April 6, 2009
A 'deeply researched and deeply disturbing book'
Here's one that I should have posted a long time ago but I'm just getting to now.
Northern Illinois University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum recently published “Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism” by Kevin P. Spicer.
According to the press release, the book “exposes the priests who served as Nazi propagandists, examines their motives, the Catholic Church’s reaction to their party involvement, and the consequences of their political activism including, for some, convictions in post-war trials.”
Here's more:
While the Catholic Church officially forbade the involvement of priests in Nazi Party activities through March 1933 and discouraged them from participating in such activities thereafter, a relatively small number of priests—at least 138, who were dubbed “brown priests,”—alluding to the brown shirts worn by the Nazi SA (storm troopers)—publicly backed the Party, and a third of those eventually joined it. There were approximately 24,000 priests in Germany at the time. Dr. Spicer shows how each “brown priest” justified his support for the Nazis. Some harbored nationalistic desires to restore Germany’s greatness after defeat in World War I; others sympathized with the party’s vehement antisemitism. But, whatever their reason, Dr. Spicer explores how all of them were able internally to reconcile Catholic teachings with Nazi doctrine.
In a review in The Washington Post, the book received ample praise:
Indifference does not describe the attitudes of the Roman Catholic priests in Kevin P. Spicer's deeply researched and deeply disturbing book, Hitler's Priests. A priest and member of the Congregation of Holy Cross, Spicer has an insider's grasp of the church's organization and governance. He has combed through an impressive number of diocesan and government archives to assemble a list of 138 “brown priests,” who were either members of the Nazi party or at least active supporters of its program. His book is devoted to a detailed account of the radical nationalism and virulent anti-Semitism that led these men to believe they could be followers of both Hitler and Christ.
This tome, which weighs in at an impressive 385 pages, will undoubtedly be a welcomoe addition to the scholarship of the Holocaust.
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