Joseph McCabe (1867-1955) was one of the most prolific authors of all time. He was brought up as a Roman Catholic, worked on Latin documents, and made himself very well-informed about Christianity, but turned against it. But he was extremely naive about Jews; bear this in mind.

Click for Detailed notes on McCabe - scroll down for selections from A Rationalist Encyclopaedia (1948).

Here's the full A Rationalist Encyclopaedia (about 1.3 MBytes; Word format; includes notes on some of its limits)

Religion in Germany.

J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia

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      Germany, Religion in. Certain religious aspects of the (German) Holy Roman Empire and the Reformation are discussed under those heads. The modern development began with the founding of the German Empire, in 1871. Since the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine added very materially to the Catholic population, which Protestant Prussia already regarded with distrust, a quarrel soon developed, and Bismarck launched a heavy campaign against the Roman hierarchy. [See Kulturkampf.] But the rapid growth of a new enemy, Socialism, caused the Emperor to abandon Bismarck's policy and seek alliance with the Catholic Church against Socialism. The accession of a new Pope, Leo XIII, who had the illusion that he was a great diplomat - in fact during his pontificate the Church lost, largely through his blunders, almost as heavily as at the Reformation - facilitated the alliance, and from that date the Kaiser and his statesmen were accustomed to speak with respect of "our two great Churches." Reference-works and the Press still almost always describe the German people as two-thirds Protestant and one-third Catholic, though at other times they explain Nazi barbarity on the ground that the population has become suddenly irreligious. Scepticism had, however, made the same progress in Germany as in France and Great Britain, as the immense circulation of the Atheistic works of Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Buechner, Haeckel, etc., testifies, and, although the Catholic birth-rate is much higher than the general rate, the Roman Church steadily lost ground, and the life-and-death struggle to which the Pope had committed it had disastrous consequences.
      In view of the bitter mutual hostility with which this struggle was conducted, election figures here afford decisive evidence. The Catholics were politically organized in the Centre Party [see] and the Bavarian People's Party, and only a very negligible number of them would defy the bishops and vote, against their stern orders, for Socialists or Communists. These election statistics therefore prove that the Catholic Church in Germany had lost about 10,000,000 followers before Hitler seized power. In the twenty years after the alliance to fight Socialism the proportion of the Catholic to the total vote fell, in spite of the high Catholic birth-rate, from 201 to 19.3 per cent (figures in the official Statistisches Jahrbuch). By 1910 the total vote had doubled, but the Catholic vote had risen by only about 50 per cent. At the last free election (1932) the total vote was 35,148,470. The Catholic share of this, while every work of reference continued to describe the Catholics as one-third of the nation, was 5,326,583 votes, or little over one-seventh; and this was with the support of the Jews (against Hitler), as the Catholic writer E. Pitter shows in his work Der Weg des politischen Katholicismus (1934). The Communists and Socialists polled 13,000,000 votes; the Nazis, who made a supreme effort with the financial aid, since disclosed by Hugenberg and Thyssen, of the big industrialists, polled only 11,737,391 votes, or less than one-third of the whole.
      The statement that the Nazis began to persecute both Churches when, largely through the Pope's blunder, as we shall see, they secured power, is false. It was part of Hitler's amateurish imperial scheme that religious influence should be made stronger than ever by some vaguely conceived blend or amalgamation of the rival sects in one National Christian Church, which he would subsidize generously. As far as the Lutherans are concerned, the great majority of the clergy and laity readily accepted the new regime. Rebels like Pastor Niemoeller - few in England reflected that his was almost the only name of a recalcitrant Protestant minister that appeared in the Press, though for a time he had the support of several hundred less important ministers - based their objections upon the interference of the State with their credal formularies, and did not attack Hitler's criminal ambition and savage treatment of Jews, Communists, Pacifists, etc. A staunch Protestant writer, D. Schafer (Die Bibel im dritten Reich, 1935), boasts of the healthy condition of the Lutheran Church in his country