Michael von Faulhaber

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Memorial stone of von Faulhaber in the Munich Frauenkirche

His Eminence Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber (born March 3, 1869 in Klosterheidenfeld, Unterfranken, died June 12, 1952 in Munich) was Roman Catholic Archbishop of Munich for 35 years, from 1917 to his death in 1952. In 1921 he became a Cardinal, with the title of Cardinal Priest of S. Anastasia, and at his death was the last surviving Cardinal appointed by Pope Benedict XV. He ordained the future Pope Benedict XVI as a priest in Munich in 1951. Faulhaber served as a priest in Würzburg from 1892 until 1910 when he was appointed Bishop of Speyer, serving there for six years. His studies included a specialisation in the early Christian writer, Tertullian.

From 1925 to 1928 Faulhaber was a member in the International Catholic League against Antisemitism and Racism Amici Israël, in which many Jewish converts to Roman Catholicism (Jewish priests, sisters, monks) took membership. The later Archbishop of Milan Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster was also a member at the time.^[1]

Faulhaber was a key figure in the negotiations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Nazis and German bureaucracy.

Rabbi David G. Dalin, Ph.D. has described him as "a famous opponent of the Nazis". ^[1] Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a noted American voice for the Jewish cause during the war, called Faulhaber "a true Christian prelate", saying he tried to protect Jews when he "had lifted his fearless voice". ^[2]

On April 1, 1933 a violent "boycott" of Jewish businesses took place and a week later Jews were banned from the German civil service by the Nazis. Yet at the same time, "At a meeting of the Bavarian Council of Ministers on April 24, 1933 the Premier was able to report that Cardinal Faulhaber had issued an order to the clergy to support the new regime in which he (Faulhaber) had confidence" [parentheses in original].^[3]

According to a modern critic Friedlaender:

The 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses was the first major test on a national scale of the attitude of the Christian churches toward the situation of the Jews under the new government. In historian Klaus Scholder's words, during the decisive days around the first of April, no bishop, no church dignitaries, no synod made any open declaration against the persecution of the Jews in Germany.^[4]

However, it must be said that the persecution at this time was limited only to economic bans and measures from the Nazi government.

Friedlaender quotes Faulhaber:

In a letter addressed ... to the Vatican's secretary of state, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, Faulhaber wrote: We bishops are being asked why the Catholic Church, as often in its history, does not intervene on behalf of the Jews. This is not possible at this time because the struggle against the Jews would then, at the same time, become a struggle against the Catholics, and because the Jews can help themselves, as the sudden end of the boycott shows.^[5]

Styles of Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber


Reference style	His Eminence
Spoken style	Your Eminence
Informal style	Cardinal
See	Munich

Faulhaber was also involved with Cardinal Pacelli in the negotiations of the Reichskonkordat which was signed on July 20, 1933 and ratified in September of that year.^[6] It was typical policy of the Church to sign Concordats with the nations of Europe and the Church had signed dozens of treaties with all sorts of European nations in the decades prior.

The Concordat also sought protection for Catholics when the influence of their traditional protector, the Catholic Center party, had waned (the party was established when Pius IX was Pope to defend Catholics during Chancellor Otto von Bismark's anti-Catholic program, the Kulturkampf, but by the time of signing of the Concordat the party had lost influence and had been dissolved even before the signing). ^[7]

Faulhaber and Pacelli sought through the Concordat, closed at a time when the Nazis did not yet fully control German government, to gain a strategic and legal basis to challenge violent repression of the Church, in part for its condemnations of Nazi racial doctrine. "With the concordat we are hanged, without the concordat we are hanged, drawn and quartered," Faulhaber is reported to have asserted. Pacelli - the later Pius XII - is reported to have told the British ambassador to the Holy See: "I had to choose between an agreement and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich." He felt that "a pistol had been held to his head" and he was negotiating "with the devil himself."^[8]

The bishops of Austria, Hitler's country of birth, but outside the control of Nazi repression at that time, publicly expressed their view of the Concordat, Nazism, and the situation in Germany in a letter of December 23, 1933: "The concordat recently concluded between the Holy See and Germany does not mean that the Catholic Church approves of the religious errors of Nazism. Everybody knows how tense is the situation between the Church and State in Germany. . . . The Catholic Church has never agreed with the three fundamental errors of Nazism, which are first, race madness, second, violent anti-Semitism, and third extreme nationalism." The Austrian bishops still dared to write in this manner, as they were under the protection of Engelbert Dollfuss, who was an ally of the then still anti-Hitlerite Italian leader Benito Mussolini.

