[1][2] Cardinal von Faulhaber was a senior member and co-founder of the Amici Israel, a priestly association founded in Rome in 1926 with the goal of working toward the Jewish people's conversion to Roman Catholicism, while also seeking to combat antisemitism within the Church.

At the national Catholic conference (Katholikentag) of 1922 in Munich, he declared that the Weimar Republic was a "perjury and betrayal", because it had arrived through the overthrow of the legitimate civil authorities, the German royal houses, and had included in its constitution the separation of church and state.

The declaration disturbed Catholics who were committed to the Weimar Republic, but Cardinal von Faulhaber had already praised the German Empire a few months earlier during the Requiem Mass of the last King of Bavaria, Ludwig III.

issued later in the year attributed the losses incurred by the Bavarian People's Party to the neutral position adopted by Faulhaber by asking "Had the Cardinal not indirectly pointed out the path to be followed in the future?

"[23] According to Saul Friedländer, "The 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses was the first major test on a national scale of the attitude of the Christian churches toward the situation of the Jews under the new government.

In historian Klaus Scholder's words, during the decisive days around the first of April, no bishop, no church dignitaries, no synod made any open declaration against the persecution of the Jews in Germany.

"[28] Friedländer notes that these sermons employed some of the more common stereotypical depictions of traditional religious antisemitism: "The daughters of Zion received their bill of divorce and from that time forth, Ahasuerus wanders, forever restless, over the face of the earth.

[33]: 15 In November 1941, a small group of German Catholic bishops drafted a pastoral letter that proposed to protest against hostile measures taken against the church by the Nazi regime.

Saul Friedländer sees this lack of willingness to take a public stand to the growing awareness of the mass exterminations in the East as being calculated because Faulhaber recorded in a memo his thoughts as to the proposed letter contents and his belief that raising "the Jewish question" and other matters would hurt the reputation of the German people and its government.

[18] The writer Sidney Ehler has written that Faulhaber's series of sermons, in December 1933, condemned "the fundamental errors contained in the racial theory and its 'German Christian' offshoot.

"[29] On the following day he wrote to Hitler's Minister of the Interior: Lapide also notes, when the World Jewish Council heard of the supposed preaching of Faulhaber they sent a communication to him thanking him for his courageous words.

[16]: 189  The encyclical sought to undercut the Nazi's attempt to alter Christianity to support racism: "The culmination of Revelation in the Gospel of Jesus Christ is final, is binding forever.

[18] Faulhaber, like other members of the German Catholic hierarchy, desired to have " a working relationship with [–] government and found it difficult to believe when Hitler used them for his own propaganda purposes and then abandoned them with empty promises.

[59] When the timetable for this announcement fell through – suppressed for its reference to state violations against the Reich-Vatican Concordat – Faulhaber set to work on another draft that he submitted to the German bishops.

[62] The Dutch Catholic newspaper "Der Deutsche Weg" expressed disappointment of the pastoral letter: "We find it hard to understand that despite the events of 30 June [i.e. Night of the Long Knives], despite the inhuman brutalities perpetrated in concentration camps, despite the currency and defamation trials, despite the personal insults against individual princes of the Church, against the Holy Father [i.e., the Pope] and the entire Church, and in spite of all the hostile measures amounting to another Kulturkampf, ... the bishops find words of appreciation for what (next to Bolshevism) is their worst enemy.

[63] Paul Johnson describes Faulhaber as sharing in a common illusion of German Christians of a distinction between the Führer, whom he thought was well intentioned, and a certain number of Hitler's "evil associates".

The program was started in secret but when word leaked out Faulhaber was one of the German bishops who protested at the killings and wrote to Minister of Justice: In April 1941, the Nazis proposed the removal of crucifixes from classrooms that resulted in an eruption of civil disobedience by ordinary Catholics that led to the dropping of the ban.

Signed by Bertram it read: In 1944 Pope Pius XII wrote to Faulhaber indicating that in the event of a negotiated peace Germany should not have to give up Austria and the Sudeten province of Czechoslovakia.

[83] Paul Johnson's opinion was that the Kulturkampf had left the German episcopate in a state of fear of once again being considered anti-German and this had encouraged the Church to come to an agreement with Hitler.

"[85] Faulhaber and Pacelli sought through the Concordat to gain a strategic and legal basis to challenge violent repression of the Church, in part for its condemnations of Nazi racial doctrine.

In 2017 the liberal secularist free thought association Bund für Geistesfreiheit of Munich, in an open letter demanding the renaming of the Kardinal-Faulhaber-Strasse, called it unbearable that Cardinal von Faulhaber should still be honoured with a street name.

According to the association, in a September 1933 diary entry Faulhaber had written that he hoped Hitler would succeed in doing what Bismarck had failed to do and 'eradicate the evil of the parliamentary democratic system'.

[33]: 135  The most controversial section dealing with the issue of personal or collective guilt for the Holocaust caused a rift between the predominantly Catholic population of southern Germany and the Occupational Military Government-United States, the latter of which censored the bishops' letter.

[33]: 151  Faulhaber called antisemitism a scourge of mankind and gave the assurance to an Anglo-American group "that I will do all in my power to convince the Roman Catholics of Bavaria that they must tear out all remaining anti-Semitism from their hearts.

[33]: 181  Michael Phayer is of the opinion that in practice Faulhaber, along with Cardinal Preysing, accomplished "little or nothing" of significance in attacking antisemitism because of the priorities of the Vatican and the envoy of Pope Pius XII, Bishop Aloysius Muench.

[33]: 152 Faulhaber sharply criticized the American, British and Soviet military occupation authorities for attempting to secularize, liberalize and modernize the German and Austrian school systems.

In "We Remember: A Reflection of the Shoah", a declaration issued by the Vatican in 1998 under Pope John Paul II's Papacy, Faulhaber's Advent sermons of 1933 were praised for their rejection of "Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda".

At a meeting in 1999, a Jewish Rabbi, who as a sixteen-year-old lived in Munich at the time of the Advent sermons, recalled that Faulhaber had upheld the normative position of the Catholic Church "that with the coming of Christ, Jews and Judaism have lost their place in the world.

"[94] The Rabbi and some American historians at the meeting said that Faulhaber himself said he had only been defending the "Old Testament" and pre-Christian Jews, thus rejecting the race-based nature of Nazi antisemitism, not endorsing Rabbinic Judaism as valid.

James Carroll, an American who authored the pro-Jewish work Constantine's Sword, reported that Cardinal Cassidy seemed embarrassed and replied that the disputed assertion in "We Remember" had not been in his original document but had been added "by historians".