An Act of Faith? A priest researches the history of a Boston-based pro-Nazi group.
It could be the plot of a James Bond movie: An SS officer in charge of setting up spy rings, a British intelligence agent running a counterespionage effort, and a militant Catholic group peddling Nazi propaganda.
But it’s a true story that unfolded in New York and Boston from 1939 to 1945, lasting long after the United States entered World War II.
“There are heroes and villains, shades of darkness and light, and people whose actions demonstrate the goodness that is in all of us,” said Charles Gallagher about his research on the Christian Front, a Boston-based group that sought to foment antisemitism and pro-Nazi sentiment in the Irish-Catholic community. Gallagher is a Jesuit priest, an associate professor of history at Boston College, and, at the Museum, the William J. Lowenberg Fellow on America, the Holocaust, and the Jews.
The response of religious communities in the United States to the Nazi threat is as multifaceted as the faith traditions they represent. Methodists, Unitarians, Quakers, Mennonites, and many others played active roles in rescue and relief efforts for Jews. But the more complete picture is far less rosy, and much more nuanced.
The Christian Front, for example, took its cue from the antisemitic rhetoric Father Charles Coughlin spewed in his weekly national radio broadcast. The group’s leader in Boston, Francis Moran, had prepared to become a Catholic priest but left seminary before being ordained. The German consul general in Boston, an SS officer named Herbert Scholz, recruited Moran to disseminate Nazi propaganda throughout New England and to convince his fellow Catholics that Jews, not Nazis, were the threat to American ideals.
“The Nazis’ persecution of Jews and other minorities is inconsistent with the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbor,” said Gallagher. “And yet radical church leaders like Father Coughlin were able to sway vast numbers of Catholics toward antisemitism.” How did people of faith reconcile their beliefs with a political ideology of hatred?
During his fellowship at the Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Gallagher had access to “second-to-none” resources, ranging from the diplomatic archives of the Vatican, to UN war crimes documents, to oral histories of people reflecting on antisemitism in Boston in the 1930s. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Nazis of Copley Square: A History of the Christian Front, which traces the rise and fall of the Christian Front and the arrest of several of its members, who were charged with sedition.
Keep reading Memory & Action to learn more about American responses to Nazism — the subject of a special exhibition opening at the Museum in spring 2018.
This article was first published in Fall 2017.
