Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (160 page)

In German-occupied Ukraine, where religious life much revived once the Red Army had been thrown back by German armies, nationalism also took religious lines, but in a terrible new combination of forces. The toxic effect of Nazi occupation was to set Pole against only recently self-identified Ukrainian, with the bizarre effect that Greek Catholic Ukrainians allied with Orthodox Ukrainians against the Roman Catholic Poles who shared Greek Catholics' allegiance to Rome - thus overturning the alignments and antipathies of the previous three centuries. In the contested territory of Volhynia, lately Polish-administered, in 1943 Ukrainians were able amid mutual genocidal conflict to identify Polish Roman Catholics because the Poles observed Christmas earlier than either Greek Catholics or Orthodox. The Poles were generally holding their Christmas celebrations in wooden churches, which burned easily, and anyone escaping these infernos was shot. Overall, around seventy thousand Poles died throughout the Ukraine in this violence, and twenty thousand Ukrainians.
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The case of France and its Catholicism continues to be a source of national agonizing. When in 1940 the French army fell to a devastating German attack, the Third French Republic was swiftly dismantled and its secularist appeal to the values of 1789 was cast into discredit. A new government presided over those parts of France not directly occupied by the Nazis, from the spa town of Vichy. The aged national war hero who took over as Vichy head of state, Marshal Philippe Petain, chose to cast his vigorous conservatism around an ideology of Catholic traditionalism, despite his own lack of any great devotional fervour. The official Church was delighted to back the new national slogan,
Travail, famille, patrie
('Work, family, country'), and the anti-Semitism of those defeated forty years before in the Dreyfus controversy (see p. 827) was not slow to ally itself with the much more radical anti-Semitism of the victorious Nazis. Only slowly did the Catholic hierarchy realize what a terrible mistake it had made; from the early days of defeat, younger and junior clergy tended to be much more suspicious of the Vichy regime, some of whose politicians combined pronounced anticlerical views with quasi-Fascist ideology.

Gradually, as the exploitative character of German occupation became clear, national resistance grew. Catholics were prominent among the resisters, and many became heroically committed to the work of saving Jews from barbaric treatment and deportation for death. Yet it is an irony of the Vichy years that among the regime's lasting memorials is one of the most beautiful works of modern Catholic liturgical music, Maurice Durufle's
Requiem
, enfolding the plainsong melodies of the Requiem Mass in the most lush and haunting of French choral romanticism. This was commissioned by the Vichy government, from a devoutly Catholic composer, whose publisher was among Petain's most enthusiastic supporters. For many years after the war, the origins of Durufle's great work were conveniently shrouded in obscurity.
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At the centre of all this was Pope Pius XII. His part in the war has generated debate which is still not ended. Amid the noise of scholarly and less scholarly controversy, the Pope's own 'silence' is still hard to miss. It has two sides, for he was silent to the German government when he learned of an army plot to assassinate Hitler in late 1939, and discreetly communicative to the Western Allies about what he knew of it, but as the Holocaust unfolded, he was silent also about the Jews. While a variety of Vatican agencies helped thousands of Jews to escape round-ups in Italy, the Pope only once nerved himself to make a public statement about their plight, in his Christmas radio broadcast in 1942. Even then, his mention of those 'put to death or doomed to slow extinction, sometimes merely because of their race or their descent' failed to put a name to the chief sufferers. His third near-silence, that of any significant public reflection on his actions, and indeed some deliberate if understandable obfuscation, lasted through the thirteen years of his pontificate after the war had ended.
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The Pope's unhappy equivocations contrast with the conduct of a Catholic Church leader in an infinitely more dangerous personal situation: Andrei Sheptyts'kyi, Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Galician Ukraine since 1900, when it had been Habsburg territory. In the desperate situation of German-occupied Galicia in 1944, Sheptyts'kyi could see no other course than that a division of the Waffen-SS should become the core of an army to defend the region against the advancing Russians. That might suggest that he was another Father Tiso or a Pavelic for the Ukrainians; but despite his deep commitment to the construction of a Ukrainian nation, Sheptyts'kyi was an aristocrat whose family looked back to the old multiconfessional and multi-faith Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A convert to the Greek Catholic Church from Roman Catholicism, with a brother who had helped to create the victorious Polish army in 1920, he put his own life in danger when the Germans invaded by personally sheltering Jews against deportation and setting up networks to hide them.

