Strategies: How the New York Times recent reporting against the Pope resembles the Nazi strategy for destroying Christianity.


In researching Hitler's religious views, I ran across the 1945 report - "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches" - prepared by the OSS as part of the preparation for the Nazi War Crimes Trial at Nuremberg. Part of the charges against the Nazi leadership included defamation of the clergy. At page 51 of the report there is this:

3. Defamation of the Clergy. In order to reduce the influence of the clergy, systematic propaganda campaigns were carried out to depict them in an unfavorable light. The most vigorous of these campaigns were the press campaigns in connection with the "Currency trials" and the "Clerical immorality trials" of 1935 and 1936, which tried to discredit the Catholic clergy as financial manipulators and moral degenerates. The Catholic Church was the principal victim of these tactics.

The OSS report discussed the "Problem of Proof."

THE PROBLEM OF PROOF. Evidence here consists in the files of all German newspapers for the period. The extent and sensational coloring of the reports of these trials, quite apart from any case of the guilt or innocence of the particular defendants, is proof of the anti-Church purpose of the campaign which was underlined in violent outbursts of Hitler and Goebbels themselves made in official speeches. See especially the speech made by Goebbels in a mass meeting in the Deutschlandhalle (Berlin) on 28 May 1937.

The extent of coloring and the sensationalism of the reporting, as well as the timing and the coordination of coverage was viewed by the OSS Report as prima facie evidence of a conspiracy among the Nazi leadership to persecute Christianity. Other information that comes out of the OSS report is the motivation of the Nazi leadership to distance the churches from the people - so that there would not be a possible opposition source of authority - and the anti-Nazi message of Catholicism, which included the anti-racist message in Pope Pius XII's encyclical Summi Ponitificatus, which encyclical was suppressed by the Nazis (See p. 63), and the suspect notion that "God alone has the ultimate right over our bodies and our health," as was contained in a Catholic publication suppressed by the Nazis. (P. 65.)

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the contemporary context, we can see the sensationalism of the charges against Pope Benedict. We can also see a coordination among the various liberal columnists and the supposed journalists. The element of timing the disclosures to reach a peak before Holy Week might be coincidental, but we have seen with respect to the timing of hit pieces against McCain and Bush that the media does consider the timing of its stories. Finally, the ideological element is clear. Maureen Dowd’s screeds show that her problem with Benedict is over his condemnation of abortion and his refusal to accept the zeitgeist position on women in the clergy and homosexuality.

According to the OSS report, what more do we need as prima facie evidence of the Times’ intent to persecute?

On which point, read this essay by Elizabeth Lev, which contains these observations:

The salacious reporting on clerical sex abuse ( as if it were limited to only Roman Catholic clergy) has been given a prominence greater than the massacres of Christians happening right now in India and Iraq. Moreover, the term "clerical sex abuse" is often misleadingly equated with "pedophilia" to whip up even more public outrage. It doesn't take the political acumen of an Edmund Burke to wonder why the Catholic Church has been singled out for this treatment.


While no one denies the wrongdoing and the harm caused by a small minority of priests, their misconduct has been used to undermine the reputations of the overwhelming majority of clergy who live holy quiet lives in their parishes, tending to their flocks. These good men have been smeared with the same poisonous ink.

The brutal reality is that there are an estimated 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse in the United States today. Of these, between 40 and 60 percent were abused by a family member (for the most part uncles, cousins, stepfathers and live-in boyfriends). Carol Shakeshaft and Audrey Cohan have produced a study showing that 5 percent were molested by school teachers, while the New York Times published a survey showing that fewer than 2% of the offenders were Catholic priests. But to read the papers, it would seem that Catholic clergy hold a monopoly in child molestation.

Burke's explanation for the furious anti-clericalism of yore could have been written today: The denigration of the clergy was "to teach them [the people] to persecute their own pastors....by raising a disgust and horror of the clergy."

If Burke were alive today, he would perhaps discern another motive behind the selective assaults on Catholic clergy, besides designs on Church property: namely to destroy the credibility of a powerful moral voice in public debate. The most recent example concerns the heated battle over the health care reform bill. The vocal opposition of the United States Bishops' conference (particularly in regard to tax-payer -funded abortion) has proved especially annoying to the proponents of the legislation. As the final vote approaches, the clerical sex abuse drumbeat has risen to a frenzy.

The record number of participants in January's Pro-Life March; Bishop Tobin's rebuke to Rep. Patrick Kennedy for his pro-abortion positions; and the success of the marriage movement in the United States, indicate that the voice of the bishops is indeed resonating with people. To silence the moral voice of the Church, the preferred option has been to discredit its ministers.

Well, it worked for the Nazis.  In fact, in General Donovan's October 25, 1945 Report distinguished between the Nazi strategy against Catholicism and its strategy against Protestantism:

The Protestant Church in Germany does not have hierarchic but a democratic constitution.  Apart from that, it is constituted by 28 provincial churches.  Therefore it did not have the congeniality and strictness of the Catholic Church. That is why the struggle of the Protestant Church against Hitler became much more difficult.  If it was the clerics that bore the brunt of the struggle within the Catholic Church it was the congregation which beame the nest of resistance withing the Protestant Church.

Interesting how the media attack on Catholicism mirrors the strategy employed by the Nazis.