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Hollow and False Church? His work in this cause was vigorous but fruitless. In 1939 there was little friendship even among the churches themselves.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler had said: "I promise you ... I could destroy the Church in a few years. It is hollow and false and rotten through and through." In the years between wars the churches did less than they might have to disprove this slander. Like many of Europe's churches, the Lutheran Church of Norway was a state establishment. Pastors living comfortably on state-provided farms and holdings were often held suspect by their poorer neighbors. Many of the common people thought them complacent and bourgeois; young intellectuals scoffed at both the Church and its God.
Ordeal and Rebirth. Yet when the war came, the legends of resistance seeping out of occupied countries were starred with names of heroic men of God. Niemöller, Faulhaber and Galen in Germany itself, Hlond in Poland, De Jong in Holland, Damaskinos* in Greece and the aged Patriarch Gavrilo Dozich in Yugoslavia, all stood firm against the Nazis. With them stood a host of unnamed churchmen, like the 1,300 priests slaughtered in Poland, the priest and the pastor in Czechoslovakia who together faced a firing squad avenging the death of Heydrich the Hangman, and the French priest active in the underground who, warned of the Gestapo's coming, said, "I shall let myself be taken because I want the people of France to know there are priests too who are willing to give their lives. I ask only all your prayers that I may have the strength necessary to resist torture." Though the Gestapo tore off his ears, his comrades' prayers were answered; he betrayed no secrets.
Born of hope in oppression, grown to greatness in suffering, the Christian Church found new strength and new unity in its new ordeal. In Holland, where Catholics and Protestants had been at odds since the Reformation, old differences were forgotten in a common defiance of the Nazis, a common defense of the Jews. The Church in occupied Europe has taken a new lease on life because it has fought not only for its own preservation but for all freedom. Churches grown listless and smug under state support turned suddenly about in the state's default and themselves assumed the responsibility of leadership.
In Belgium King Leopold surrendered, but Cardinal van Roey, heroic successor to heroic Cardinal Mercier, publicly forswore Catholic collaboration with "an oppressive regime" and forbade his priests to give the sacrament to anyone wearing the German uniform. Rather than let the Nazis prostitute the educational system, he closed the schools and universities. Throughout Europe, when the universities and the press and the writers and philosophers were silenced, "only the churches"—in the words of Albert Einstein—"stood squarely across the path of Hitler. .
Said Bishop Berggrav: "God's peace ... is not something finished and done with . . . not ours to keep forever. The peace is won by accompanying God into the battle, It is then it grows, becomes new and real. It is in battle we feel the peace."