The Austrian bishops' letter, the New York Times noted, "is regarded as a challenge to national-socialism not only in Austria but also in Germany."^[9]

In his Advent 1933 sermon, Faulhaber clearly preached: "Let us not forget that we were saved not by German blood but by the blood of Christ!" in response to Nazi racism.

One modern commenter, Saul Friedlaender, contends:

Cardinal Faulhaber himself later stressed that, in his Advent sermons, he had wished only to defend the Old Testament and not to comment on contemporary aspects of the Jewish issue. In fact, in the sermons he was using some of the most common clichés of traditional religious anti-Semitism.^[10]

Despite Friedlander's interpretation of the sermons, "the security service of the SS interpreted the sermons as an intervention in favour of the Jews". ^[11]

In 1934 an unknown person fired two shots at the cardinal's study.

In 1938, after Faulhaber's condemning the racism of Kristallnacht a Nazi mob broke the windows in his episcopal residence, prompted by an attack on Catholic allies of the Jews, uttered by the Bavarian Nazi Interior Minister. In 1935, a confrontation between a Nazi mob and a pro-Faulhaber crowd outside the main church in Munich had almost come to street violence and several Catholics were severely wounded by the Nazi fanatics.

Faulhaber was also an opponent of the Nazi euthanasia program. In a letter to the head of the Reich Chancellery, Faulhaber wrote:

"I have deemed it my duty to speak out in this ethico-legal, non-political question, for as a Catholic bishop I may not remain silent when the preservation of the moral foundations of all public order is at stake."^[12]

Like all German bishops, with the exception of Berlin's bishop Konrad von Preysing, Faulhaber initially approved Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union and the fight against Communism. In a pastoral letter of all Bavarian bishops he wrote in December 1941:

"We attend our soldiers with our prayers and commemorate in grateful love the dead ones, who gave their life for our nation. We repeatedly have insistently appealed to our believers for faithful fulfillment of their duties, to persevere boldly, for self-sacrificing work and for fighting in service of our country in the hardest times of war, as we did the last time in our pastoral letter in this summer. We gave warning to the German Catholics of bolshevism and called on for vigilance in many pastoral letters from 1921 to 1936, as the German government well knows and so we observe this fight against Bolshevism with great satisfaction."

On June 20, 1945 Cardinal Faulhaber, together with the Lutheran regional bishop of Bavaria, Hans Meiser, issued a protest on behalf of imprisoned Nazi Party members and members of the German Army. They protested against the Allied-Soviet treatment of other German civilians too. In their joint letter to the American military government in Munich both stated, that imprisonment on remand was an "avoidable harshness" that would make it difficult to re-educate the German people after World War II. Faulhaber protested against atrocities and unclarified sudden death cases in POW prisons also. Faulhaber also spiritually and materially supported Brigitte Frank, the widow of former Reich Governor of Poland Hans Frank, who had lost her property during denazification. Hans Frank would convert to Catholicism just before his execution in 1946.

On Jun 29, 1951 Faulhaber ordained Joseph Ratzinger (who was later elected as Pope Benedict XVI) and his brother Georg Ratzinger as priests.

[edit] Notes

^ Rabbi David G. Dalin, Ph.D History as Bigotry:Daniel Goldhagen slanders the Catholic Church Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights (Originally published 2/10/2003 in The Weekly Standard)
^ Rychlak, Ronald J. Another Reckoning: A Response to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair January 1, 2003 Crisis Magazine
^ Lewy, Guenter (2000). The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80931-1. p. 41. Amazon Books. Retrieved May 8, 2005.
^ Friedlaender, Saul. (1997). "Consenting Elites, Threatened Elites." Chapter 2 in Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol I - The Years of Persecution 1933-1939. New York. History-of-the-Holocaust.org. Retrieved May 8, 2005.
^ Ibid.
^ See Lewy, pp. 72, 73, 101-104.
^ Rabbi David G. Dalin, Ph.D The Myth of Hitler's Pope: Pope Pius XII and His Secret War Against Nazi Germany p. 60 Regnery Publishing, Inc. (July 25, 2005)
^ Catholic Culture. The Record of Pius XII's Opposition to Hitler. "[13]"
^ New York Times, "Austrian Bishops Oppose the Nazis: Bid Catholics Support Dollfuss Regime to Avert Situation Like That in Germany", December 23, 1933, p.8.
^ Friedlaender, op cit.
^ Friedlaender, Ibid.
^ See Lewy, p. 265.