The Pope's Last Crusade by Peter Eisner

Author:Peter Eisner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

New York, November 20, 1938

LaFarge’s magazine, America, condemned Kristallnacht in a sharp editorial. “Germany, once counted among the civilized nations, has put herself beyond the pale. . . . We have no words to express our horror and detestation of the barbarous and un-Christian treatment of Jews by Nazi Germany. It forms one of history’s blackest pages.”

American Catholic leaders repudiated the savagery of Kristallnacht. Catholic University organized a high-profile, prime-time coast-to-coast radio broadcast, featuring a live hookup with bishops from around the country, with the rector of the university and with Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. Rev. Maurice Sheehy, a professor at Catholic University, set the tone, saying that church leaders “raise their voice not in mad hysteria, but in firm indignation against the atrocities visited upon the Jews in Germany, because as Pope Pius XI has pointed out, we are all spiritual Semites.”

Despite the condemnation from religious leaders, one widely known American priest presented a different message. Father Charles Coughlin, a onetime New Deal Democrat, had a one-hour weekly national radio broadcast that was steeped in demagoguery, virulent criticism of Roosevelt, and underlying support for Adolf Hitler. A forty-seven-year-old parish priest at the National Shrine of the Little Flower Church in Royal Oaks, Michigan, Coughlin had been broadcasting the weekly program since 1926. His power and influence had begun to falter under persistent criticism from the church hierarchy, but he still reached a loyal audience estimated at as many as fifteen million.

Coughlin took to the microphone at 4 P.M. on November 20 for his weekly Sunday address. That evening, he said his goal was to submit Kristallnacht to the lens of “scientific analysis.” The result was rhetorical tripe and lies. Why did the Nazis lash out at Jews? His answer: Jews are aggressive and wily and the atheists among them are responsible for a worldwide conspiracy that led to the Russian Revolution and the onset of Communism.

After the anti-Jewish rant, his flagship radio station, WMCA in New York, threw him off the air as did many other stations. The next week he continued in the same vein, saying he only asked “that an insane world will distinguish between the innocent Jews and the guilty Jews as much as I would ask the same insane world to distinguish between the innocent gentile and the guilty gentile.”

Prior to these broadcasts, Catholic officials and priests in the United States often had difficulty confronting Coughlin head-on. LaFarge, among others, was uncomfortable speaking about him in public because they feared his power. “He has tremendous influence among Catholics and non-Catholics,” LaFarge said in an interview shortly after he had arrived in England in May 1938. “This influence reaches the most inaccessible places, in fact wherever there is a radio. I think on the whole his influence is good, though I don’t agree with a lot of what he says.”

Coughlin also had important friends, including the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi head of the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, who was thought to be bankrolling the radio priest’s political activities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.