Transgressions by priests against their other vows of celibacy and so on do not interest us at all. Nor has any word about this ever appeared in our press.
Incidentally, this state has intervened only once in the internal organization of the churches, namely when I myself tried in 1933 to combine the impotent, fractured Protestant state churches in Germany into one large and powerful Protestant Reich Church.
This was thwarted by the opposition of various state bishops. After that, this attempt was given up; after all, in the end, it is not our task to defend the Protestant Church by force against its own officials, let alone strengthen it!
When foreign countries, and especially certain democratic statesmen, now advance the cause of individual German priests so vigorously, it can only be for a political reason. For the same statesmen were silent when hundreds of thousands of priests were mowed down or burned in Russia; they were silent when tens of thousands of priests and nuns were barbarically slaughtered or burned alive in Spain.
They could not deny these facts, but they were and are silent, whereas – and I must say this to the democratic statesmen – in response to these slaughters many National Socialist and Fascist volunteers made themselves available to General Franco to help prevent this Bolshevist bloodlust [Blutrausch] from spreading further across Europe and thus across the better part of civilized humanity.
For it was concern for European culture and true civilization that drove Germany to take sides in this battle of nationalist Spain against its Bolshevist destroyers.
It does not say much for the mentality of various countries when people cannot even imagine that someone would act out of unselfish motives. But National Socialist Germany took part in the elevation of General Franco merely out of an ardent desire that he might succeed in saving his country from a danger to which Germany itself very nearly succumbed at one time.
Thus it cannot be sympathy or pity for persecuted servants of God that is mobilizing the interest democratic citizens are taking in individual priests who have run afoul of the law; rather, it is an interest in the enemy of the German state.
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