Marriage And Family Is No Longer A Private Matter

Newsletter 6: 17 March 1936 

(part one)

“Daily events of the Kulturekampf in the Third Reich often turn one’s attention away from the permanent and implacable process of the expulsion of Christianity and humanism from the area of both public and private life. This struggle is not observed among Catholics abroad, since it is directed by legal processes arising from within existing legislation, while it cannot arouse the protests of the Catholic clergy living under the conditions of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, the pastoral letters of the bishops have expressed on numerous occasions their grave reservations about the devastation caused by the deChristianization of legislation in the areas of marriage, the family and education. 

In reality, the damage, not only to the Church but to the whole Christian order, caused by the ‘biologizing’ of legislation and the whole of public life under the Third Reich, is much graver and full of greater consequence than the wounds caused by the daily skirmishes arising from the Kulturekampf. We have already drawn attention to the proposals for the reform of marriage law, particularly the laws on divorce. The upheavals caused by the Nazis to international law, and also to civil and criminal law, arise from the same cause: they are a consequence of the application of the racist biological principle, the transformation of a totalitarian worldview (Weltanschauung) into world domination. The principal obstacle to this worldview, according to the regime’s declarations, is the civil code which enshrines the principal enemy to be extirpated—the fundamental rights of the Christian-humanist-liberal ethos. With typical Nazi methodical relentlessness, each of these fundamental rights through which man overcame nature is returned to nature, and new biological and racist principles are enshrined in law. 

Already the systemic assertion of control over children by the State and Party results in a danger to the ordering of Christian family life, since parents have become no more than ‘trustees of children’, a role which they are allowed by Hitler’s state. Now the violations of the fundamental rights of man proposed by the Nazi dictatorship in the new matrimonial legislation, especially the laws of divorce containing as they do the establishment of ‘certificates for aptitude for marriage’, amount in reality to a return to paganism.”

Excerpted from “Confronting the Nazi War on Christianity: The Kulturkampf Newsletters” (1936-1939), Edited and translated by Richard Bonney