From a series of sermons concerning the Jews, delivered in 1933 by Michael von Faulhaber, Cardinal Archbishop of Munich.
Source: J. Remak (ed.), The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, (Prentice - Hall, 1969), pp.97-99.
... It is a historical fact that among no other pre-Christian people do we find so many intellectually outstanding men, men who placed their words and their whole personality at the service of their people's religious order, as among the people of the Old Testament. ... In particular, human culture and the Christian religion owe to the Old Testament the sublime and pure idea of God, the most biblical part of the bible, of Jehovah revealed, the ever present, the Lord Sabath, the Lord of Hosts. We owe to it the revelation of the one and only God, who will have no other gods beside him. We owe to it the revelation of the supernatural, personal God, who from his infinite heights bent down and talked to men through his messengers, who proclaimed his law and demanded obedience to that law. We owe to it the revelation of the God who, in the poetic, non-philosophical language of the Psalmists, is clothed with honour and majesty, who covered himself with light as with a garment, stretched out the heavens like a curtain, made his angels spirits and the flaming fire his messengers. (Psalms 104:1-4.) The divine idea is the highest idea of which the spirit of man is capable. ... Let no one treat the sacred writings of the Old Covenant with contempt; God's name is in them. Cardinal Manning once said to the Jews: I would not understand my own religion did I honour yours.' ... In the New Year, too, anti-Christian forces will attempt to exhume ancient Germanic paganism. A public suggestion has already been made to give the names of the old Teutonic Gods to the three weekdays of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and to call them Woden's Day, Thor's Day, and Freyja's Day. The Calendar of German Labour is offering parents a list of old Germanic first names to take the place of biblical and Christian first names such as John or Henry or Mary that can be found in the conventional calendars. But the majority of the German nation will not betray and deny its Saviour that quickly. We are not ashamed of our Christian names, names that are on our fathers' gravestones, and that remind us of those who are our models and who intercede for us before God. God's grace did not save us from Russian paganism merely to let us drift now into a Germanic paganism.
"Justice is the state's foundation." We lament, we regard with great concern, the evidence of how this foundation is being shaken today, how justice - that natural and Christian virtue, which is indispensable to the orderly existence of every human society - is not being plainly implemented and maintained for all. It is not only for the sake of the rights of the Church, not only for that of the rights of the human personality, it also is out of love for our nation and out of our profound concern for our country that we beg, ask, demand: Justice! Who is there among us who does not fear for the survival of his home when the foundations are being sapped? The regular courts have no say over the jurisdiction by decree of the Secret Police. Since none of us know of a way that might give us an impartial control over the measures of the Gestapo - its expulsions, its arrests, its imprisonment of fellow Germans in concentration camps - large groups of German have a feeling of being without rights, and what is worse, harbour feelings of cowardly fear. Great harm is being done to the German community in this way. The obligation of my Episcopal office to defend the moral order, and the loyalty to my oath, which I swore before God and the government's representative, to prevent to the best of my ability any harm that might come to the German body politic, impel me, in view of the Gestapo's actions, to say this publicly. ...
