Weekly Warns Coughlin Will Be Weapon Against Catholics

When Father Coughlin’s anti-Jewish campaign is no longer useful to the Nazis to justify persecution of Jews, the Nazis will find his example invaluable to justify persecution of the Catholic clergy, declares The Commonweal in its leading editorial.

“They can point him out, with the customary accent of ‘Aryan’ virtue, in their references to ‘black priestcraft of the Vatican’,” the editorial asserted. “Father Coughlin, the Nazis know, may easily be presented as a priest seeking with no little energy secular power of his own in political life.”

The weekly said the American people believe that what Father Coughlin, and certain Catholic weeklies like the Brooklyn Tablet, turn out on the subject of race is anti-Semitism. Such utterances, the editorial asserted, contrasted with denunciations of racism by Archbishop Mitty, Cardinal Mundelein and the Pope himself.

“The habit of specious selection in loading blame on Jews recalls too vividly the propaganda of the Nazis before they took power,” the editorial continued. “They also expressed all kindly consideration for the ‘good Jew’ as opposed to the ‘international’ or bad Jew. They also manifested regard for the good, positive Christian, as opposed to the bad, unpatriotic Christian, especially those with a ‘foreign alliance.’ It is small consolation to the ‘good’ Christian and Jew in Germany to remember now that at one time Hitler defended them. We can’t forget either that modern anti-Semitism, condemned in a noble way as racism, must also be recognized from a most practical, everyday point of view as one side of a co in on whose reverse is inscribed ‘No Popery!'”