Sheptyts'kyi went further. As the Nazis first recruited Ukrainians to murder Jews and then encouraged them to murder Poles, the Metropolitan took the highly dangerous step of writing personally to Heinrich Himmler, pleading with him not to call up Ukrainian policemen. He then issued a pastoral letter, to be read out from every Greek Catholic pulpit in even more perilous circumstances than the distribution of
Mit brennender Sorge
: its title was 'Thou shalt not kill', and it reminded his congregations that nothing could excuse murder. It was not his only pastoral letter on the subject, and he wrote to Pius XII in 1942 to denounce Nazism as a 'system of egoism exaggerated to an absurd degree'. His Church was fortunate to have such a leader; although the old man died only a few months after Soviet tanks rolled back through Ukraine and beyond, his memory sustained Greek Catholics through half a century more of misfortune and repression.
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Pope Pius XII was the successor of rulers who confined their Jewish subjects to a ghetto in Rome up to the nineteenth century, yet the papacy need not alone shoulder responsibility in a religion which has institutionalized anti-Semitism for most of its existence. German Protestants did little better than the Pope in the 1950s in confronting their wartime past.
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The taint lies throughout Chalcedonian Christianity, including the casual unthinking anti-Semitism which characterized British and American society until the late twentieth century. It will not do to point out the undoubted fact that most Nazis hated Christianity and would have done their best to destroy its institutional power if they had been victorious.
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As the Nazi extermination machine enrolled countless thousands of European Christians as facilitators or uncomplaining bystanders of its industrialized killings of Jews, it could succeed in co-opting them in the work of dehumanizing the victims because the collaborators had absorbed eighteen centuries of Christian negative stereotypes of Judaism - not to mention the tensions visible in the text of the New Testament, which had prompted the urge to create those stereotypes, up to the most mendacious and marginalizing such as the 'blood libel' (see pp. 400-401). This is a hard burden for post-war European Christians to bear. To their credit, after unhappy half-measures in the immediate post-war period, the Churches have done their best to face facts. Like the missionary failure in India, the Holocaust has provided a useful spur to humility for Christianity.

There were also those Christians who stood out: often lonely figures, whose resistance to the apparently limitless success of the Nazis seemed baffling to most people at the time. Franz Jagerstatter was a humble man from the same area of Austria as Hitler himself, and with a not dissimilarly murky family background. What he constructed out of these personal circumstances was a firm decision to serve his little local church as sexton, a choice not to vote for the plebiscite acclaiming Hitler's absorption of Austria, and finally a fixed refusal to fight for his country in an evil cause. He was beheaded in Berlin in 1943, and the inclusion of his name on his village's war memorial after the Second World War was the subject of heated local argument.
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From the Confessing Church, there remains the now emblematic figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Although he was a marginal figure in the resistance to the Nazis, this Lutheran pastor was intimately involved in the circles of those seeking the destruction of the regime, and knew of the plans which culminated in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944; that was why the Gestapo arrested him and took him to his final imprisonment. His situation left Christians facing anew the moral questions about the murder of tyrants which the Reformation had already raised. His execution just before the end of the war gave German Lutherans a martyr, when so many others had not been. From Bonhoeffer's time in prison, he left as the end of an industrious production of theological works a series of fragments and letters which contained phrases still echoing round Western Christian ears, as possible clues to future directions for the Church (see p. 988). His parents' quietly handsome house and garden in a leafy suburb of Berlin, from where the Gestapo escorted him to prison, remain as his memorial, but the place of his burial will probably never be known.

