The Innitzer Moment 2008

"The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that while Bishops support some of Obama's goals, such as universal health care, they are troubled by his promise to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which they argue would remove legal restrictions on abortion procedures and require health care providers -- including those who are Catholic -- to offer the abortion services. George said, 'We are particularly concerned with the freedom of conscience of health care workers and the Catholic health care system.' He added, 'They stand as witnesses to the world that there is someplace in our society where no one is deliberately killed'"

Source

A society that does not pray for the dead and aborts children in the womb cannot talk about justice.

I am sure that some Bishops in Austria in 1938 supported the anti-communist goals of Hitler, but it did not take long for Cardinal Innitzer to realise what a dreadful mistake he had made when he welcomed Hitler.

This was in contrast to the Protestant pastors of Austria who were so fanatically Nazi that Hitler honoured them with a special reception. He kept Cardinal Innitzer waiting for a meeting.

Extract below from The Holy Reich

Some of the loudest protests came from Austrian pastors (when all Protestant pastors were expelled from the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in 1939) . For years, while the NSDAP was banned in Austria, Protestants had stood in the forefront of support fof Nazism and Austria's reintegration into Germany. As in the case of Georg von Schönerer, this tendency fit in with an historical understanding of the nation that German nationalists in the Habsburg Empire associated with Protestantism. This held true as well in the 1930s. After 1933, the number of conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism in Austria increased dramatically, reaching 20,000 in the first half of 1934 alone. (Cathcon-one has to wait until 2008 and the Father Wagner case before there was such a wave of conversion again- but many came back when they got their own way)

Since 1898, the highest number of Protestant converts in one year had been' only
6,ooo. Konrad Henlein, the Sudeten Nazi leader who later became Gauleiter of the annexed Sudetenland, had been a convert to Protestantism out of "conviction and love for his Volk," as one pastor put it.Even Hitler acknowledged the strongly nationalist element of Austrian Protestantism. Long after he gave up on the Reich Church, he told Rosenberg that he "previously had certain impressions which he had brought from his Austrian background, where the Protestants had been a national church."

The German Anschluß of Austria was greeted by the Austrian Protestant Church as a "gift from God," as the salvation of the Volk from materialism through the hands of the Führer.

The Protestant Church in Austria even agreed with the Nazis' abolition of the confessional school, which for Protestants was associated with the long-endured dominance of the Catholic Church and the privileged Status it enjoyed in the Austrian State.In January 1939 the Deutsch-Evangelische Korrespondenz reported with great pride on the place of Protestant pastors in the Austrian Nazi movement:

Of the-127 Austrian pastors who responded to an inquiry, 73 were members of the NSDAP (Cathcon !!!!!!).

Before the Anschluß, the paper reported, pastors' homes often served as meeting places for the party. Pastors could be found holding party office as school leaders, organization leaders, cultural experts, and up the chain of command to Ortsgruppenleiter- The paper went on to point out that, because of their involvement in Nazism, several of these pastors suffered State action against them, including seventeen imprisoned or placed under house arrest.

Given their devotion to the Nazi cause and the consequences they endured at the hands of the Austrian authorities, these pastors could only receive the news of their expulsion with great indignation. One letter, writ-ten by a Protestant theology Student, expressed fairly typical sentiments. As a Protestant Christian, this Student was a convinced National Socialist and "true follower of the Führer" during the time of illegality. His fellow theol¬ogy students were some of Austria's most ardent Nazis. This Student pointed out that Hitler himself was aware of this, as he had.received an official dep-utation of the Protestant Church in Vienna on 9 April 1938, shortly after the Nazis entered the city. Others protested as well, all pointing out how they suffered legal and social consequences for joining what was then an illegal organization. One Pastor Kühne of Vienna boasted that he had been clandestinely supporting the movement since 1920.

See also 100 percent Protestant vote for Hitler