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THE VATICAN AGAINST EUROPE
the recommendation to the flock to 'follow unreservedly the Great German State and its Fuhrer' as well as the other recommendation, addressed to the clergy, 'to refrain from taking part in polities'. This again is in accordance with the decisions not only of the Pope, but also of the German Episcopate. . . . "The fourth paragraph forecasts nothing less than the dissolution of the Catholic youth associations; for this is the special meaning of the invitation to the 'chiefs of the youth organizations to make ready for their reunion with the youth organizations of the German Reich'. ... To hand over Catholic youth to Baldur von Schirach's control was to make it follow the 'Rosenberg line'. . . . One has only to examine now the third paragraph of his bulletin: "From a belief in the communion of spirits derives, for Christians, the conviction that the nation s natural community must fulfil a divine idea; hence the practice of the natural virtues must be the condition of a true religious life.". . . "That is the crucial point of all these directives. . . . This bulletin is the manifest agreement between Catholicism and National Socialism. . . . "In Germany, people are devoted to the authoritarian spirit of the National Socialist movement. To illustrate this point, one need do no more than take a close look at the speeches made at the Maria Laach congress. We shall mention only that of the Reverend Father Ildefonso Herwegen, Abbot of this Benedictine monastery who had long had the reputation of being the mouthpiece of those who sympathized with National Socialism. On this occasion, he was pleased to draw a parallel between the authoritarian spirit of monastic life and that of the Third Reich. "Two years later, in 1935, he wrote a preface to the strangest book that has ever appeared amongst Catholic publications in Germany. It was called 'Katholisch-Konservatives Erbgut'. This anthology, which is a collection of texts by the principal German Catholic theorists, from Gorres to Vogelsang, would have us believe that National Socialism is based purely and simply on the fundamental ideas of Catholicism. ..." That well-known journalist Emile Bure35 also recalls how the 25
L'Ordre de Paris, 9 January 1947.