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.
Read more on First Things: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/11/lessons-from-dietrich-von-hildebrand