NAZIS AND CHURCH

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 58, Issue 258, 12 August 1938, Page 5

NAZIS AND CHURCH

CATHOLICISM IN AUSTRIA.

POLICY OF REPRESSION IMPOSED CARDINAL SEEKS COMPROMISE. (United Press Association —Copyright.) (Received This Day, 12.5 p.m.) LONDON, August 11. The Vienna correspondent of the ‘.‘Daily Telegraph” says that the Pope’s announcement that the human race was one family, and the prompt retort of the Fascists and Na?;is that it is not, caused dissension among people who still regard themselves as Christians.

Nazi journals publish pages of pictures with the object of refuting the Pope’s, declaration by contrasting Aryans and Jews, white and coloured races.

, Cardinal Innitzer refrains from public utterances, but it is known that he is trying to make a compromise between the Nazi principles of race purification and the sermon on the Mount. His conclusions, when made known, will be received with the keenest interest throughout the world. , The Catholic Church in Austria is'already half paralysed. Monks and nuns are rarely seen in the streets. Priests must submit to Nazi domination in parishes. Vast religious properties are .being gradually confiscated like those of Jews. No Nazi speaker ever refers to God or Christ, but only to Providence. i Devout Catholics are shocked to see caricatures of the Pope in the newspapers and magazines and comments which were formerly inconceivable in Austria.

The Rome correspondent of the “Telegraph” says that Fascist Party officials told several Jewish business men that they cannot consider themselves active members of their syndicates. This is believed to foreshadow the ostracism of Jews from Fascist life.

POPE’S ADDRESS ON RACIALISM.

PROTEST AGAINST INTERPRE-

TATION

ROME, August 11

The Vatican newspaper “Osservatore Romano” strongly protests against the interpretation placed on the Pope’s recent- remarks concerning racialism, “especially in Italian and German papers, which never reported a single word of the address.” The scantiest report reached London. The “Osservatore Romano” says that the Pope did not condemn two distinct racialisms. He did not say that Italian developments in the racial field had so far been .copies (from Germany), nor as far as the Jewish question is concerned did the reasoning or spirit of the address descend to details which people dared to attribute to it.

A long quotation is then given from an article in the Frieburg (Switzerland newspaper “La Liberte,” which explains the object of the Pope’s address and points out the dangers of the kind of racialism which creates divisions among the great family of human beings. The Duce’s original idea of the race which inspired, for instance, the efforts to preserve racial purity in Abyssinia, was not, according to the Frieburg newspaper, the kind of racialism which aroused the Pope’s anxiety.