What role did the religious leaders play during World War 2?
1) “Before the outbreak of World War II in the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, Pope Pius XI “condemned the neopaganism of the Nazi ideology-especially its theory of racial superiority…”. Drafted by the future Pope Pius XII and read from the pulpits of all German Catholic churches, it described Hitler as an insane and arrogant prophet and was the first official denunciation of Nazism made by any major organization. Pius XI later warned a group of pilgrims that antisemitism is incompatible with Christianity. Nazi reprisals against the Church in Germany followed thereafter, including “staged prosecutions of monks for homosexuality, with the maximum of publicity”. When Dutch bishops protested against the wartime deportation of Jews, the Nazis responded with harsher measures rounding up 92 converts including Edith Stein who were then deported and murdered. “The brutality of the retaliation made an enormous impression on Pius XII.” In Poland, the Nazis murdered over 2,500 monks and p
