Language:
English
Year of publication:
2008
Titel der Quelle:
Holocaust Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
14,3 (2008) 1-24
Keywords:
Adam, Karl,
;
Faulhaber, Michael von,
;
Church history 20th century
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Abstract:
Examines the views of two German Catholic clergymen, the nationalist theologian Karl Adam (1876-1966) and Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber. In the period of the Nazi dictatorship, they tried to reconcile Catholicism with the Nazi racial antisemitic doctrine. Rejecting the notion of an "Aryan Christ", shared by some of the pro-Nazi clergy in the Reich, they tried to dissociate Jesus from Jewry, both in spiritual and racial terms. With this goal in view, they resorted to a special kind of Marian theology, which claimed that the Virgin Mary, by the grace of her (not only Jesus') immaculate conception, is free from any stain of original sin, and thus has no Jewish hereditary traits and nothing in common with present-day Jewry (and the more so Jesus). Notes that this ambivalent theology did not spare both Adam and Faulhaber from some friction with the Nazi establishment. It was this theology, dissociating post-biblical Jews, Jesus, and the Old Testament from present-day Jewry, that made both Adam and Faulhaber keep silent during the deportation of German Jews.
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