Posted by
Maudie in Mandeville on Friday, May 07, 2010 2:04:52 PM
In 1937 propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels organized a campaign to discredit the Catholic Church after Pope Pius XI severely criticised the Nazi regime.
Sound familiar?
On March 10, 1937, with the encyclical
Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning anxiety), Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) condemned the Nazi ideology. At the end of the same month, the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda headed by Goebbels launched a campaign against the sexual abuses of priests. The design and administration of this campaign are known to historians thanks to documents which tell a story worthy of the best spy novels.
Even without the benefit of modern sociology, Goebbels responded to the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge in 1937 with a textbook case of the creation of a moral panic.
As always in moral panics, the facts are not totally invented. Prior to the encyclical there were some cases in Germany of abuse of minors. Mariaux himself considered a religious in the school of Bad Reichenall guilty, as well as a lay teacher, a gardener and a janitor, who were condemned in 1936, although he believed the sanction imposed by the Ministry of Public Instruction in Bavaria – revoking the authorization to run scholastic institutes of four religious orders – to be entirely disproportionate, and he linked it to the desire of the regime to undercut Catholic schools.
Sound familiar?
It was the anti-Nazi encyclical of Pius XI that led to the great campaign of 1937. Mariaux proved it by publishing highly detailed instructions sent by Goebbels to the Gestapo, the political police of the Third Reich, and above all to journalists (Sound familiar?), just a few days after the publication of Mit brennender Sorge, inviting them to “reopen” the cases from 1936 and also older cases, constantly recalling them to public opinion. Goebbels also ordered the Gestapo to find witnesses willing to accuse a certain number of priests, threatening them with immediate arrest if they didn’t collaborate, even if they were children.
The effort to discredit the Catholic Church on an international scale through accusations of immorality and pedophilia among priests, however, did not succeed.
Thanks to the courage of Admiral Canaris and his friends, and to the persistence of the Jesuit detective Mariaux, the truth was already out during the war. The perfidy of the campaign of Goebbels aroused more indignation than the eventual guilt of some religious. The father of all moral panics in the area of pedophile priests blew up in the hands of the Nazi propagandists who had tried to organize it.
Rid our Church of "the filth", as Pope Benedict has called the homosexuals and perverts. Hold to the Faith.
You Can't Do Business With Hitler (1942 Radio segment) '
The Anti-Christ' starts 2nd episode at 15:00