"A vast number of Catholic clerics have been tried for sexual crimes ... It is not a matter of regrettable individual lapses, but of a general corruption of morals such as the history of civilization has scarcely ever known . . . No other class of society has ever come to shelter such depravity ... In our civilized world no other class of society has contrived to practice immorality and indulge in filth on a scale resembling than that achieved by the German clergy in all its ranks ... We cannot possibly impose sanctions on unnatural vice and yet at the same time allow thousands upon thousands of priests and brothers of religious Orders to escape scot-free ... A very large number of these priests and Religious work in the confessional ... There is no doubt that even the thousands of cases which have come to light represent but a small fraction of the total moral corruption."
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Speech by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels on all German wireless stations, May 28, 1937, accusing Catholic priests and monks of immorality and pedophilia on a grand scale. The speech was part of a larger "Nazi campaign in 1937 led by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels to discredit the Catholic Church following Pope Pius XI’s anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge." Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich, Facts and Documents (1940, 1941, 2003), "published with the a
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Priesthood in the Catholic Church
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