著者

大里 巌

出版者

広島女学院大学

雑誌

広島女学院大学論集 (ISSN:03748057)

巻号頁・発行日

no.48, pp.21-37, 1998-12

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As it was only to clear that the Nazi ideology and resulting nationalistic policy were totally incompatible with the presence of the Church, its doctrine, spirit and structure, the Nazi Regime intended from the start to suppress the Church. However, the Nazi government needed citizens' support in order to pursure its policies such as the military aggression to begin with, and for this purpose Concordat was signed with the Church, giving it a formal assurrance of ecclesiastical freedom. In fact, the German government never hesitated to seize every opportunity to oppress the Church, while the Episcopal Corps was unable to cope effectively with the political power to defend the Church, and this forced them to end up with submission to the Regime's will.Yet, there were a very small number of the Church elites who dared to challenge openly the Regime's acts of inhumanity and oppression to the Catholic Church, of whom the Bishop Graf von Galen was the most prominent figure. In this paper, the Author reviews the well-known three sermons made by the Bishop and his course of resistance movement to see how the Bishop's words and behavior influenced not only catholics but also non-catholics and how the Nazi regime reacted to the resistance in order to understand the meaning of his resistance.