A Catholic friend recently suggested that what Germany needs is faith. I am sympathetic to that view. Germany is one of the most secularized societies in Europe, and the consequences are visible in its culture, its demographics, and its politics. But the institution best positioned to bring faith to Germany — the Catholic Church — has spent nearly a century making itself incapable of doing so. The story of how that happened is worth understanding, because it is not primarily a story about secularism winning. It is a story about the Church losing, through choices that its own moral theology condemns.
A moral system that binds only when obedience is easy is not functioning as a binding moral discipline. It is functioning instead as a set of preferences, subordinate to prudence, self-preservation, and institutional interest. The Catholic Church teaches martyrdom, sanctity of conscience, and the impermissibility of formal cooperation with grave evil. The question is whether those teachings were treated as binding when they demanded real sacrifice — or whether they were set aside the moment institutional survival was at stake. The record suggests the latter. The pattern of behavior that follows, from 1933 through the present day, suggests that at the institutional level these teachings were not allowed to operate as effective constraints. When survival and privilege were at stake, they were repeatedly subordinated to institutional interest.
The focus on the Catholic Church in this essay is not intended to exculpate the Protestant churches; in practice, they have followed the development of the Catholic Church in many ways. However, Protestant churches never had their own political party, nor do they have the institutional continuity or centralized record-keeping of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, for most of post-WWII history, the Catholic Church was the dominant force in West German politics, and it still holds a special status in German political life today.
I. The Bargain
On March 23, 1933, the Catholic Center Party (Zentrum) voted for the Enabling Act, the law that gave Adolf Hitler the power to rule by decree and effectively ended the Weimar Republic. The vote passed 444 to 94. The Social Democrats were the only party to vote against it. The Communists had already been banned.
The Center Party’s 73 votes were not legally compelled. They gave the act cross-party legitimacy and constitutional cover, transforming what would otherwise have been a naked power grab by the NSDAP and its nationalist allies into an apparently broad democratic consensus. The act would likely have reached its two-thirds threshold without the Center — but the Center chose to vote yes, not to abstain or oppose.
The party’s leader, Prelate Ludwig Kaas, was not merely a politician. He was a Catholic priest, a canon lawyer, and a prelate of the Church — a senior ecclesiastical figure whose actions could not easily be separated from the institution he represented. Kaas argued to his colleagues that a “no” vote would be suicidal, that it would trigger a new Kulturkampf (state persecution of Catholics) or a Communist revolution. Hitler had provided oral and written assurances that he would respect the Church’s autonomy, maintain Catholic schools, and preserve the president’s veto power. Kaas considered these sufficient.
Kaas did not vote reluctantly. He delivered a speech to the Reichstag defending the Center Party’s decision, framing the vote as a positive moral act taken in the interest of national unity. This distinction matters in Catholic moral theology: there is a difference between material cooperation with evil — being compelled to participate in something one opposes — and formal cooperation, which involves endorsing the act as right. A compelled vote might be defensible under duress. A voluntary speech justifying the vote as morally correct cannot be.
Not everyone agreed. Former Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, a devout Catholic, argued that the Church was being tricked into a legal trap, that the guarantees were worthless, and that Catholic social teaching did not require supporting a revolutionary seizure of power. Former minister Joseph Wirth sided with Brüning. They were overruled by an appeal to ecclesiastical discipline and the Vatican’s desire for a unified diplomatic front. The fact that the party’s leader was a prelate made this appeal difficult to resist — Kaas spoke not just as a chairman but with the implicit weight of clerical authority.
Five days later, on March 28, the German bishops issued the Fulda Declaration, formally withdrawing all previous moral prohibitions against National Socialism. Their reasoning: Hitler’s March 23 speech, which called the churches “the most important factors for the maintenance of our society,” constituted a solemn assurance that changed the movement’s status from a revolutionary threat to a legitimate state partner.
The day after the Enabling Act vote, Kaas traveled to Rome. By early April, official negotiations for the Reichskonkordat — a treaty between the Vatican and the Third Reich — had begun, with Franz von Papen representing the German state. The concordat guaranteed the continuation of the Kirchensteuer (church tax), protected Church property, and secured Catholic schools. In exchange, the Vatican agreed to a “depoliticization” of the clergy, effectively prohibiting priests from criticizing the Nazi state in a political capacity.
The Center Party dissolved itself in July 1933, ending organized political Catholicism in Germany. The treaty was signed on July 20.
