Letter to a Bishop

Since Gumbleton isn’t a Cardinal (gratias Deo!), shouldn’t he be addressed as “Your Excellency,” not “Your Eminence”?

It’s interesting how those with no sense of history other than facts filtered by their person agenda regularly chastise the Church for not having prophetic knowledge of the future.

Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. He had done nothing yet. Was the Church to declare war on him then? Kristalnacht [“The night of broken glass”], the first big attack on the Jews did not happen until November 9, 1938.

“Mit Brennender Sorge” [“With Burning Sorrow”], Pius XI’s major condemnation of the Nazis came on March 14, 1937, nearly two years earlier.

A concise summary of Church in Germany during the Nazi era can be found here.

An excerpt:

Faulhaber, undeterred, pressed on with denunciations of Nazi policy on Catholic schools, youth organisations, rigged elections, sterilisation laws, attacks on the Pope and attempts to replace Christianity with what he called �ersatz� (fake) religious principles. He played a considerable role in the writing of the great anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (�With Burning Anxiety�) issued in March 1937. It denounced repeated attacks on the Catholic faith, the breaking of almost every article of the 1933 Concordat, and assailed Nazi ideology and political practice. The encyclical was smuggled into Germany under the eyes of Gestapo agents who had received warnings from Berlin to expect an important anti-Nazi pamphlet. Copies were secretly printed in various parts of the country and the underground Catholic network was engaged in distributing it to parishes throughout Germany. Hundreds of helpers, in cars, on motorbikes or bicycles, handed copies personally to priests, sometimes in the dead of night. The encyclical made it plain that the Nazis were intent on a �war of extermination� against the Catholic Church, and that after numerous rebuffs to diplomatic approaches from Rome, the Pope had decided to make a final stand.

The government reaction to the encyclical was immediate. A formal protest was sent from Berlin to Rome, and equally swiftly rejected by Cardinal Pacelli. An enraged Hitler and Goebbels cranked up the propaganda machine and once more dozens of clerics found themselves arraigned on the hoary old charges of immorality and �slandering� the Nazi state. Gestapo units were mobilised to find which presses had produced the encyclical: 12 were confiscated and the editors arrested. In one parish, Essen in the diocese of Oldenburg, seven girls were arrested inside the church as they handed out copies of Mit brennender Sorge after the Palm Sunday service.

I thought his excellency retired? And as someone from the Detroit area who is very familiar with this publicity hound what can we do?