Introduction

I have translated a section of Bishop Alois Hudal’s Römische Tagebücher: Lebensbeichte eines alten Bischofs (Graz: Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1976) pp. 161-173. Hudal had encountered a priest who had gotten into trouble because of sexual abuse.

Hudal, the head of the German College in Rome during the 1930s and 1940s, is of great historical interest because he tried to reconcile National Socialism and Roman Catholicism.1There is an extensive discussion of Hudal in Peter Godman’s Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives That Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church (New York: Free Press, 2004). This bizarre attempt, unappreciated both by the Nazis and by the Vatican, was motivated by a mixture of pan-German nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-Communism, opportunism, and egotism (with the last element predominating). Hudal assisted the post-war escape of Nazi criminals, such as Franz Stangl, commandant of the extermination camp at Treblinka, in which a million Jews were gassed and cremated.2Hudal’s role in the escape of Nazi murderers from justice is discussed in Gerald Steinacher’s Nazis auf der Flucht: Wie Kriegsverbrecher über Italien nach Übersee Entkamen (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2009). The Red Cross document that indicates that Stangl’s address in Rome was Hudal’s address in reproduced on page 132. Stangl describes his meeting with Hudal in Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (1974. New York: Vintage Books, 1983) p. 289. Hudal justified the help he gave these murderers because Christianity is a religion of forgiveness, as Judaism is a religion of vengeance (Talmudhass) – at least according to Hudal.

After the war the Italian press attacked Hudal for the help he had given to Nazis, and Vatican pressure finally forced Hudal to retire in 1953. In his embittered retirement he wrote Römische Tagebücher: Lebensbeichte eines alten Bischofs (Roman Dairy: The Life Confessions of an Old Bishop). In the chapter “Arme Brüder,” from which this selection is taken, Hudal recounted stories of people in trouble who came to him for help. There is no particular reason to doubt the veracity of these stories, but Hudal’s rhetorical purpose is to show himself a sympathetic person whom people seek out for help because they know he is the type of human being who will help. Thereby Hudal seeks to justify the help he gave to Nazi war criminals to enable them to escape justice.

Hudal is careful to conceal particulars of Canon N. We may assume he was from a German-speaking country. Hudal wrote his book in the 1950s. Canon N. seems to have been ordained around 1900. The case of N. had been decided long ago, and N. had lived his double life for twenty years, so the story seems to belong to the first third of the twentieth century.

When the Vatican laicized N., it still held him to the requirement of celibacy. In the 1950s Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paraclete, criticized this policy, and it was  changed, so that now priests and religious who are returned to the lay state also receive permission to marry. However Hudal does not seem to realize that this permission would be irrelevant to Canon N., whose sexual desires were exclusively homosexual.

Also note the assumption of the existence of hereditary mental problems. This assumption is based on a biological determinism that was popular in many circles in the first half of the twentieth century (and later), but was somewhat contaminated by its use by the Nazis. The Church was suspicious of this concept for many reasons. Note also the general doubts that Hudal has about celibacy, although his sympathy for a national church and fear that celibacy isolates the priest from the blood of the nation has somewhat of a Nazi tinge.

Canon N.

I encountered a totally different type of human being in the poor brother of a foundation of canons, who because of repeated misconduct (179) was declared forfeit of all clerical rights by the Holy Office, the highest moral authority of the Roman Church, without being freed from the duties of this status in regard to celibacy. Years had passed since this decision. He made himself sick to death about it. He was sent from one monastery to another. Everywhere the first question of his brothers was, Why as a cleric doesn’t he say mass? Marked with the sign of Cain, he went from place to place, fleeing a world that had no love or kind word for him. On the contrary, as soon as they learned of his past and of his errors, they judged and damned him again. Truly a poor brother!

The tragedy of this hard fate led me to speak up for a revision of the whole ecclesiastical process of handling cases and especially the judgment at the highest level. My suggestion was to free him from all priestly activities and duties and to prepare for him the way to a reasonable middle-class occupation.

I had no success, although this pitiable priestly penitent acknowledged his guilt with a flood of tears and a reasonable program of life as a layman would perhaps have saved him. This unhappy man, whose final fate deeply moved me for years and always came to the surface of my memory, belonged to a certain foundation of canons, whose essential purpose had become difficult in our world with its urgent social questions. They occupied themselves with the care of souls like many other old orders, which had become untrue to their original purpose for which they were founded, because secular priests are in the first place called to pastoral work. In any case these half-cloistered, half-secular minded men, lived a life unperturbed by earthly cares, with which fathers of families and single people were oppressed in the factories of industrial cities.

Everything from getting out of bed to the obligatory pious exercises that broke the monotony of life is ordered according to a good rule. These men could fall into heaven from this vale of tears, if only from time to time the all-too-human did not disturb their rest. Like conservators in a museum of archeology they watched over immense art treasures of past centuries. The Roman Curia only rarely intervened with reforms, when for example offenses became too great or too well-known. The Curia did not easily discard outdated monastic forms, out of tender consideration for the usually canonized founders and dragged through the centuries outlived, rotten things, like an old woman who separate herself from the household junk of her youth. Only secular history from time to time mercilessly intervenes with its destructive and constructive power and destroys what competent authorities would neither preserve nor modernize.

The family history of this poor brother was strange enough. Canon N. came from a decayed family. The father was disposed to melancholy and sensuality. The parents’ marriage broke up early on, because, among other things, the mother, advised by a pious confessor, from fear of danger to life in the case of a third birth, denied or at least discouraged the marital act so that her husband refrained from it, only soon to have an affair with an unmarried person, with whom he, over 60 years old, fathered children who embraced him with warm love and graced the evening of his life. He died, without being able to be reconciled to his first wife because a second, purely-civilly contracted marriage ruled out any possibility of reconstructing the life of his first family that had ended in divorce.