II. The Silence
Before 1933, the Church had been willing to name National Socialism as a moral evil. The Mainz Declaration of 1930 and several other diocesan decrees declared the movement incompatible with Christianity, condemning its racial ideology, its extreme nationalism, and its “positive Christianity” as neo-pagan and heretical.
All of this was abandoned in March 1933, not because the ideology had changed, but because the regime had made promises about the Church’s institutional position.
In April 1933, Edith Stein — a Jewish-born philosopher who had converted to Catholicism and become a Carmelite nun — wrote to Pope Pius XI urging an encyclical against the persecution of Jews. She warned explicitly that the silence of the Church would “one day weigh heavily” on it. The Vatican did not issue a public response.
The silence deepened as the evidence mounted. The Vatican’s archives, unsealed in 2020, confirm that the Holy See received detailed intelligence about the mass murder of Jews as early as 1942. In December of that year, Father Lothar Koenig, a German Jesuit and member of the anti-Nazi resistance, sent a letter to Father Robert Leiber, the Pope’s private secretary. The letter explicitly named the SS-Sonderkommando and the death camp at Bełżec. It reported that “every day, about 6,000 people, especially Poles and Jews” were being murdered in “SS furnaces.”
This letter reached the Vatican approximately ten days before Pius XII’s 1942 Christmas radio address — the most direct public statement the Pope would make about the genocide during the entire war. In it, he spoke of “hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.” He did not name the perpetrators. He did not name the victims. He did not name the camps.
The negotiations for the Reichskonkordat contain no record of the Vatican demanding protections for non-Catholics or condemning the regime’s racial laws. Article 32 of the concordat restricted clergy from party-political activity. The treaty is widely understood as an exchange: institutional protections and legal guarantees in return for political neutrality. Whether or not that was the explicit intention, the practical effect was to give the regime a legal basis for silencing clerical dissent — and the Church a reason not to test the boundaries.
III. The Self-Indictment
The defenses offered for the Church’s 1933 decisions are familiar: the leadership feared a new Kulturkampf; they believed Communism was the greater threat; they sought to preserve the sacraments for the faithful; they exercised the Thomistic virtue of prudence. Each of these arguments rests on a consequentialist calculus — the belief that accepting a lesser evil was justified by the prevention of a greater one.
Catholic moral theology explicitly rejects this reasoning. The tradition, rooted in Thomism and codified in long-standing teaching, holds that certain acts are intrinsically evil and cannot be justified by intention or outcome. The end does not justify the means. An act of formal cooperation with the establishment of a murderous tyranny cannot be morally rehabilitated by pointing to the good outcomes it was hoped to produce.
Historians disagree about whether the Center Party’s 73 votes were arithmetically necessary for the two-thirds majority. With the Communist deputies already expelled, the effective size of the chamber was reduced, and the threshold depended on who was present and voting. The moral indictment holds under either scenario. If the votes were not decisive, then Kaas’s central argument — that the vote was necessary to avert a worse outcome — was factually wrong, and the Church incurred the full moral weight of formal cooperation with the regime without altering the result. If the votes were decisive, then the consequentialist defense has a factual basis but runs directly into the Church’s own theological prohibition on formal cooperation with intrinsic evil: the end does not justify the means. Either way, the disputed arithmetic does not rescue Kaas’s position.
And this was formal cooperation, not merely material. Kaas did not simply cast a reluctant vote under threat. He composed and delivered a public speech endorsing the act as morally justified — a voluntary, affirmative act that Catholic moral theology cannot excuse by appeal to duress or obedience.
The Church possessed the moral vocabulary to say all of this in 1933. At the decisive institutional level, it chose not to use it.
What the documented record shows instead is a narrowly institutional calculus. The minutes of the Center Party’s March 1933 meetings, the notes of Cardinal Pacelli’s diplomatic correspondence, and the text of the Fulda Declaration focus almost exclusively on the legal status of the clergy, the protection of Catholic youth organizations, and the retention of Catholic schools. In the documentary record cited here, there is no comparable discussion weighing the intrinsic evil of Nazi ideology against the fate of those outside the Church. The warnings of Brüning, Stein, and others — who argued within the Catholic tradition that the Church’s moral framework demanded a different answer — were available and were not heeded.
