Summary

The issue of the position that the Roman Catholic Church took on Hitler's policies, with his primary goal to exterminate the Jewish nation, still causes rifts among historians. Apologists of the official Catholic stance make a point of highlighting the Church's unbending opposition to the German National Socialist Party's platform. On the other hand, ceratain accusatory works have come out in which the Church is presented as one of the Nazis' collaborators. Indeed, how to explain the German Episcopate's striking reticence as the influence of Hitler's party grew to alarming proportions in the country? Does one attribute this to a sense of powerlessness, incognizance, fear, or opportunistic convenience? Is the thesis tenable that makes of Catholics no less than a driving force in propelling Germany down a totalitarian track? Lastly, can the Church of today be said to have learned lessons or to have drawn conclusions from the experiences it went through during the period of Nazism?

The American religious expert Donald Nicholl writes about the subtle faculty referred to as "discernment of spirits", something which German bishops of the thirties found themselves sorely lacking. Professor F. Martin Rhonheimer delineates the reasons and history of the Church's silence in the face of the surge of anti-Semitism and the Third Reich's persecution of the Jews. Following that is a discussion on the German Church's attitude and on Hitler's policies with the participation of Professor Anna Wolff-Powęska, F. Manfred Desaelers, and F. Professor Grzegorz Ryś.

Our April issue also provides a follow-up to Małgorzata Wiertlewska's reflection on F. Tomasz Węcławski's theological thought, along with fresh contributions to Janusz Poniewierski and Piotr Kłodkowski's regular pages.

This month Znak is starting a new column called "1984", created for and by university students. The opening edition contains two polemical texts, one by Jakub Lubelski and the other by Michał Godzic, on the generation of twenty-year-olds.

POCZĄTEK STRONY