Source: SS Leitheft, No. 4,
1938
by Paul Erich Büttner
In
Italy an extraordinarily interesting discussion is taking place. For the first
time since the existence of the Fascist Party, there is talk of the need to
consider national and historical questions in a racial way.
The
milieu that gave rise to this impulse and demand consisted of a group of
prominent Italian university professors. Thus, this innovative ideological
vision had already found some credit. It could not be ignored and it was not.
Its importance was immediately recognized, as it allowed for a modification of
the overall picture of the state that fascism had created for itself, or at
least for a broadening of the essential points of view. While ideology,
especially racial ideology, was the driving force of National Socialism from the
very beginning, Fascism initially defended only state objectives and demands.
The great Italian past, above all antiquity, had a major influence on its
spiritual vision. Apart from that, it left a lot of room for the religious
activity of Roman Catholicism, which held a predominant position in Italy. Seen
in this light, Fascism’s very recent stand for the Italian race and for the
Aryan racial community signifies a revolutionary advance whose historical
repercussions cannot yet be foreseen.
The
Roman Church was quicker to react to the Fascist comments than the customs of
Vatican politics would suggest – for one of its basic principles in politics is
to wait. The Pope himself used an audience with students of the missionary
congregation at his summer seat in Castel Gandolfo to speak out categorically
against any racist remarks. It is often forgotten that he said, among other
things, that
the
whole human race forms one great universal human race.
He went so far as to suspect that Fascism was imitating German racial studies.
„One has
to ask oneself’, as he literally said in his speech, „why by misfortune Italy
needed to imitate Germany”.
The
response to this aggressive warning was bound to come. While
Starace,
the Party Secretary, had admitted the validity of the racial demands to the
university professors, none other than
Mussolini
himself approved their consideration. His brief and pithy reply to the Pope was
soon known in Germany:
„Everyone must know that we too will walk into the future from the perspective
of the race question. To say that fascism imitated anyone or anything is simply
absurd.”
The
discussion in Italy is therefore not yet over, but it is nevertheless being
conducted in a strict and direct manner, because the Church is continuing the
fight against racial studies in a covert manner; with increased efforts, because
no issue seems so dangerous as racial studies for the Roman Church, for its
credit, its influence and its existence as a religious society, as we shall see.
At a
time when these questions have taken on a particularly topical dimension, it
seems quite justified to ask, through careful examination, what relationship the
Roman Church has with racial studies. This attitude is not at all as clear as it
seems at first sight if one considers the completely authentic statements of the
pope. The ecclesiastical positions on racial studies even reveal a rather
confused view.
Certainly, the Church expresses in this way its constant biblical mission to
preach Christianity to all peoples. This mission is the basis of the Roman
Church’s will to universal power, which can in no way tolerate a racial
difference between peoples, especially in terms of religious feeling, and a
difference in racial
value.
But on the other hand, the results of German racial research are of such
scientific value that an unconditional refusal by the Roman Church would lead to
a significant loss of prestige for the Church in Germany.
Copernicus also had to disprove religious dogma with his scientific results. It
was Copernicus, not the Church, who was right in the eyes of history. The Roman
Church is in danger of having to lower its voice in this matter one day because
of its relentless struggle against racism.
It is
thus faced with the choice of making itself laughable in the face of history by
rejecting racial studies, or of abandoning one of the most important conditions
for its international effectiveness by recognising it. The
worldwide
Roman
Church provisionally decided in favour of the first choice, which was only
possible as long as racial studies and its practical application remained more
or less limited to the German area. The Roman Church in
Germany
has taken a different path.
But
before we come to study the episcopal and therefore ecclesiastical positions,
let us mention the publication of the Roman priest and university professor
Wilhelm
Schmidt,
whose attempt to „refute” racial studies from a scientific point of view is
interesting in more than one way. Schmidt is the Roman scientist who dealt with
racial studies in a particularly detailed, if only superficial, way.
But the
results he arrived at in his book
Race and
People do
not correspond to those of racial science, nor to the fundamental principles of
the National Socialist world view. The method he used is certainly extremely
simple, scientifically not only criticizable but also perfectly condemnable. In
particular, he seeks – albeit perfunctorily – to pit each representative of
racism against each other. In this way he achieves the results he needs for his
religious conviction.
On page
33 he comes to the conclusion that ‘physical qualities have not been shown to be
overt racial characteristics’ and draws the conclusion that ‘yet the racial
doctrine defining everything spiritual as „racially determined“ and based on
physical qualities, totally collapses’.
When
considering the relationship between moral qualities and race, Schmidt becomes
even more superficial as he simply appeals to the Church’s doctrine that ‘the
soul is a proper, autonomous substance, which in turn has no hereditary
relationship, not only with anybody but also with no other soul, nor with the
souls of the parents, but each time God recreates it for each individual’ (p.
