Catholicism
The attitude of the Nazi party to the Catholic Church ranged from tolerance, to near total renunciation and outright aggression. Bullock wrote that Hitler had some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, but utter contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, "would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure". Many Nazis were anti-clerical in both private and public life. The Nazi party had decidedly pagan elements. One position is that the Church and fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic Weltanschauung" claiming the whole of the person. Adolf Hitler himself has been described as a "spiritualist" by Laqueur; but by Bullock as a "rationalist" and "materialist" with no appreciation of the spiritual side of humanity; and a simple "atheist" by Blainey. His Fascist comrade Benito Mussolini was an atheist. Both were anticlerical, but understood that it would be rash to begin their Kulturkampfs against Catholicism prematurely. Such a clash, possibly inevitable in the future, was put off while they dealt with other enemies.
Read more about this topic: Religion In Nazi Germany
Famous quotes containing the word catholicism:
“Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft. Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being too much like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.”
—C.S. (Clive Staples)