BBspot.com linked to this article about a World of Warcraft player who has been building pascifist characters. So why I do I care enough to post about this? Well, if the geek factor wasn't enough, the player was interviewed...
Tell us about the concept behind Reinisch, your first pacifist character. I started him from a roleplaying point of view, based very loosely on a real German priest, Franz Reinisch, who refused to serve in Hitler's army and was executed. My undead priest's back story is basically the same, and he still refuses to kill.
This, of course, sent me on a long tangent of reading about Fr. Reinisch...which, according to the histories that Google Books provides, is a pretty depressing story of a priest who essentially went rogue by resisting the Nazis even when the German Catholic Church seemed largely complicit. As Guenter Lewy writes,
the Pallotine priest Franz Reinisch was denied Holy Communion by the Catholic prison chaplain on the grounds that he had violated his Christian duty by refusing to take the military oath of alegiance to Hitler. Josef Fleischer, a layman, recalls that he was visited in prison by a high Church dignitary who tried to persuade him to abandon his refusal to serve, and who finally left in a fit of anger declaring that people like Fleischer deserved to be "shortened by a head." Even the relatively innocuous statement of a parish priest made in 1939 that he waited for the end of "this awfully stupid war" and that those fed up should be allowed to go home, drew a reprimand from his diocesan chancery; the priest in question was made to send his apology to the officer to whose soldiers he had made the comment.
But by and large the Catholics willingly followed the exhortations of their bishops to do their Christian duty and fight for the fatherland....
I'm not expert in WWII era Catholic history, so I have no idea how accurate the above passage is. I'm sure that maintaining an institutionalized religion during a fascist regime is no cakewalk, and I'm also certain that there have always been bad bishops and priests in the Church (even when Jesus was running the show in person, one in twelve priests were horribly corrupt). However, I'm also fairly certain that it was the Catholicism of those who resisted above that empowered them to resist (as evidenced by the Nazis attempts to appeal to their very Catholic identities). One of the greatest powers of Christianity is its self-correcting nature. You can attempt to exploit the authority of the Church, but her core truths will eventually purge that corruption.
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