The question was never whether resistance was dangerous. Of course it was dangerous. The question was whether the Church’s own teachings required accepting danger rather than cooperating with evil. A Church that teaches the impermissibility of formal cooperation with grave evil cannot excuse itself by saying the costs of refusal were high. High cost is precisely when such teachings are tested. The bishops, the Catholic political leadership, and much of the institutional hierarchy chose preservation of schools, property, legal status, and organizational continuity over the risks demanded by their professed principles. That choice was not simply a failure of courage. It is evidence that, institutionally, moral theology was not functioning as a binding constraint.
The moral contradiction runs deeper still. In 1957, when Lower Saxony challenged the Reichskonkordat, the Catholic Church defended it before the Federal Constitutional Court as a valid and continuing international agreement, and it prevailed. That legal result does not by itself answer every historical question about pressure, fear, or prudence in 1933. But it does reveal something important: when the Church’s postwar legal and institutional interests were at stake, it chose to affirm the concordat as legitimate rather than to describe it as an agreement morally compromised by coercion.
That creates a serious tension in the Church’s own retrospective self-understanding. In 1933, Catholic leaders appealed to obedience, necessity, and the danger of worse outcomes. In 1957, the institution defended the resulting settlement as a valid legal act. Those arguments are not strictly identical questions, but they do not sit comfortably together. The more firmly the Church insisted on the legal legitimacy of the concordat, the weaker its later moral appeal to necessity as an exculpation for cooperation became.
The Church’s 1933 “lesser evil” calculation helped legitimize and accommodate a regime whose rule proved catastrophic: the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews and millions of others, and a world war that killed between seventy and eighty-five million people. The Church’s own moral framework holds that an act that produces catastrophic evil cannot be retroactively justified by the good intentions of its authors. By that standard, the 1933 bargain stands condemned — not by secular critics, but by Catholic moral theology itself.
IV. The Poisoned Fruit
After the war, the Catholic Church did not renounce the Reichskonkordat. It did the opposite.
In 1957, when Lower Saxony argued that the treaty should be invalidated as a product of a criminal regime, the Church’s lawyers fought to preserve it. The Federal Constitutional Court ruled in the Church’s favor (BVerfGE 6, 309), holding that the concordat remained a binding international treaty. The financial and institutional arrangements it guaranteed would continue.
Those arrangements are substantial. The Kirchensteuer (church tax), protected by the concordat, is collected by the German state on behalf of the Church. Recent estimates put its annual revenue for the Catholic Church in Germany at approximately €6.8 billion. The state retains a collection fee of 3 to 4 percent — roughly €200 to €270 million per year — giving it a direct financial interest in maintaining the system.
Separately, the German states pay over €600 million annually in Staatsleistungen (state subsidies) to the major churches, compensation for the secularization of church lands in 1803. The German constitution mandates that these payments eventually be ended, but the estimated buyout cost is €20 to €40 billion. No government has been willing to pay it.
Beyond money, the Church holds permanent seats on public broadcasting boards (Rundfunkräte), ethics committees, and advisory councils for education and social policy. Catholic theological faculties are maintained at public universities. The Church operates as a Public Law Corporation (Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts), a status that grants it tax sovereignty and exemptions from general labor law.
Through Caritas, the Church is one of the largest private employers in Germany, with roughly 700,000 staff. This is often cited as evidence of the Church’s social mission. But over 90 percent of Caritas’s funding comes from state social insurance and taxpayer funds, not from the church tax. The Church provides administrative control; the state provides the money. The social services themselves would not vanish simply because the Church lost its present tax-privileged status; the funding base is overwhelmingly public already.
After 1945, the Church did not renounce these arrangements or seek to detach itself from the legal privileges preserved through the concordat framework. On the contrary, when those arrangements were challenged, it fought to preserve them.
V. The Collapse
The Catholic Church has had more economic, legal, and institutional power in Germany than in most other countries. Yet the result has been a steep collapse in Catholic practice and affiliation.
Weekly Mass attendance stands at approximately 6.8 percent of registered Catholics. In 2024, thirty-eight men were ordained as priests in all of Germany — a country of over eighty-three million people. In 2023, more than 402,000 people formally left the Catholic Church (Kirchenaustritt). Combined with Protestant departures, over 600,000 Germans officially renounced church membership in a single year. The religiously unaffiliated are now the largest demographic group in Germany, approaching 50 percent of the population.
The Church’s revenue, meanwhile, continues to rise. Because the Kirchensteuer is pegged to income, inflation and wage growth push revenue upward even as membership falls. The institution is structurally immune to the market signal of its own failure. It does not need to attract or retain believers to remain solvent.
