Free Republic

CATHOLICISM & THE ROOTS OF NAZISM: Religious Identity & National Socialism, by Derek Hastings. 290 pages, illustrated. Oxford Although numerous Catholic apologists have been concerned to deny it, it goes without saying that a mass political party organized in 85% Catholic Bavaria must have been, in some sense, compatible with Roman Catholicism. And so it was. In “Catholicism & the Roots of Nazism,” Derek Hastings shows precisely how this worked and, following the failed putsch of 1923, how Nazism left Catholicism behind. Bavarian Catholics before 1914 were deeply divided between “politicals,” allied to the Center Party and the Vatican; and...