After decades of ambivalence, document prepared by clergy says hundreds of priests gave spiritual guidance to Hitler’s soldiers on front, ‘lent war an additional sense of purpose’
In a new report after decades of ambivalence, Germany’s council of Catholic bishops has finally admitted to the church’s complicity in the actions of the Nazi regime during World War II, The Times reported Friday.
The 23-page document by the council reportedly states, “Inasmuch as the bishops did not oppose the war with a clear ‘no,’ and most of them bolstered the [German nation’s] will to endure, they made themselves complicit in the war.”
This included providing hundreds of priests who joined Nazi soldiers on the front lines of the war to offer spiritual guidance between 1939 and 1945 and the conversion of thousands of church properties into military hospitals where tens of thousands of nuns worked as nurses, says the document, produced 75 years after the collapse of Hitler’s Third Reich.
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