The contrast with other countries is suggestive, if not conclusive. The United States, where churches depend entirely on voluntary donations, maintains weekly attendance rates of roughly 20 to 30 percent. Poland, with a historically poorer and less institutionally powerful church, has had far higher rates of religious identification and practice — though Poland’s own rapid secularization since 2015 suggests the picture is more complicated than any single variable can explain. Still, the German case is hard to square with the claim that guaranteed state funding supports faith. It may be more accurate to say it replaces the need for it.
The sexual abuse scandals, which prompted the 2018 MHG Study and the subsequent Synodal Way reform process, are often treated as the cause of the Church’s crisis. They are better understood as a symptom. Secularization in Germany began in the late 1960s, decades before the abuse came to light. The MHG Study itself identified “specific structural characteristics” of the Catholic Church — clericalism, the exercise of unchecked power, and a lack of transparency — as the factors that enabled and concealed abuse. These are the same characteristics of institutional protectionism that defined the Church’s behavior in the 1930s and 1940s: the instinct to manage problems legally and financially, to protect the institution’s reputation at the cost of individuals, to silence internal dissent.
The continuity is not perfect, but the institutional habit is recognizable. The legalistic maneuvering and preference for institutional self-protection visible in 1933 reappeared later in the handling of abuse: protect the institution, control the scandal, and defer genuine reckoning.
VI. The Need for Correction
None of this is a criticism of the Catholic faith, or of the many individual Catholics — priests, religious, and laypeople — who have served Germany with genuine devotion. The Church as a theological reality and the Church as a human institution staffed by fallible people are not the same thing. The distinction matters precisely because it is the institution’s decisions, not the faith itself, that have created this crisis. Individuals within the German Church have resisted, dissented, and sacrificed — from Brüning and Stein in 1933 to the priests and laypeople who have pushed for accountability in the abuse crisis. The problem is not that the Church lacks good people. It is that the institution’s structure and incentives have consistently overridden their witness.
The German Catholic Church’s current reform initiative, the Synodal Way (Synodaler Weg), launched in 2019 in response to the abuse crisis, focuses on power sharing, the role of women, priestly celibacy, and sexual morality. The Vatican has issued multiple formal warnings that the German Church lacks the authority to change doctrine or create governance structures that would allow laity to outvote bishops.
None of this addresses the root question. The Synodal Way proposes structural changes to make the institution more palatable to secular German society. It does not propose renouncing the Reichskonkordat, ending the Kirchensteuer, or surrendering the legal privileges that insulate the hierarchy from accountability. The reforms are designed to manage the Church’s decline, not to reclaim its moral authority.
The Vatican, for its part, has refrained from decisive action. Financial dependence on German church revenues is at least one plausible reason, and likely an important one: Germany is among the largest contributors to the Holy See. The billions generated by the Kirchensteuer fund not only the German dioceses but Vatican operations and global missions. A formal break with the German hierarchy would create a global administrative crisis for the papacy. Rome has the theological precedent — Pope Clement XIV suppressed the entire Jesuit order in 1773, and Pius XI condemned Action Française in 1926 — but lacks the financial willingness.
The Catholic tradition has always understood that institutions run by fallible human beings require correction. The prophetic tradition in scripture exists for this reason — not to destroy the community of faith, but to call it back to its own standards when its leaders have failed. Honest criticism is the mechanism by which institutions reform. Silence in the face of institutional failure is not loyalty; it is the same instinct that produced the silence of 1933.
The Church has the theological vocabulary for what needs to happen. Institutional poverty — the voluntary surrender of wealth and power — is not a foreign concept in Catholic tradition. The Franciscan movement was founded on it. But voluntary poverty requires the conviction that the institution’s mission matters more than the institution’s survival. The entire history of the German Catholic Church since 1933 suggests the opposite conviction.
My Catholic friend is right that Germany needs faith. But the institution responsible for carrying that faith in Germany has spent ninety years prioritizing its own survival over its mission. It has the money, the legal standing, the seats on the boards, and the staff. What it does not have is the moral credibility that comes from living by its own teaching. That credibility was gravely compromised in 1933 and then further squandered by the decades of legal, financial, and institutional choices that followed. The first step toward recovering it would be to admit, plainly and without legal qualification, that the trade was wrong — and to stop profiting from it.