A nation-wide movement has been launched by the Catholic Church in Germany by the issue to-day of Pastoral letters by the Cardinal Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Schulte and the Archbishops of Muenster, Osnabrueck, Treves and Limburg, warning all Catholics against the false teachings of Hitlerism and declaring that no true Satholic may have anything to do with the Hitlerist movement “because the religion of race-hatred cannot be reconciled with the Catholic religion.”
The Roman Catholic Bishop of Mayence, Bishop Ludwig Maria Hugo, was the first Roman Catholic Prelate in Germany to issue a pastoral letter immediately after the Hitlerist victory in the September elections, forbidding Catholics in his diocese under pain of excommunication to belong to the Fitlerist movement, whose teachings he declared to be irreconcilable with Christianity. The Hitlerists were furious, and violent attacks were made on him in the Fitlerist press, and he was even attacked by Hitlerists in the streets of Mayence. Soon after the Cardinals of Munich and Breslau issued similar pastoral letters denouncing Hitlerism as anti-Christian. About a fortnight ago, the Bishops of all the eight dioceses in Bavaria published a pronouncement prohibiting Catholics from belonging to the Hitlerist movement, because the Hitlerists deny the divine inspiration of the old Tostament, which they denounce as a Jewish work and refuse to recognise even the authority of the Ten Commandments because they were given through Moses.
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