41).
Schmidt
concludes this passage of his book with the most simplistic statement:
„The
soul as such is not bound to any race, nor does it have any earthly homeland.
Since,
in Schmidt’s view, there is therefore no hereditary transmission of psychic and
physical qualities, he could have spared himself the trouble of giving these
explanations. Instead, he has revealed through his sometimes extremely clear
reasoning which particular points of racial studies cause problems for the Roman
Church. Schmidt defends himself against the fact: „that race determines
all
human experience; it could be that it embraces only specific areas and that
there could even be a racial difference that is expressed in certain areas of
one race as well as another” (p. 53).
And on
page 56, it says:
„One
must emphatically reject the conception .... asserting that each of these
(racial) types has its own sensitive faculty and its own morality appropriate to
it, so that this morality entails, so to speak, duties ..., just as there are
truths recognised by men of all species, so there are also general human
standards of morality which result from human nature and can only disappear with
humanity itself (p. 56).
These
positions are revealing, for they clearly show what gaps the Roman Church
considers a threat to its own doctrine. If, as racial studies assert together
with ethnology, proto-history, Germanistics etc., it should be true that each
race can only have a morality adapted to its nature, that for example the Nordic
race cannot observe the same moral laws as the Jewish race, if it is capable of
the greatest creations, then there is no place and no justification „for general
human norms of morality which result in their own right from human nature. By
general human standards of morality Schmidt refers in particular to the morality
of the Roman Christian doctrine.
Schmidt
is aware of the impossibility of really wanting to refute racial studies in a
serious way. And so, his own aim is not to deny racial studies at all, but to
tear its claws out and make it harmless. At a conference in Vienna, he made this
clear:
„Race
and people can only take their value from the deist faith in the One Creator who
created all men from one origin. Both are further transfigured, purified and
strengthened in the Christian-Catholic religion, which fully accepts the many
duties arising from belonging to a race and a people, gives them moral character
and gives men the strength and will to fulfil them.
This is
the sound of the melody that is being sung in accordance with all ecclesiastical
statements in Germany. This means that the Church deliberately claims to accept
the values of race, people, nation and love as the highest „natural” values
intended by God. Above these merely „natural” values, however, would rise the
„supernatural” values of divine grace, etc., which are meant to diminish, polish
and thus perfect the simplifications and exaggerations of natural values. A
practical example of this view can be found in the „Catholic Missions”, where it
is stated in the booklet No. 3 of March 1938:
„She
(the Church) accepts man as he is with his race, his people, his nation, his
State, in the region where the creative will of God makes him grow, approves
therefore all these creative forces stemming from blood and soil. But we cannot
and will not forget one thing. The man of today, above all the delivered man, no
longer lives in „pure nature“. Redemption and supra-nature are a reality and
through this reality nature has entered a new order. The consequence of original
sin is that people exaggerate and defend natural values. Whether it is humanity,
freedom, law or race; the Church will always contain these escalations in the
place they occupy in the divine and absolute order of value. They are therefore
in no way reprobated; they are merely given an exact place in everything that
has value.
To show
them their exact place is the watchword by which the Church achieves her
greatest success, where she has the greatest, best, most skilful and most tried
and tested experience. When, in all ages, the Church has not succeeded in
spiritually suppressing these currents which are foreign or even hostile to her
nature, because she neglected the right moment or did not have the strength to
do so, she still has a means which almost always enables her to triumph:
assimilation. It simply accepts values that are foreign to it, inverts and
falsifies them until they fit its own system, gives them a place in its scale of
values and renders them harmless, while at the same time being able to
disseminate them as its spiritual property. A manifesto of the „Bavarian
Clerical Leaf’ of January 23, 1935, provides evidence of an unparalleled
insight:
„The
meeting of Revelation and race belongs precisely to the most attractive chapter
in the history of the Church. The race was the instrument, Revelation was the
melody, Christ the artist. And so, the Church, inflamed by Revelation, had from
time immemorial the finest flair for perceiving all real biological values.
(Only
his current pope seems to have lost this flair!) After reading this, one can
only be amazed!
We do
not wish to close these accounts without at least one more episcopal statement.
On the occasion of the memorial speech of Bishop Bares in the Hedwig Church in
Berlin, Bishop Machsen of Hildesheim said the following about the exact place of
racial studies:
„It is
absolutely impossible for a Catholic bishop to deny all that relates to the
notions of people and country, all the values of blood and soil. Religious
knowledge gives us the certainty that the flesh rises again and thus confers on
our body and its values a dignity that makes them approach the divine. According
to the teaching of the Church, nature is the basis of faith – and so from
supra-nature we lay the foundations not only for biological and ethnographic
questions, but also for social ones... This view of faith thus provides us with
an accurate view of the nobility and dignity of human nature. The notions of
blood and soil find a hierarchical place and thus have the possibility to
flourish organically.
