By Hilary White
AUGSBURG, Germany, April 14, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Secularists in Germany are furious at the assertion that the Nazi and Stalinist ideologies were developments of atheism, reports Germany’s The Local newspaper. Linking Stalinist communism and National Socialism through their mutual rejection of Judeo-Christian concepts of right and wrong, Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg said this weekend that atheism created the genocidal regimes of the 20th century.
Bishop Mixa also drew criticism earlier this year when he compared the number of abortions in recent decades to the Nazi’s attempt to exterminate the Jews.
In his Easter Sunday sermon, Bishop Mixa said, “Where God is denied, or opposed, soon Man and his dignity will also be denied and disregarded.”
Mixa, who serves as the military bishop in Germany, added, “In the last century, the godless regimes of Nazism and Communism, with their penal camps, their secret police and their mass murder, proved in a terrible way the inhumanity of atheism in practice.”
But humanist and atheist groups in Germany have objected to the sermon, calling it “historically inaccurate.” Rudolf Ladwig, chairman of the International Association of the Confessionless and Atheists said Mixa’s sermon was part of a “long-term strategy of the church to wrongly unburden the history of its own institution with regards to fascism,” reports The Local.
A spokesman for the Giordano-Bruno Foundation, reiterated the claim that the National Socialism of Adolph Hitler was based on Catholic anti-Semitism. Michael Schmidt-Salomon told Spiegel Online, “The majority of the Nazi elite can be shown to have classified themselves as Christian.”
However, Bishop Mixa is not the first to have made the connection between National Socialism and anti-Christian atheism. In the early 1940s, under the Nazi regime itself, Archbishop Clemens August von Galen, the bishop of Münster, infuriated the Nazi regime by denouncing it as a godless ideology opposed to Christianity.
Archbishop von Galen, who would become known to history as the Lion of Münster and who was beatified in 2005 by Pope Benedict XVI, campaigned against the atheistic racialist theories of National Socialism, the euthanasia programs and the Nazi efforts to halt religious instruction in Catholic schools.
In 1941, von Galen began publicly to attack the regime from his cathedral pulpit. In his sermons, he blasted the Nazi regime for its closing of Catholic institutions and deporting and jailing of clergy, for the desecration of Catholic churches, closing of convents and monasteries, and the deportation and euthanasia of mentally ill people.
Von Galen also opposed Stalinist communism for its persecution of Christians since the 1918 revolution, during which virtually all Catholic bishops were killed or imprisoned.
Currently, the movement to reinstate legal euthanasia in Germany and throughout Europe for the mentally ill and physically disabled is being spearheaded and funded by secularist atheist organisations and individuals. As of the beginning of 2009, some form of legal euthanasia have been reinstated in Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
The international academic and scientific world is also seeing a revival of the eugenic theories that formed a significant part of the Nazi ideologies, particularly in the fields associated with genetics and artificial procreation, cloning technologies and in vitro fertilisation. Some prominent atheists in these fields have openly called for the implementation of eugenic policies using modern technologies, including, most prominently, James Watson, the Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist who co-discovered DNA.