ANTI-RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22579, 8 December 1938, Page 9

ANTI-RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA

TO THE EDITOR OI THE PRESS Sir, —Religious propaganda is a fearful and wonderful thing. Listen to the special representative of the “Irish Independent,” who recently returned from Austria. The following are some of the points in the training course of the Hitler Youth Movement in Catholic Austria: (1) Christianity puts negroes, Jews, and Germans on the same level. (2) The bad things perish, the good lives. For that reason the Catholic Church must perish. (3) The idea of a world Messiah can only belong to a bad people. The Germans are good people. They do not need a Saviour. (4) The Catholic Church has always opposed science. (5) The Papacy is a swindle. The Pope is the representative of God. One hundred and fifty years after Peter there was no Pope. The popes were always the worst of men.

The foregoing are from 50 points, all strongly hostile to the Roman Catholic Church. A point from Mussolini’s “Man - and Divinity” has a special setting. "Man and Divinity” is a discourse delivered at Lausanne in 1904. "The struggle agains*“®eligiooß afosurdk'

ity is to-day more necessary than ever. To allow ourselves to be deceived would be base. The Church cannot trick us.”

So spoke Comrade Mussolini before he returned to the faith of his fathers and raped Abyssinia. Great is the power of propaganda. Nazi propaganda has created among the young people of Germany a belief in the existence of a purely mythical race, the Aryan race; and Hitler is its prophet. If the vile and obscene propaganda called anti-semitjsm were not tragic it would be a joke, as Professor J. B. S. Haldane sees it. He says anthropologists claim there is no such thing as a Jewish race. There never was any such thing. There is a religion called Judaism, and believers in it are called Jews. But Jew no more connotes .a race or a nation than Roman Catholic connotes an Italian. There are Jews in Germany who have been Germans for more than 1000 years. There are Jews in Italy who have been Italians for more than 2000 years. The Jews are a separate people so far as they follow their religion, as in the Roman Catholic or the Mohammedan religion. "When the Jew no longer follows his faith he is no longer a Jew. ■

Haldane blames the Christian Church for the persecution of the Jew. The persecution of the Jew started In the darkest days of religious superstition. When the Fathers of the Church set the stupid story going that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. This led the Church to keep the Jews as a people apart, an accursed people. They were always handy scapegoats as an explanation for anything unpleasant that occurred.—Yours, etc.. CATHOLIC TRUTH. December 7. 1938, • •■*...