There were those among the Allies fighting Nazi Germany who realized that the Allies too were capable of wicked acts. George Bell, Bonhoeffer's close friend in England and an Anglican bishop with unusually wide ecumenical contacts in mainland Europe, acted as a conscience of the British governing elite, earning no gratitude from Britain's wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. During the First World War he had been domestic chaplain (in effect, secretary) to Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had managed to steer the Church of England's official statements away from the path of egregious patriotism represented by Bishop Winnington-Ingram. Bell, now Bishop of Chichester and, from 1938, occupying one of the Anglican episcopate's places in the British House of Lords, took Davidson's line much further; he was determined to separate out Germany from Nazism in the conduct of the war. The issue for which he came to be particularly notorious was his criticism of the systematic indiscriminate aerial bombing of German cities, made possible by the Allies' crippling of the German Air Force (the Luftwaffe) in the second half of the war. The Bishop of Coventry, whose city had been wrecked by the Luftwaffe in 1940, threw his moral weight behind the British policy of retaliatory bombing; in contrast, from 1943 Bell used his public position to denounce saturation bombing as 'a wrong deed'. It is widely held that Churchill's anger at Bell's outspokenness cost him the succession to the See of Canterbury - but inspiring moral leader as Bell was, this might not entirely have been a disaster. After the war his warm friendships with German churchmen and natural impulse to Christian forgiveness led him into some questionable judgements as to which Germans ought to escape the consequences of their involvement with the Nazis.
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The Second World War was at its most destructive and bestial in Eastern Europe, and it may seem strange to suggest that it brought any benefit to the Soviet Union. Yet it is difficult to see how, without the boost to Soviet prestige provided by the repelling of Nazi armies in what Russians rightly term the Great Patriotic War, Soviet Russia could otherwise have staggered on as late as the 1980s, devoid as it was of any popular legitimacy and having already ruined the lives of so many by the time of Hitler's invasion. Stalin, whose criminal complacency had blinded him to Hitler's readiness to betray their alliance, was transformed by the war into a leader comparable to the first Romanovs or Peter the Great as defender of his people. And that same patriotic war effort saved the Russian Orthodox Church from institutional extinction, although not from a great deal of moral compromise. In 1939 there were only four bishops who were still at liberty in the Soviet Union; in September 1943, with Russia fighting desperately to keep the German Army from overrunning its heartland, Stalin invited the Patriarch and three metropolitans to a meeting which was to lead to a council of the Church, the first in Russia since 1917. The council saw to it that the Church was enrolled in the war effort, urging sacrifices on its faithful. The Georgian and Armenian Churches benefited likewise from their own patriotic activities; the funds raised by the head of the Church in Armenia went to pay for two tank divisions in the Red Army.
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After the war was over, this institutional toleration continued. In 1946 Stalin allowed the formal extinction of the languishing rival Russian Church organization which the Soviet government had encouraged, the 'Renovationist' Church. This had started life as a genuine attempt by radical clergy to produce a reforming version of Orthodoxy during the abortive revolution of 1905 (see p. 851), but it had turned into little more than a means of disrupting Orthodox activity and parroting Communist propaganda. Stalin realized that he was better served by a subservient Orthodox leadership which would have some credibility with other worldwide Christian leaders. That is how his successors used the Moscow Patriarchate, even while they resumed vicious attempts to end any popular religious life in that same Church.
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When the Soviets swept back into Ukraine, Stalin abruptly terminated the official life of the Greek Catholic Church, which had flourished in the wake of the Red Army's retreat before the Nazis. In 1946 a puppet synod in Ukraine declared void the Union of Brest of 1596, and the Church disappeared into a forcible union with the Orthodox Church in Moscow for nearly half a century.
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As Soviet armies inexorably followed up the Western Allies' uncomfortable acceptance that Stalin would make Eastern Europe a Soviet sphere of influence, the various national Orthodox Churches apart from Greece followed the Moscow Patriarchate into an unhappy combination of collaboration and persecution at the hands of Communist satellite regimes. Catholics and Protestants had more external contacts to sustain them, but for that reason, they were generally more likely to be regarded as enemies of the new 'Peoples' Democracies'.