jehovah witness and catholic relationship

Likewise they would not participate in Nazi rallies and parades. Initially, Witness indifference to the Nazi state manifested itself in the refusal to raise their arms in the Heil Hitler salute, join the German Labor Front (which all salaried and wage workers were forced to join after the Nazis outlawed trade unions), participate in Nazi welfare collections, and vote in elections. Moreover, their international theological and organizational contacts were anathema to the Nazi police state. They refused to swear loyalty to the Nazi regime. Witnesses believed themselves to belong to Jehovah's Kingdom and considered all worldly powers unwitting allies of Satan. After the Nazi Rise to PowerĪfter the Nazis came to power, persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses intensified. During the Weimar period, however, the German courts often ruled in favor of the religious minority.īefore the Nazis came to power, individual groups of local Nazis (party functionaries or SA men), acting outside the law, broke up Bible study meetings and assaulted individual Witnesses. At various times, individual jurisdictions actually banned Witness religious literature, including the booklets The Watchtower and The Golden Age. Individual German states had long sought to curb the missionary work through strict enforcement of statutes on illegal solicitation. Moreover, citizens often found the Witnesses' missionary work-knocking on doors and preaching-to be invasive. Mainstream Lutheran and Catholic churches deemed them heretics. Prejudice against Jehovah's WitnessesĮven before 1933, Jehovah's Witnesses were targets of prejudice. By the early 1930s, some 25,000 to 30,000 Germans (0.38 percent of a total population of 65 million) were members of the Jehovah's Witnesses or interested sympathizers.

In Germany, Jehovah's Witnesses became known as the Society of International Bible Students. In 1902, the first branch office of the Watch Tower Society opened in Elberfeld, Germany. The Society began missionary work in Europe in the 1890s.

Backgroundįounded in the American city of Pittsburgh in 1872 by Charles Taze Russell as the International Bible Study Society, the group took the name 'Jehovah's Witnesses' in 1931. Since such submission would violate their religious beliefs, the vast majority of Jehovah's Witnesses refused to abandon their faith even in the face of persecution, torture in concentration camps, or death. Unlike Jews and Roma (Gypsies), whom the Nazis targeted for perceived racial reasons, Jehovah's Witnesses had the option to avoid persecution and personal harm by submitting to state authority and serving in the armed forces. The Nazis perceived the refusal to commit to the state and efforts to proselytize as overtly political and subversive acts. Jehovah's Witnesses also engaged in missionary activity to win adherents for the faith.

The Nazi regime targeted Jehovah's Witnesses for persecution because they refused, out of religious conviction, to swear loyalty to a worldly government or to serve in its armed forces.

Jehovah witness and catholic relationship