Front Page Magazine – January 15, 2013 By Faith J. H. McDonnell 

Evoking the moral apathy and failure of the past, U.S. Representative Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) recently asked church leaders around the United States to use their influence for those who are persecuted. In his January 9, 2013 letter to over 300 Catholic and Protestant leaders, Wolf reminded them of the words of German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis during World War II. Bonhoeffer, when “faced with the tyranny and horror of Nazism, famously said, ‘Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.  Not to speak is to speak.  Not to act is to act,’” recalled Wolf.

“And that is precisely what many in the church did, or failed to do, as Hitler unleashed his murderous plans,” Wolf continued. Writing with passion and urgency to such representative Christian leaders as the U.S. Catholic bishops, the leaders of Protestant denominations, and the pastors of some of America’s largest “mega-churches,” the congressman then told the story of a German Christian shared in the book When a Nation Forgets God:

I lived in Germany during the Nazi Holocaust.  I considered myself a Christian.  We heard stories of what was happening to the Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it, because, what could anyone do to stop it? 

A railroad track ran behind our small church and each Sunday morning we could hear the whistle in the distance and then the wheels coming over the tracks.  We became disturbed when we heard the cries coming from the train as it passed by.  We realized that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars!

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