‘HISTORICAL revisionists” who have researched the events of World War II have a very disturbing tendency to overreact to some of the serious exaggerations and distortions they find and to fall into glorifying National Socialism and the beliefs of Adolf Hitler. You see this in many places on the Internet. I can’t fully explore how seriously wrong and disturbing this phenomenon is in this post. I hope to write more about it in the future, but I would like simply to quote one of the documents issued by the Catholic Church against National Socialism because it sums up what was indefensible in a movement which deified German blood and the German nation. A healthy love of one’s race and nation, subordinate to the love of their Creator, is not the same thing as this idolatry.**

On April 13, 1938, the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities, writing amidst persecutions of Catholics in Germany, wrote to Rectors of Seminaries and Catholic Universities urging Catholic institutions to do everything possible to combat the racialist mystique of National Socialism. It condemned the errors in National Socialist writings:

“Last year, on Christmas Eve, our august Pontiff and gloriously reigning Pope, in his allocution to the Cardinals and Prelates of the Roman Curia, referred in grave and sorrowful terms to the grievous persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany. It was a cause of the greatest pain to the heart of the Holy Father that, in order to excuse such flagrant injustice, bare-faced calumnies were invented, and most pernicious doctrines, falsely alleged to be scientific, were spread far and wide, with the intention of creating dire confusion in minds and uprooting the true religion. In view of this state of things, the Sacred Congregation of Studies urges Catholic universities and faculties to direct all their resources and efforts to the defence of truth against the inroads of these errors. Accordingly, those who are teaching in these centres of higher studies must mobilise all the means at their command in biology, history, philosophy, apologetics, legal and moral science, and thus forge the weapons with which to refute decisively and expertly the following absolutely untenable and erroneous doctrines:

“1. The human races by their natural and immutable characters are so different, one from another, that the lowest of them is further removed from the highest than it is from the highest species of animal.

“2. The vigour of the race and blood-purity must be preserved and cultivated by every means. Anything that conduces to this end is by the very fact honourable and permissible.

“3. The intellectual and moral qualities of man come mainly from his blood, the source of racial characteristics.

“4. The essential aim of education is to develop the characters of the race and to inflame men’s minds with a burning love of their own race as of the supreme good.

“5. Religion is subject to the law of race and must be adapted to it.

“6. The primary source and supreme rule of the whole juridical order is the racial instinct.

“7. Only the Cosmos or Universe exists, a living being; all things, man included, are only diverse forms, increasing through the ages, of the Universal Living Being.

“8. Individual men exist by the State and for the State: whatever rights they possess come to them exclusively through a concession from the State . . . ”

[Source]

** A related phenomenon is the idolatry of races other than one’s own.

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