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
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