and of the enormous circulation of the Bible. This was repeated by the American Bible Society in 1939, which said that in 1938 the sale of the Bible had exceeded that of Mein Kampf by 200,000 copies. On February 5, 1940, the News-Chronicle reproduced the boast of a New York commentator of the National Broadcasting Co. that there was in Germany "a growth of religious fervour on a scale not known for many years; churches and cathedrals are crowded with worshippers." Although Hitler had effectively replied in 1939, in a speech reproduced in the London Press, that, instead of persecuting religion, the Nazis had paid a subsidy of 1,770 million marks to the Churches in five years (1933-8), had quadrupled the subsidy of their predecessors, and had not closed a single church, and although it was generally agreed in 1940 that at least four-fifths of the nation (still described in annuals as two-thirds Protestant and one-third Catholic) fully supported Hitler, British and American religious periodicals and the Protestant bishops continued to make it a charge against him that he "persecuted all religion." In the meantime the more solemn speeches of Hitler, Goering, Von Papen, and most of the leading Nazis, contained pious invocations of the Almighty on every important occasion.
      This painful misrepresentation in the Press, to the detriment of Rationalism, was worst on the Catholic side. At the end of 1932 the Pope, after a deal with Hitler through the Catholic Von Papen, ordered German Catholics to drop their opposition to him. This is stated in the impartial Annual Register for 1933 and in an article in the Catholic Revue des Deux Mondes (January 15, 1935); and Von Papen boasted of his mediation in an address to Catholics which was later published (Der 12 November, 1933). The Nazi vote at the next election, after Goering had fired the Reichstag, rose to 17,000,000 (still less than half the country, it should be noted), and Hitler, as head of the strongest single party, took power and destroyed the parliamentary system. Against this, and the horrible outrages that followed, and even the Blood-Purge of 1934 (in which several Catholic leaders perished), the Pope and the German hierarchy did not utter a word of protest. They continued to press Hitler for an alliance (News-Chronicle, September 12, 1936, Times, November 4, 1936, etc.), especially as he had now entered upon a policy which threatened the Church with more terrible losses than ever. As is stated in the article Franciscans, the police, at the beginning of 1936, arrested 276 Franciscan monks (lay brothers with a few priests) in one single Catholic district on a charge of sodomy. Most of the remaining friars of the province were secretly warned and fled the country. Of the sensational trials that followed, no British paper gave any account, but they occasionally reproduced false Catholic statements that the charges were merely technical financial irregularities or were Nazi fabrications. For a short summary of the facts see McCabe's Papacy in Modern Politics (cheap ed. 1940, pp. 76-9). Here it can be said only that the statement that the charges and trials were a fraudulent part of a Nazi persecution of the Church was a deliberate untruth of the American and British clergy. Every police official involved in the inquiries and arrests was a Catholic; every single witness was a loyal Catholic; nine-tenths of the friars pleaded guilty and accused each other in court, though they got no reduction of sentence; and the Pope, after the first ten trials, suppressed the entire Westphalian province of Franciscan monks on the ground of irregularities. All trials were held in Catholic cities (Coblenz, Bonn, Cologne, Munich, etc.), and were fully reported in and approved by the papers of those cities (which have three Catholic readers to one Nazi). From Westphalia the exposure spread north to the Dutch frontier, south to Austria, and all over Germany, and a number of religious brothers, priests, monks, etc., which Goebbels declared to be "several thousands," were arrested for sodomy or seduction of the young or feebleminded. The World Almanac for 1939 (p. 236) says that "up to October 1938 more than 8,000 Catholic monks and lay brothers had been arrested by Nazi officials," or half the total number in Germany; that 242 monastic priests and brothers were "sentenced on immorality charges"; and that 188 priests were acquitted or released without trial. The last sentence is misleading. The present writer read the reports of dozens of trials of secular priests in the German Press and all were convicted of sodomy. This completed the disorganization of the Catholic body in Germany, the proudest in the Church, and it now probably numbers not more than 10,000,000 followers, instead of one-third of the population (about 80,000,000). Home Page

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