Religion and Politics in Germany since 1945: The Evangelical and Catholic Churches

Abstract

Examining the nature of political opposition on the part of Chris tian ecclessiastical bodies in the twentieth century demonstrates that while churches have adapted to a variety of political systems, no church can compromise with the state when its mission is at stake: those factors which are minimally essential for its survival. These would in clude the liberty of priests, nuns, and other clerics to carry out their sacerdotal tasks, the preservation under church control of its facilities, control of the contents of its own theology, and the ability to enforce adherence to the core sexual-marital ethics of the religious body. While everything else may be open to negotiation—as the case of Lu theran Church policy under Bishop Zoltan Kaldy in socialist Hungary makes clear1—when a state infringes on these core interests, church resistance is sharp, as the Nazis discovered in 1937 when Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge. The pontiff condemned the regime for the establishment of the German Christian Movement with its neo-pagan trappings and racist ideology, the wholesale arrest of Catholic priests, and the closure of Catholic schools, and declared: Whoever raises race or nation or state or state form or the agents of state authority or other values of human communal life—which within the terrestrial order have an essential and honorable place—to the highest norm of all, taking it out of the