Hitler and Providence

By the time Adolf Hitler arrived in Rome last week (see p. 22), His Holiness Pope Pius XI had retreated from the comforts of the Vatican and gone to his unheated palace at Castel Gandolfo, which he does not usually visit until definitely warm weather has arrived. The Pope was represented as displeased because the Fuehrer had not requested an audience. To pilgrims at Castel Gandolfo the Holy Father said that it was sad that "on the feast day of the Holy Cross of Christ the banners of another cross [the swastika], which certainly is not that of Christ, should have been hoisted in Rome." Next day the Vatican Museum was closed, prelates explaining that the Vatican would not welcome the multitudes of swastika-wearing German tourists who might want to kill time while Hitler and Mussolini were in Naples.

Osservatore Romano, semi-official news-organ of Pius XI, had busied itself printing the highest-powered extracts of an anti-Italian nature it was able to cull from the back files of German newspapers. In sum, these gems of Nazi thought extolled the Nordic races over the Mediterranean, and Osservatore Romano even found a Nazi press crack that Italians ought to have no difficulty colonizing in Africa "because the difference between them and Africans is not very great."

Meanwhile, in Germany last week it became known that one bishop, out of the whole German hierarchy, had deliberately abstained from voting in last month's plebiscite. That one, Bishop Johann Baptist Sproll, head of the Church in Wuerttemberg, had immediately been informed by the secret police that his security could not be guaranteed. He left his episcopal seat, Rottenburg, but presently returned. Last week the Nazi governor of Wuerttemberg, Wilhelm Murr, demanded that Bishop Sproll resign his post, on the grounds that his "disloyalty" to the State was a violation of the 1933 concordat between Church & State--which the Nazis have violated so thoroughly that it is now a dead letter. Wrote Governor Murr: "Bishop Sproll does not recognize, it would seem, that Divine Providence has appointed Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist ideology to save our nation from the grim chaos of Bolshevism. Instead of bowing humbly to God's will, he was continually talking about persecution and martyrdom. I know that Bishop Sproll covets the halo of a martyr. This halo will not be denied him." Bishop Sproll kept mum.

A prelate who covets no martyr's halo is Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, Archbishop of Vienna, who advised Austrians to vote ja in the plebiscite, was supposedly rebuked by the Vatican, and voted ja himself with a Nazi salute (TIME, April 18). Last week the Christian Century, able U. S. nondenominational weekly, published an article by Martin Schroeder, Lutheran student of German church affairs, which offered a novel but specious explanation of Cardinal Innitzer's actions. It is simply that ''Cardinal Innitzer has made a strong bid to head a national German episcopate," a church accountable only to Hitler. Lutheran Schroeder argues that German Protestantism has been divided and Hitler, "looking over the ecclesiastical scratch-sheet for winners," has found none among Protestants. The strongest of them, Martin Niemoeller, has (according to Martin Schroeder) been dropped by his followers since his trial. Thus Hitler has turned to Catholicism, the faith in which he was baptized, and which now counts the nominal allegiance of 27,000,000 Germans.' In Austria, by the Schroeder arguement, antagonism to Rome is deeply rooted. A "Los von Rom" ("Free from Rome") movement arose there 40-odd years ago. The Old Catholic Church, result of a schism in 1870 over papal infallibility, counts 400,000 European adherents. The Old Catholics employ the vernacular in the Mass, do not require celibacy of the clergy. Such a church, headed by Cardinal Innitzer, could win Hitler's blessing "by simply paying the price of separation from Rome."

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