Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Abortion and the Hovering Ghost of the Nazi-Vatican Concordat By David Gottfried

I always felt simpatico with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  She was a Jew, and I am a Jew.  She was a liberal, and for most of my life I was a true blue liberal.  Her roots were in Brooklyn, New York, and my Brooklyn roots are so strong that when I was a teenager, I wrote a poem entitled, “Mother Brooklyn and Father Marx.”  Although I never knew her, I believe we adored the same highly caloric Eastern European Jewish delicacies.  She could have been a kinder and more brilliant version of my Maternal Aunt.

However, I have to part company with her on the issue of abortion (Although she criticized the legal strategy underlying Roe v. Wade, she was firmly pro-Choice), and thinking of abortion and Ginsburg, I cannot help but think of very vile historical developments that occurred in the year of her birth, 1933.  I am speaking of not only Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power but also of the Nazi-Vatican Concordat.   (Before I explain the connection between the Nazi-Vatican Concordat and contemporary political fights regarding abortion, I must briefly summarize a few salient religious developments, in Germany, in the past few centuries. Bear with me.) 

The Nazi-Vatican Concordat resolved disputes between the rising Nazi tiger and the ancient Catholic Church.  Many German Catholics found fault with Hitlerite Militarism, and the Catholic Church, unlike Protestant denominations, stressed universality and held that we are all children of God. The Lutheran faith corrupted Christianity by sanctifying German nationalism, and Martin Luther was a notorious anti-Semite who chastised the Catholic Church for not being sufficiently Anti-Semitic and for believing that the native Americans of the new world were our brothers.  The German-Lutheran  Weltanschauung held that the native Americans of the new world constituted an inferior race.  With this singular act of stupidity and intellectual savagery, Modern European racism was born.

When the modern German nation was born, in 1870, Prussia, the leading German state, saw fit to implement stern and punitive measures to make Catholic Bavaria conform to the nationalistic and militaristic ethos of Prussia.   German nationalists implemented the “Kulturkampf,” or cultural struggle, designed to subject the Catholic Church to state controls and to weed-out and strangle pacificism and the failure to worship the state.  In the course of the Kulturkampf, some priests and nuns were put to death.

In any event, after Hitler came to power, the fissure between German Protestant aggressiveness and Catholicism was accentuated.  Indeed, the leading Protestant theologian of the time, Gerhard Kittel, said, in 1933, that the solution to the Jewish problem was simple:  Eliminate the Jews.  

At the time Hitler came to power, there was a German

Catholic party which found fault with his veneration of Valhalla and Mars and which could have been the germ of resistance against the Nazi regime.  Since there were so many millions of Catholics in Germany, the Catholic Church, if it had stood fast to its faith, could have, perhaps, toppled the Nazi regime.  (Until the late 1930’s, Hitler’s hold on power was precarious.  Some historians claim that if the French, in 1936, had shown any resistance to the militarization of the Rhineland, Hitler would have withdrawn his forces from the West Bank of the Rhine, and his government would have collapsed.)   

Hitler needed to silence the nascent Catholic opposition, and the Vatican was his ally. In part, the Pope may have admired fascism because of its fierce opposition to communism.  (Christopher Hitchens quite rightly argues that some Catholic regimes in Europe were wedded to fascism, including Slovakia and Croatia, and Catholic Poland, the fascists in Spain, and Vichy France were extremely antisemitic.)   Adolf Hitler and the Vatican achieved their goals by making two reciprocal pledges in the infamous Nazi-Vatican Concordat: 

1) The Catholic Church agreed not to interfere with, criticize or impede the policies and programs of the Third Reich.  The Catholic Church was to concern itself only with the internal workings of the Church.  Toward this end, the Pope instructed the German Catholic party to dissolve.  The authors of this infamous accord arguably subscribed to what liberals in the United States exalt as the wall between Church and State.  

2)      In consideration for the Pope’s pledge, Nazi Germany agreed not to interfere with the internal workings of the Church. 

Essentially, the Church understood that religion would be freed of concerning itself with right and wrong or morals.  A German Catholic would express his Catholicism by singing certain songs, wearing quaint outfits such as lederhosen, stuffing himself with sausages and being a big stooge and fool.  Controversial things like morality were not the proper purview of the Church. 

In this country, the pro abortion lobby holds that religion must stay out of politics.  They hold that the infiltration of religious ideas into the political arena sullies our democracy just as surely as salmonella bacteria sullies the purity of our food.  When they claim that religious people must cease and desist from political activity to curb or ban abortion, they are reminiscent of the advocates of the Nazi-Vatican concordat who said that Catholics should cease and desist from criticizing Adolf Hitler.

I suppose that some people might try to rebut my contention because we cannot allow religious people to muscle their way into government and compel us to pass legislation compelling the worship of Jesus or the adoption of the Jewish dietary laws.  Of course, I agree that we would dishonor the First Amendment and the most cherished principles of American democracy if we passed legislation compelling Judaism,  Christianity or Islam.

However, there are religious principles which are indistinguishable from fundamental moral principles, and we must adhere to them if our society is to have any semblance of being humane.  There is a principle, advocated by believers and atheists alike, that tells us “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”  Although non-believers can be fervent believers in peace (I am thinking, for example, of the members of the Society for Ethical Culture), religious people can supply the energy and determination to make humane changes possible (Consider the religious foundations of the Black Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, etc.)

I am a Jew, and as a Jew I have often chafed at Christian assertion and dominance and, in particular, Catholic Anti-Semitism.  However, I think that Catholic antisemitism may, in the final analysis, be seen not as something originating in Catholicism per se. Rather, I think Freud hit the nail on the head when he opined, in “Moses and Monotheism,” that the antisemitism of European Catholics demonstrates that they never were completely Christianized in the first place and bore far too many vestigial remnants of their pagan past. 

Jews and Catholics believe in many of the same things. We believe that murder is wrong.  We believe that the State at times must be defied.  (However I have always felt queasy about Jesus’s reputed assertion to “render onto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” a concept which is one of many reasons which have made me proud to be a Jew). I have respect and love for those Christians who, believing that killing is wrong,  condemn the killings condoned by the State.  If Christians believe that abortion is wrong, then they should shout their denunciations from the rooftops and have nothing to do with the lily livered political correctness that opines that religion should be seen, in the form of festive Christmas trees, and not heard.  Finally, I cannot help but wonder that if more Christians had remained true to the religion of the Holy Writ, of the religion of John Brown, of the religion of the Jewish Maccabees, of the religion of noble and furious resistance against evil, there would not have been an Auschwitz.