All
these examples clearly show that the Roman Church is unable to escape the
influence of racial studies in Germany. Outside Germany, in a world dominated by
the Church itself, by liberalism, which is at least related in this respect by
its egalitarian doctrine, or by Marxism, rejections of racial studies are heard,
even to the point of outright hatred, which testifies to a resentful impotence.
We do
not quote articles from anti-German Catholic immigrant newspapers, but instead
give two examples from a book published in Switzerland in 1935 in which, without
concern for any facts, purely political demagoguery is expressed, although Roman
bishops are among its contributors. In this article, the Bishop of Debreczen
invites racial theory to „keep within the narrow limits of its childish nature”,
and in the article by N. Berdiajev, it is said:
„Both
the racial and class theories – mean the intrusion of polytheism into social
life; they – the racial theory to a greater degree than the class theory (!) –
are incompatible with Christian doctrine and lead to confrontation with
Christianity. Both theories are not scientific hypotheses but idolatrous myths
within an atheistic and godless world.”
We quote
the following passage from this work mainly because of its unspeakable silliness
and clumsiness, its pleasant humorous effect, rather than for its practical
importance. The author draws the appalling conclusion from the erroneous
assertion that Zoroaster was an Oriental prophet, to whom Nietzsche gives the
famous words „I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth...” in
his work of the same name:
„Racial
theories are therefore (!!!) only a phase of Orientalism; they must be seen as
an attack on the heart of Western culture, on the belief in the power of the
mind over the body, and must be fought.
In view
of such enormities, which can only be interpreted as political and which are
understandable on the part of the Roman supporters, one must state with
astonishment that even the Vatican offices, which usually show some diplomatic
skill, address and flexibility as soon as they feel prompted to speak out on
racial studies, adopt a tone that hardly differs from that of their emigrant
colleagues outside Germany.
The
Cardinal and Secretary of State of the Pope had the opportunity to speak twice
in 1935 about racial studies, once in his closing speech for the celebrations of
Lourdes, the French pilgrimage site, and the other time in his congratulatory
text addressed to Cardinal Schulte for his 25th episcopal anniversary. In
Lourdes Pacelli explained:
„With
their claim to proclaim a new wisdom, they are in reality only deplorable
plagiarists who clothe ancient errors in new clothes... Whether they are
obsessed with the superstition of blood or race, both philosophies are, however,
based on principles which are contrary to the Christian faith.”
And it
says in the text of congratulations to Cardinal Schulte:
„When
false prophets with Luciferian pride arise, claiming to be the bearers of a new
faith and a new gospel that is not that of Christ, then the hour has come when
the bishop, neither pastor nor mercenary, strengthened by his office and his
oath that unites him since the day of his blessing to the faithful souls, must
raise his voice and repeat fearlessly and inexorably the word of the apostle
before the High Council:
„Judge
for yourselves whether it is right to obey you more than God!
This
tone betrays a nervousness that reflects a trait of character that is also found
in the above-mentioned speech of the Pope; this nervousness stems from the fact
that the Church suspects that the racial worldview is capable of changing the
image of the world and of history even more strongly and radically than it did
in the past through the results of Copernicus’ research. In any case, it is thus
affected more seriously and in depth.
In a
letter from the Congregation of the Seminary and Universities of the Roman Curia
in Rome to the rectors of the Catholic institutes subordinate to it, the Vatican
returns to its old judicial and doctrinaire tone, but remains absolutely
intractable in this matter. In this letter, which is a regulation inviting to
fight against all doctrines of racial studies and its applications, it is said:
„What
touches our Holy Father in an extremely painful way is the fact that impudent
blasphemies are reported to excuse this injustice, and that by the dissemination
of very pernicious doctrines presented as science, although they wrongly bear
this name, they seek to confuse minds and extirpate true religion from souls.”
The
following principles are particularly to be condemned:
2. The
strength of the race and the purity of the blood must be preserved and
maintained in every possible way; everything that leads to this goal is
therefore good and worthwhile.
3. The
blood containing the racial type delivers all the spiritual and moral qualities
to man as its main source.
6. The
first source and absolute measure of all legal rule is racial instinct.
The book
dates from April of this year. Fascism’s profession of faith in racial studies
has not yet been able to change this position. The Church still seeks to
maintain its old position. It will seek to maintain it desperately until it has
to move down one place. But there is no doubt that one day it will have to move
backwards all the way.
SS-Schaf. Horst Pabel
