In addition to his influential philosophical and theological writings, the eminent German Catholic thinker Dietrich von Hildebrand was a vocal opponent of Nazism—unlike many of his coreligionists. George Weigel comments on the romance between German Catholics and Hitler:

Why did intelligent Catholics in Germany and elsewhere fall prey to the siren songs of German National Socialism? A close reading of Hildebrand’s diaries suggests that it was in part because they despised liberal democracy, which they regarded as “bourgeois” and decadent. And there certainly were elements of decadence, and aggressive secularism, in Germany’s interwar Weimar Republic.

But a Catholic answer to the quandaries of political modernity was not going to be found in Hitler’s Third Reich (which some foolishly imagined as the forerunner of a new Holy Roman Empire) or in Mussolini’s fascism (which some Catholics thought an expression of the “corporatism” espoused by Pius XI’s 1931 social encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno). The answer was a democracy (even under a constitutional monarch) tethered to moral truth through a religiously-informed public philosophy drawn from Europe’s heritage of reason and revelation—from the legacies left to Europe by Athens and Jerusalem.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.