Erich Przywara, S.J., and «Catholic Fascism»: A Response to Paul Silas Peterson

In seemingly endless production of literature addressing the question of German Catholic complicity in National Socialism, the name of Erich Przywara (1889-1972), Jesuit priest and Kulturphilosoph prominent in the interwar period, has emerged on the side of both the angels and the devils. Paul Silas Peterson, taking the part of the diaboli advocatus, has argued recently and rather forcefully for Przywara's complicity in the destructive ideologies of his day. The reasons for Peterson's wrongheaded conclusions, are principally two: first, he depends on rather selective associative evidence; second, he reads Przywara's against an internally undifferentiated construct called "Catholic fascism" rather than against the backdrop of either Przywara's own metaphysical writings or those of Przywara's Jewish contemporaries.

Английский

Journal for the History of Modern Theology = Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte. – 2016. – Vol. 23, № 1. – P. 27–55.