Michael Von Faulhaber - Legacy

Legacy

Faulhaber remains a controversial personality. The Nazis reportedly considered Faulhaber a "friend of the Jews" and a Catholic "reactionary" (the term used by the Nazis to refer to opponents of the Nazis who were not left-wing). Ronald Rychlak is of the opinion that the views expressed by people like Faulhaber to Cardinal Pacelli (counselling silence on the assumption that speaking out would make matters worse) influenced Cardinal Pacelli's future responses to issues. In “We Remember: A Reflection of the Shoah”, a declaration issued by the Vatican in 1998, Faulhaber's Advent sermons of 1933 were praised for their rejection of “Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.” The principal author of the document, Cardinal Cassidy, was challenged at a meeting in 1999 by an elderly rabbi, who as a sixteen-year-old lived in Munich at the time of the Advent sermons, when he recalled that Faulhaber had declared “that with the coming of Christ, Jews and Judaism have lost their place in the world.” When historians at the meeting pointed out that Faulhaber himself said he had only been defending the “Old Testament” and pre-Christian Jews, James Carroll reported that the Cardinal seemed embarrassed and replied that the disputed assertion in “We Remember” had not been in his original document but had been added “by historians”.

West Germany granted Faulhaber its highest honor, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit.