Principalities and Powers: Spiritual Combat 1942-1943 (Fr. George Rutler)

Fr Rutler, a parish priest in Manhattan, New York and a well-known essayist, has taken his title from the famous quotation in St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. This is in part because of he wishes to show the larger forces at work during WWII and also because an old friend and fellow priest had bequeathed to him a pile of newspapers, journals and radio transcripts for this particular year. Growing up after the war, Rutler sees his book as “a feeble act of thanks from my generation” for the previous one that had endured so many sacrifices on behalf of future ones.

The papers, read long after the events they describe, emphasised for the author the stark and supernatural outlines of the conflict. He puts it thus: WWII “can rightly be understood and probably only fully appreciated as a holy war fought for multiple and mixed motives, but in its deepest meaning as a campaign against evil by defenders, consciously or obliviously, of the good.” Doubtless, secular historians such as Andrew Roberts or Sir Max Hastings, who has researched the “multiple and mixed motives” of the war in detail in his own books, would not demur from this conclusion. Certainly Churchill, not a conventional Christian believer but with a deep sense of what a Christian civilization signified, would have agreed with it.

The Tablet, the Catholic weekly journal, then edited by Douglas Woodruff and renowned for the gifted Catholic writers it attracted under its editorial banner of intelligent and vigorous orthodoxy, is often cited in these pages, as is L’Osservatore Romano and, interestingly, the Jewish Chronicle. Running through the whole account and forming the thread that unites it are the words and speeches of the wartime Pope, Pius XII. Occasionally he is criticised by one group or another for sounding too diplomatic at the expense of being prophetic; more often his is indeed a prophetic voice, quoted by the Jewish Chronicle as a defender of their own persecuted people in Nazi-occupied Europe. Among other reports the newspaper says that Catholic priests in France were playing a leading part in hiding hunted Jews “and sheltering the children of those under arrest.” Bishop Paul Remond of Nice is mentioned as playing a large part in this mission. This supports the verifiable records of Pius XII ordering his hierarchies around Europe to do everything they could to save Jews from arrest and transportation. In this policy Rutler believes he “marshalled prudence to save lives when impetuousness could have cost more.”

The newspaper cuttings make it clear that not all members of the hierarchy imitated the Pope’s charitable outreach to the Jews of Europe. The Archbishop of Salzburg, Mgr Sigismund Waitz, referred to the Jews as “an alien people” and Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna was reprimanded by Pius XI and his Secretary of State for “naively welcoming the Anschluss.” Cardinal Alfredo Schuster of Milan had at first been impressed by Mussolini, but by 1938 had turned against him in response to the anti-Jewish laws of the Fascist dictator. Rutler records that he was beatified by John Paul II in 1996, remarking that “Some saints have made mistakes in politics...Their sanctity is based on heroic virtue and the state of their souls at death.”

Rutler is fascinated by the way large historical events interweave with humbler but no less significant spiritual occurrences, relating that on the day of the British defeat in the first battle of El Alamein, Fr Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite, died in Dachau after giving his Rosary to the SS functionary who gave him a lethal injection. L’Osservatore Romano reported the death of Fr Maximilian Kolbe in Auschwitz (in August 1941) and that his Franciscan habit had been returned to his Polish monastery by the punctilious Germans.

Rutler is also alive to the mordant comedy the war occasioned; for instance, when Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens, threatened with a firing squad by the Germans, reminded them of the lynching of Patriarch Gregory of Constantinople by the Turks in 1821: “According to the tradition of the Greek Orthodox Church our prelates are hanged, not shot. Please respect our traditions.”

Cardinal Hinsley of Westminster, who died on 17 March 1943 and who had been outspoken against “all forms of totalitarianism” gets a good press. Amusingly, Churchill had wanted him to become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942, indicating “both his regard for Cardinal Hinsley and his own vague ecclesiology” (since the Reformation Archbishops of Canterbury have always been Anglican). King George VI was frustrated that protocol made it impossible for him to attend the Cardinal’s funeral. In contrast, Rutler makes several veiled ironic comments about the future Cardinal Spellman of New York, then going on junkets and jaunts around the world, and quotes the mischievous words of Cardinal William O’Connor of Boston: “[Spellman] is what you get when you teach a bookkeeper to read.”

Always alert to the twists of circumstances that link one era to the next, the author points out that Zyklon-B gas, notoriously used in the gas chambers of the extermination camps, was manufactured by IG Farben. After the war the company was broken into units, including Hoechst AG. In 1997 Hoechst AG bought Roussel Uclaf SA which had developed the RU-486 abortion pill.

