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<i>Religion under Siege,</i> Vol. 1: <i>The Roman Catholic Church in Occupied Europe (1939–1950)</i> (review)

2010; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.0.0675

1534-0708

James Ramon Felak,

Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics

Reviewed by: Religion under Siege, Vol. 1: The Roman Catholic Church in Occupied Europe (1939–1950) James R. Felak Religion under Siege, Vol. 1: The Roman Catholic Church in Occupied Europe (1939–1950). Edited by Lieve Gevers and Jan Bank. (Leuven: Peeters. 2007. Pp. x, 346. €54,00 paperback. ISBN 978-9-042-91932-7.) This collection constitutes part of a larger project on “The Impact of National Socialist and Fascist Occupation in Europe,” sponsored by the European Science Foundation and carried out from 1999 to 2005. Five of the book’s ten contributors have some connection with the Catholic University of Leuven/Louvain, including one of the editors. Most of the contributions deal individually with the wartime and immediate postwar situations in Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Belgium. These chapters focus on the relations between the Catholic Church and the Nazi-dominated regimes, and explore the degree to which Catholics accommodated themselves to the new regimes, collaborated with them, or resisted. Also considered are the policies of the regimes in question toward the Church. In addition, the collection includes a chapter on the Catholic corporatist movement in several European countries, and one on the controversial Bishop Alois Hudal. A strength of the collection is its treatment of the issues in their local contexts, where we find considerable diversity in terms of regime policy and church response. Many of the authors take a comparative approach which highlights this diversity. For instance, Vilma Narkute’s article on Lithuania contrasts the Church under successive Soviet and Nazi regimes, while Tamara [End Page 384] Griesser-Pečar compares Slovenia in its German, Italian, and Hungarian partitions. The most evocative comparisons come in the articles on the Low Countries by Gevers and Lieven Saerens, where we find examination of the differences between Belgium and the Netherlands, between Catholics and Protestants in the Netherlands, and between the Fleming and the Walloon regions of Belgium. A number of the authors explore the reasons why Catholics and their bishops sought accommodation with Nazi-sponsored regimes. These include a sense that the Nazi order was there to stay; that said regime was preferable to direct German occupation; a desire to protect the Church’s interests; and sympathy for right-wing nationalism, anticommunism, “Christian morality,” and corporative socioeconomic ideas. In cases like Slovakia, the Church was reacting in part to religious and ethnic discrimination under the liberal interwar Czechoslovak Republic. While correctly pointing out anti-Catholic bias in the academic literature on the wartime period, some of the contributions have a tendency to handle the Church and its exponents far too tenderly. Emilia Hrabovec, for instance, in her article on Slovakia, downplays the complicity of Slovakia’s priest-president Jozef Tiso in the Holocaust. For example, readers of that piece would not learn that after Slovakia had deported tens of thousands of Jews to Nazi Germany, Tiso gave a public speech in which he justified the deportations and referred to Jews as “parasites.” Jure Krišto’s contribution on Croatia, while understandably noting that communist propaganda and Serbian hostility has led to a demonization of wartime Croatia, makes the questionable assertion that the fascist Ustaša movement “and Catholicism have nothing in common and that Ustasism was an aberration in Croatian history” (p. 41). Such over-statement obscures the more valuable parts of Krišto’s article. A particularly interesting contribution to this collection is a revisionist piece by Johan Ickx on Alois Hudal. Demonized in much of the literature on the war and its aftermath as the “Nazi bishop” who helped a number of war criminals escape justice via the so-called Rat Line, Ickx tries to show another side to Hudal. In his attempt to build bridges to Nazism, Hudal insisted that Nazism abandon its anti-Christian aspects, including its idolatry of state, race, and nation and its “racial antisemitism.” This led to a number of Hudal’s major writings being banned by the Nazi and Italian fascist regimes in the 1930s. Ickx also notes that Hudal aided and hid not only Nazi war criminals at the end of the war but also escaped Allied soldiers during the war. However, since even a Nazism...