his conception of the fateful ambiguity in Luther and the Reformation. National Socialism, in his view, was compatible with Catholicism in its attack on both liberal principles and subjective relativism, and it was an ally in the restoration of a social framework more conducive to the work of the church.

  A second kinship between Catholicism and National Socialism for Lortz is the common effort against permissiveness and immorality, against a flawed understanding of society characterized by the loose contemporary norms of social behavior leading to the degeneration of society. But now, he claimed, there was hope for a common effort of regeneration: "National Socialism is an outspoken opponent of godlessness and public immorality, as it has dominated modern civilization in the increasing effect of liberal permissiveness and turning society toward an unchristian life. We Catholics have protested tirelessly in countless press campaigns, pamphlets, sermons, conference resolutions and parliamentary proposals against trash and filth [Schund and Schnnutz]. But this effort remained mainly in the theoretical realm, because we were not the state. But now, because of National Socialism, the power exists to be independently effective and in its attack upon the cesspool of the capital [Berlin] we already see the result.""

  Lortz described this kinship as well in a common rejection of the general liberal tendency to accent personal pleasure. There is a false sense of freedom and equality in liberal society that, in its celebration of the individual, ignores God's own created arrangement in the natural order of things. It also contravenes directly the Catholic understanding that God's grace and design operate within the diverse and unequal realities of nature."'

  Again and again in Lortz, the seeds of disintegration in liberalism and subjectivism were matched against decisive resolution in the combined commitment of church and National Socialist state. Perhaps of equal importance to Lortz, however, was that this partnership afforded the church the opportunity to return to its primary spiritual task. National Socialism provided a renewed chance to recover the essence of the church's strength in explicit creed and emphasis on faith:

  Perhaps what is most important is this: "Catholic" signifies a basic religious creed. We have just come through a period which threatened, through its [intellectual] relativism as well as through the vast actual relativizing of life, to exterminate any genuine strength in every area of life. It is now extremely valuable for the Catholic understanding of religion as revelation that through National Socialism the formal attitude of a creedal standard [Bekenutnismassig], which had almost completely dropped out of circulation, is once again in place in the widest ranks of society as a valuable attitude. In fact, this is true with an unexpected intensity. "Faith" no longer appears as something of lesser worth or weak, but rather as momentous and heroic, through which humanity realizes the best dimension of itself."

  Lortz went on to point to a kinship with the Nazis in a reemphasis upon the genius of German culture, a "renaissance" in which the integral role of the church will be further recognized. He asserted a strong connection between National Socialist views of social unity and equality and the corporatist principles of Pius XI's 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo anno. He pointed to a concurrence between National Socialist recoveries of concepts of noble sacrifice and strength and the accent in Catholicism on a resurgence of strong faith that realizes itself in social commitment. Ridiculing a kind of arid Catholic intellectualism, he looked with idealistic hope to a partnership with the Nazis that could lead to the recovery of a Catholic spirituality of "the concrete and the whole of being human and even the whole of nature.""

  His final point, however, is especially characteristic of Lortz. Here he concluded that National Socialism meant the unity of the German people and, for Lortz, that was a Christian unity. The political unity of the Volk was but a reflection of a deeper spiritual unity that framed the elliptical poles of church and state. This unity meant a return to perhaps the greatest vision of the grand medieval achievement. It promised a return to Christendom. Further, echoing his pioneering ecumenical work in the Catholic analysis of the Reformation, Lortz saw this unity as a step toward overcoming the western schism of Christianity. Lortz saw in National Socialism not only an avenue out of the modern social and moral morass, but he saw as well the theological vision he wanted to see: western cultural and spiritual integration. At the very end of the treatise, he wrote a fateful warning: "Either this movement rips through to the rescue or we land in chaos. No one can deny any longer the inexorable result. Such chaos, however, would be the destruction of the nation and the ruin of the German church. And that closes the discussion."'" It was clear for Lortz that the essential connection of Catholicism and National Socialism was key, not only to the stability and continued viability of the German nation and culture, but also to any continuing prospect for Germany as a Christian society.

  Even from this brief review of Lortz's Konigsberg lecture, themes emerge that would have profound consequences in the thinking of German Catholics. Lortz taught them how to reconcile Catholicism with Nazism. Furthermore, beyond the power of these ideas to bind Catholics to National Socialism, there was considerable potential in this treatise for the Nazis themselves. As they pursued policies that suppressed individual rights, victimized the Jews, forced social conformity, and criminalized deviance, they had this Catholic theologian on their side.

  Lortz's emphasis on the kinship between Catholic and Nazi ideals recalls a common concept in practical politics, namely, the old conviction that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." That can be seen in the anticommunist and antiliberal convergence he emphasized. But Lortz was not willing to see this convergence merely as mundane politics. Rather, he saw the rise of National Socialism as a providential act, pitting a powerful political movement against the faithless compromises and moral erosion of modern liberalism and its communist offspring:

  The deeper nature of National Socialism first became partially evident to broader acknowledgement through its strong and vigorous opposition to Bolshevism. Bolshevism is the radicalization of the Marxist program through the revision of social democratic liberalism into a despotic dogmatism under the leadership of dictatorial power. It intentionally seeks the expansion of its materialistic domination over the whole world. Germany, as the center of Europe, is the most important country for the accomplishment of this plan. It has to be seen as providential that just at this moment there has arisen over against Bolshevism a victorious opponent in the NSDAP, which is just as far from the weakness of liberalism as Bolshevism but at the same time with a bitter hatred of Bolshevistic materialism."'

  Lortz also accepted a necessary use of force, in his scorn for the weakness of Weimar liberalism and praise for the toughness of the Nazis:

  The secret of [National Socialist] success is in the nature of its attack against [communism] and in a more constructive way than simply providing a better substitute for fallen idols.
It proves the softness of the legitimate, established powers in old Europe, which have prospered to death, that National Socialism is still so little thanked for this simple life-saving act. The complete inner overthrow of communism, admittedly, cannot be achieved by power alone. However, the fact that terror is to be broken only through force is a forgotten truism and one which usually demands employment in life. This fact Hitler has rightly rediscovered. So, for the present, his emergence has meant the salvation of Germany, and Europe with it, from the chaos of Bolshevism, i.e., from the destruction of Christian Europe."

  This was certainly the kind of ammunition welcomed by some Catholics in their effort to legitimize and affirm an aggressive police policy against those opponents who were perceived as a chaotic threat to the social and religious harmony of the nation's majority.

  Another theme that emerged in Lortz's work in 1933 is the assertion of the priority of the community over the rights and place of the individual. Lortz repeatedly accented a Nazi password, Totalitatsanspruch, meaning the "claim of the Whole." This is a claim that differed dramatically from the Enlightenment tradition of the preeminence of the individual, and Lortz not only understood but explicitly affirmed the difficulty of this value: "One ought not to diminish or disguise this claim of the Whole. It is by no means generally comfortable. Were it so, it would fit poorly with the great decisions which it has to carry out. Life-changing decisions always mean struggle. Only in the recognition of that claim of the Whole and at the same time of its positive mastery, through the cooperation of the Church and Catholics, is there for both nation and Church an acceptable and worthy resolution [of our situation], namely, our common fulfillment.""