Other clippings mention that in March 1943 the Nazis opened Crematorium IV at Auschwitz, “a streamlined death machine”. In April 1943 the mass graves of Polish army officers were discovered in Katyn Forest and the Archbishop of Krakow, Adam Sapieha, who included among his secret seminarians the young Karol Wojtyla, later a canonised Pope, sent a priest to Katyn to give Christian burial rites to the thousands of murdered men. In May 1943 an item mentions that a young doctor, Josef Mengele, had arrived at Auschwitz to assist the chief physician.

Rutler concludes this personal, thoughtful and eclectic survey with the sober reflection that although the war was won “there is no end to such a war, for it began in Eden and will contend until the world itself returns to the eternity from which it was made.”

'Rutler makes several veiled ironic comments about the future Cardinal Spellman of New York, then going on junkets and jaunts around the world, and quotes the mischievous words of Cardinal William O’Connor of Boston: “[Spellman] is what you get when you teach a bookkeeper to read.”'

Each week, Fr. Rutler writes a column to which you can subscribe on the parish web site. In this week's column, he writes:

I do not like most jargon, as it diminishes the creative power of the noble English language rightly used. For instance, I do not like to be told by bureaucratic sorts to “prioritize.” (Apparently, the first recorded instance of its use was in the 1972 presidential campaign.) As with all things, Christ the Living Word put it better when he said, “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33). God and his promise of eternal life should have priority over every other desire or concern.
Recently, many television viewers complained about a news bulletin covering the beheading of the journalist and devout Catholic, James Foley. Their objection was not to the horror of the news, but that it had interrupted the broadcast of a soap opera. We are learning quickly that people with that defective kind of priority will soon find out the hard way that life is not a soap opera. We are now engaged in a war, whether or not some politicians hesitate to call it that, and it must have priority over all other interests. The war is being fought by enemies of God, deluded by the conceit that they are fighting for God.
This is so hard for an indulged and selfish culture to accept, inasmuch as it means acknowledging that good and evil exist, though many would prefer to ignore the latter. Christians are being martyred in the Middle East, and public officials still find it hard to mention that those who are being crucified, beheaded, and driven from their homes are suffering because they are Christians.
The auxiliary bishop of Baghdad, Shlemon Warduni, said on Vatican radio: “We have to ask the world: Why are you silent? Why do not you speak out? Do human rights exist, or not? And if they exist, where are they? There are many, many cases that should arouse the conscience of the whole world: Where is Europe? Where is America?” The genocide of Christians, who have been in Iraq since shortly after the Resurrection, does not seem to have priority in the attention of many in our country.
As this suffering continues, many in the United States are willing to tolerate heresy and moral decadence in a vain attempt to “get along” with others. While Christians must “love the sinner and hate the sin,” there are an increasing number of people who are intimidated into enabling the sinner to advertise his sin. In 1992, Cardinal O’Connor said that compromising Catholic truth for the sake of political correctness “was not worth one comma in the Apostles' Creed.”
The holy martyrs in the Middle East honor the Church and atone for our degeneracy. Their bishops are willing to struggle and die with them. They must be amazed that bishops and people in other places have their priorities so wrong.

As you may know, Cardinal Dolan moved Fr. George Rutler from the Church of Our Saviour on Park Avenue, to St. Michael's in Hells's Kitchen. Fr. Rutler also serves as Administrator of Church of the Holy Innocents, a short distance from St. Michael's. Both parishes are on the short list of parishes recommended for closing. Holy Innocents offers 3 Daily Masses, and is the ONLY parish in Manhattan to offer the TLM.

Dolan is no O'Connor. Actions speak louder than words.

Thanks for posting this NYer. New Yorkers should get that newspaper front page image blown up to a gigantic billboard size, and place it somewhere near St. Patrick's Cathedral so that Dolan can see it often, and learn something about the virtue of courage, and about faithfulness to Church teachings.

(I'm starting to think that envy may be playing a part in Dolan's odious mistreatment of Fr. Rutler, as well as in his senseless interference in the cause for sainthood for Archbishop Fulton Sheen.)

I don't know if you got a chance to see these links concerning Fr. Rutler that I put into another thread the other day, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to put them here again in case you didn't see them. (I know you're a big fan of Fr. Rutler too.)

Here is that paragraph I posted on another thread:

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You may be interested in taking a look at this video clip, which is one of the last celebrations of the Latin Mass by Fr. George Rutler at The Church of Our Savior, Manhattan, before Cardinal Dolan reassigned him to another parish in "Hell's Kitchen".
   "Perhaps the last saying of Latin Mass by Fr. Rutler at Church of Our Savior, Manhattan"
You can read about Fr. Rutler's reassignment, and the apparent bad fruits of that reassignment in these articles and comments:
   "Fr. George Rutler Moved from Our Saviour to St. Michael’s"
   "Fr. Rutler reassigned in NYC"
   "It’s Extraordinary"
   "How Much Anaesthetic Does A Dolanoscopy Require?"

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