GERMANY: Holy War

As soon as the Olympic Games were over last year. Dictator Hitler got down in earnest to a rigorous anti-Catholic campaign. Catholic confessional schools were suppressed at Württemberg, in the Saar, in the Palatinate, and a State Youth Law suppressed surviving Catholic Youth organizations by ordering all children to join the Brown Shirt Hitler Youth.

The Catholic clergy were up in arms. Pastoral letters flew like autumn leaves protesting that the school campaign was a breach of the Vatican-Nazi Concordat (TIME, July 17, 1933). Hitler, however, had a trump card. He had long been lining up "evidence" to prove that German Catholic monasteries were hotbeds of immorality. In a climactic, triumphant effort to squelch Catholicism on Aryan soil he threw all the immorality trials into the courts at the same time. He hoped that wholesale convictions would destroy the prestige of the Catholic Church for good, that the Reich's 2,000,000 or so Catholic children would be transformed without a hitch into little Brown Shirts.

Official figures, published in Germany, reveal that more than 1,000 lay brothers and "numerous" priests were fortnight ago on trial or awaiting trial for immorality. Fifty-three had already been convicted. Suddenly Nazi State police swooped down on a Catholic boys' seminary at Heiligenstadt in Thuringia, closed it because of "wretched moral conditions prevailing among the youthful inmates."

The resentment of Catholic Germans burst out as far as it dared. Catholic attorneys, while admitting that isolated instances of immorality existed, protested that many of the accused had already been punished by the Church, that the Government was using evidence picked up during earlier proceedings against monks and nuns accused of violating money transfer restrictions.

From Chicago, fuel was heaped last week onto the already blazing fire. The heaper was Chicago's erudite, 64-year-old Roman Catholic Archbishop, George William Cardinal Mundelein, who started life on Manhattan's lower East Side and early won renown as a youthful orator. Before 500 Catholic prelates and priests assembled for the quarterly diocesan conference at Quigley Preparatory Seminary, Cardinal Mundelein tore into the Nazi Government: "The fight is to take the [2,000,000 German] children away from us. ... Perhaps you will ask how it is that a nation of 60,000,000 people, intelligent people, will submit in fear and servitude to an alien, an Austrian paperhanger, and a poor one at that, I am told. . . . During and after the World War the German Government complained bitterly of the propaganda aimed at it by the Allies concerning atrocities perpetrated by German troops. Now the present German Government is making use of this same kind of propaganda against the Catholic Church and is giving out through its crooked Minister of Propaganda stories of wholesale immorality in religious institutions in comparison to which the War time propaganda is almost like bedtime stories for children."