''Sunday of Youth"

The Nazi-Catholic fight in Germany, brought to white heat by Chicago's George Cardinal Mundelein who declared that the immorality trials of Catholics in Germany "make Wartime propaganda stories look like bedtime tales" (TIME, May 31), has this crucial issue: Shall the Reich or shall the Catholic Church educate Germany's 2,000,000 or so Catholic children? Catholics hold that Hitler's campaign against monkish immorality is merely a lever to topple the entire German Catholic Church into a sewer of disrepute.

Catholic priests in Germany, to assert their right to train their own flocks, last week prepared to celebrate a "Sunday of Youth" with mass meetings of Catholic youngsters.

The Berlin diocese, declaring that not more than 58 of Germany's 25,635 priests could be suspected of immorality though the Reich had imprisoned for examination 915 (including lay brothers), ordered a pamphlet to be read from pulpits on the "Sunday of Youth." This was the Church's reply to a tirade three weeks ago by Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels who, as a onetime star pupil of Jesuit priests, perhaps felt specially qualified to speak about the "general shocking decadence of morals'' among the German priesthood.

Night before the pamphlet was to be read, Munich's most popular Catholic priest, Father Rupert Mayr, who lost both legs fighting for the Fatherland and has fearlessly lashed Nazi propaganda, was arrested. This did not prevent young Catholics all over Germany from flocking to their churches on "Sunday of Youth." Hitler Youth Groups were at the churches to meet them, to jeer and catcall from outside while the Catholic pamphlet was being read from the pulpits. The pamphlet made no attempt to deny the charges of immorality--"Weakness and sin have always walked alongside the Church in its passages through the centuries--" but attacked the government for unscrupulously exploiting the .2% of scandal it had found.

In Munich after services some priests led their congregations out to defy the noisy Hitler Youth. Fist fights ensued, ten more priests were bundled into jail. In Cologne 60,000 Catholics thronged the Cathedral Square, wildly cheered Cologne's anti-Nazi Archbishop, Joseph Cardinal Schulte.

Same day at Lueneberg Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, most anti-Christian Nazi bigwig, flatly and loudly restated the crux of the holy war: "National Socialism has won the right to take the education of German youth for all eternity under its control.''

Adolf Hitler, less explicit though not less vehement, declared: "It is not God who divides us, but human beings. . . . No power within or without the Reich will keep us from going our way to our Future."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.