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There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia. In January 1999, Pope John Paul II, without changing Catholic teaching, appealed for a consensus to end the death penalty on the ground that it was "both cruel and unnecessary".
Catholic politician Eugen Bolz at the People's Court. Staatspräsident of Württemberg in 1933, he was overthrown by the Nazis. Later arrested for his role in the 20 July Plot to overthrow Hitler, he was beheaded in January 1945. Catholic Centre Party politician Josef Wirmer (far right) in the People's Court, 1944.
Catholics fought on both sides during the Second World War, and Hitler's invasion of predominantly-Catholic Poland ignited the conflict in 1939. In the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany , as in the annexed regions of Slovenia and Austria , Nazi persecution of the church was intense; many Polish clergy were targeted for extermination.
This is a list, in chronological order, of present and past offences to which the Catholic Church has attached the penalty of excommunication; the list is not exhaustive. In most cases these were " automatic excommunications", wherein the violator who knowingly breaks the rule is considered automatically excommunicated from the church ...
The Catholic Church had technically banned the practice of selling indulgences as long ago as 1567. As the Times points out, a monetary donation wouldn't go amiss toward earning an indulgence.
In the United States, the National Catholic Welfare Conference reported that the German Catholic bishops jointly expressed their "horror" at the policy in their 1942 Pastoral Letter: [25] Every man has the natural right to life and the goods essential for living. The living God, the Creator of all life, is sole master over life and death.
Among the Catholic clergy who died at Dachau were many of the 108 Polish Martyrs of World War II. [77] Blessed Gerhard Hirschfelder died of hunger and illness in 1942. [78] Saint Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite, died of a lethal injection in 1942. Blessed Alojs Andritzki, a German priest, was given a lethal injection in 1943. [79]
Hitler was born to a practicing Catholic mother, Klara Hitler, and was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church; his father, Alois Hitler, was a free-thinker and skeptical of the Catholic Church. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] In 1904, he was confirmed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Linz , Austria , where the family lived. [ 8 ]