Before the attack on Pearl Harbor , Hurley was considered the most outspoken interventionist among the American Catholic bishops . He made enemies among isolationist Catholic clergy and laity by labeling the Nazi Party " public enemy No. 1 " of the United States and the Catholic Church . He declared , " The foe of all we love , both as Americans and as Catholics , is the Nazi . Communism is still our enemy but ... in point of urgency if not in point of teaching , communism has now ceded its primacy to national socialism . " In an editorial in his diocesan newspaper in 1943 , he became the only Catholic bishop to issue a clarion call to Catholics to speak out against the extermination of the Jews taking place in the Nazi concentration camps , claiming that " the very basis of the Roman Catholic faith " compelled Catholics to challenge the " orgies of extermination " being perpetrated against the Jews
extermination of the Jews
The Holocaust
Joseph Patrick Hurley