---
title: "Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein"
chunk: 7/11
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_views_of_Albert_Einstein"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:33:53.313065+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.
The quotation has since been repeatedly cited by defenders of Pope Pius XII. An investigation of the quotation by mathematician William C. Waterhouse and Barbara Wolff of the Einstein Archives in Jerusalem found that the statement was mentioned in an unpublished letter from 1947. In the letter to Count Montgelas, Einstein explained that the original comment was a casual one made to a journalist regarding the support of "a few churchmen" for individual rights and intellectual freedom during the early rule of Hitler and that, according to Einstein, the comment had been drastically exaggerated.
On 11 November 1950, a Brooklyn pastor named Cornelius Greenway wrote a letter to Einstein, which had also quoted his alleged remarks about the Church. Einstein responded, "I am, however, a little embarrassed. The wording of the statement you have quoted is not my own. Shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany I had an oral conversation with a newspaper man about these matters. Since then my remarks have been elaborated and exaggerated nearly beyond recognition. I cannot in good conscience write down the statement you sent me as my own. The matter is all the more embarrassing to me because I, like yourself, I am predominantly critical concerning the activities, and especially the political activities, through history of the official clergy. Thus, my former statement, even if reduced to my actual words (which I do not remember in detail), gives a wrong impression of my general attitude."
In 2008, the Antiques Roadshow television program aired a manuscript expert, Catherine Williamson, authenticating a 1943 letter from Einstein in which he confirms that he "made a statement which corresponds approximately" to Time magazine's quotation of him. However, Einstein continued, "I made this statement during the first years of the Nazi regime—much earlier than 1940—and my expressions were a little more moderate."