Condemning the Nazis' Kristallnacht: Father Maurice Sheehy, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the Dissent of Father Charles Coughlin

Condemning the Nazis’ Kristallnacht: Father Maurice Sheehy, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the Dissent of Father Charles Coughlin Maria Mazzenga C atholics are not known for their opposition to the Nazi persecution of Europe’s Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. To the contrary, a spate of books published over the past decade in particular show that Catholics could have done more to oppose Nazi anti-Jewish activities at several points in the 1930s and 1940s.1 These works center largely on the attitudes and actions of the Holy See and the Church in Europe, and while this focus is appropriate given Europe’s proximity to the Nazi regime, they do not offer us anything close to a comprehensive view of how the Catholic Church in the United States responded to the Holocaust.2 This essay is a pre71 Thanks to the following for comments and editorial suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay: Timothy Meagher, W. John Shepherd, Patrick Hayes, Leslie Tentler, Gerald Fogarty, S.J., Victoria Barnett, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Richard Gribble, C.S.C., Patrick McNamara, and Christopher J. Kauffman. 1. Representative are: Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001); David I. Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews (New York: Knopf, 2001); John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Penguin, 2000); Frank J. Coppa, The Papacy, The Jews, and the Holocaust (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2006); Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 2000). 2. There are several works that address the response of the United States to the Holocaust, but none that address specifically American Catholic responses. Suzanne Brown-Fleming’s The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2006) does address the question because it includes analysis of American Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, but it focuses on the postwar years and German and German-American Catholicism. Gerald P. Fogarty’s essay “Roosevelt and the American Catholic Hierarchy” is useful in its discussion of diplomatic relations between members of the U.S. hierarchy, the Roosevelt administration, and the Vatican during the war, but there is no direct discussion of American Catholic institutional responses to the Holocaust. See Fogarty’s essay in David B. Woolner and Richard G. Kurial, eds., FDR, The Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933-1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 11-43. Fogarty discusses the now famous 1937 “Mundelein-Hitler paper hanger” comment, which is very relevant, in his The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965 (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1985), 249. Cardinal Mundelein branded Hitler “an inept liminary step in that direction. The aim here is to shed light on how American Catholic institutional leadership reacted to what is now considered the first act of systematic violence of the Holocaust, Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom that swept across Germany and German-occupied territory on November 9-10, 1938. News of the persecution of the Jewish population had reached the U.S. before then, but Kristallnacht, during which dozens of Jews were killed, and thousands of homes, shops and synagogues were destroyed with the sanction of Nazi authorities, marked an elevation in the level and organization of anti-Semitic violence in that country. Widely and accurately reported in the United States, the pogrom generated extensive and emotional responses across the country, and within the American Catholic community as well.3 The specific focus here will be on the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) and Father Maurice Sheehy, assistant professor in the Department of Religious Education at the Catholic University of America. Why this focus? First, the NCWC was the representative organization of the bishops of the United States, the most respected leaders of the Catholic Church in America. An NCWC condemnation of the Nazi pogrom of November would represent a unified expression of disapproval of the Nazi treatment of German Jews on behalf of the representatives of the Church in the U.S. However, the NCWC did not issue such a condemnation. The most publicized and resounding denunciation on...