A moral authority critiqued Rethinking the role of the Roman Catholic Church during the Holocaust Master Thesis by Jet van der Meer Student Number: 3216527 Email:
[email protected] Master Politics & Society in Historical Perspective First Advisor: G.G. von Frijtag Drabbe Kunzel 23-05-2013 Contents Introduction p. 1 Chapter 1: The Pope and the Vatican p. 12 Chapter 2: Poland p. 29 Part I: Interwar Poland p. 31 Part II: World War II and the Holocaust p. 43 Chapter 3: Belgium p. 63 Part I: Interwar Belgium p. 65 Part II: World War II and the Holocaust p. 81 Conclusion p. 98 List of Literature p. 104 Introduction "To the Church belongs the right always and everywhere to announce moral principles, including those pertaining to the social order, and to make judgments on any human affairs to the extent that they are required by the fundamental rights of the human person or the salvation of souls."1 "In the moral order she [the Church] bears a mission distinct from that of political authorities: the Church is concerned with the temporal aspects of the common good because they are ordered to the sovereign Good, our ultimate end.” 2 Theoretically, professing a doctrine of absolute morality which contains eternal commandments like "Thou shalt not kill", an institution like the Catholic Church would presumably have rebuked vigorously an event as terrible as the Holocaust, and must have done everything in its power to stop the genocide and aid its victims during the 1930s and 1940s. However, according to historians Daniel Goldhagen and Michael Phayer, this was not the case.