Germany Models How to Starve the Catholic Church » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

German dictator Adolf Hitler once set out to destroy the Catholic Church: his regime shut down Catholic schools and arrested priests and nuns, imprisoning them en masse in the infamous concentration camps. Many were executed. According to some historical sources, nearly 3,000 Catholic priests were detained in Dachau alone. In Auschwitz, the Polish Franciscan St. Maximilian Kolbe was famously executed when he volunteered to take the place of another prisoner in a starvation bunker. The friar outlived his bunker-mates, leading them for weeks in prayer and hymns until the Nazis finally killed him via lethal injection.

Conservative estimates place the number of Catholic priests killed by the Nazi regime — those who were executed, those who were assassinated, those who were left to die in prison camps — at well over 3,000. Nevertheless, the Church survived, even yielding the first German pope in centuries just a few decades after Hitler’s demise.

But where the Third Reich’s totalitarian brutality failed, secularism and modernist theology have succeeded. According to the latest figures from the German Catholic bishops’ conference, a record low of only 29 priests were ordained for the entire country last year, down from 557 in 1962. Eleven German dioceses saw no priestly ordinations last year at all. In response to the grim figures, the head of the German bishops’ conference, Limburg’s Bishop Georg Bätzing, commented, “We must not close our eyes to these figures. They challenge us to ask anew: Who are we there for as a Church?” He added, “The good news has not diminished — but it must be brought to people in a different and credible way. That is why we need new paths, courageous steps, and above all the firm will to orientate ourselves toward reality.”

But Germany’s bishops have done little, if anything, to “orient themselves toward reality.” In fact, they seem to have abandoned the 2,000-year-old reality of Catholic teaching almost entirely. Over 320,000 German Catholics officially left the Church last year, over 400,000 left the year before, and over 500,000 left in 2022. Why? What do Catholics in Germany crave or expect that the nation’s bishops are simply not providing? Catholicism, perhaps.

The Problem of Germany’s Bishops

German bishops have spent the past many years seeking out the most extreme fringes of the secular world and, instead of laboring to bring the denizens of those fringes into the Church, rushed to embrace the fringes and declare them the new home of the Church in Germany.

The nation’s bishops, charged with preserving the Church’s teachings and tending to the many souls in their flock, have launched a “queer” pastoral commission, teased allowing illicit blessings for same-sex couples, vociferously promoted the ordination of women to the diaconate and even to the priesthood, and very narrowly avoided schism, with the Vatican exercising a rare show of force to rein the wayward bishops in when they attempted to found a dissident “synodal council.” (Incidentally, Cardinal Robert Prevost, the new Pope Leo XIV, was one of the chief Vatican officials responsible for averting the German calamity.)

Bätzing is right in one respect: he and his episcopal brethren must certainly ask themselves, “Who are we there for as a Church?” Clearly, the bishops are not “there for” Catholics. The Church’s age-old moral teachings, freshly assaulted by the modern, secular world and its warped, humanistic, narcissistic ideology, have been abandoned by the bishops. While bishops in other Western nations — such as the United States, Britain, Italy, and even France — struggle to find a way to affirm the Church’s perennial teachings on sexual morality and the purpose of the family without driving away potential converts through harsh and unfeeling rhetoric, Germany’s bishops have jettisoned those teachings, with a glibness suggesting a sentiment of, “If you can’t beat them — and we haven’t even tried to — then join them.”

But Germany’s bishops are also not “there for” Germany. The prelates have advocated ad nauseam in favor of practically unrestricted immigration, grievously misinterpreting the Church’s well-balanced and reasonable approach to both immigration and national sovereignty, and were among the most ardent and cult-like devotees of COVID-19-era lockdowns, restrictions, and mandates. The bishops have even fired parish and diocesan employees and volunteers who are affiliated with the country’s conservative-populist Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) political party.

Following the 2024 attack by a Muslim non-German on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Monsignor Karl Jüsten represented the German bishops’ conference in beseeching the reigning political parties not to cooperate with AfD in passing legislation restricting immigration. In other words, even as immigrants hostile to both their host nation and to Christianity were intentionally driving cars through crowds in traditional Christmas markets and steamrolling German women and children, the nation’s bishops actively petitioned the government to continue importing these dangerous parasites.

It’s little wonder that fewer than 30 men joined the priesthood in Germany last year. In fact, it’s a wonder that any men joined at all. The modern age presents the Catholic Church with a unique opportunity: armed with truth and virtue and boasting a rich patrimony of strong, courageous, masculine Saints and heroes throughout its 2,000-year history, the Church should be uniquely poised to attract the admiration and allegiance of young men around the globe, offering them a virile and fulfilling alternative to the vapid, effeminate, lecherous trappings of progressivism, liberalism, and even mainstream conservatism. Germany’s bishops have clearly opted instead to embrace the zeitgeist and forsake their Catholic patrimony. Hitler never needed guns and prison camps to drive the Church out of Germany — he just needed bad theology, weak pastors, and multicultural liberalism.