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This article evaluates how the memory of Nazi Germany and the Shoah was discussed among Catholics in the West-German Federal Republic. On the one hand, it evaluates how Catholic intellectuals sought to come to terms with the Nazi past and how they initiated a process of political “ Aufarbeitung”. On the other hand, however, the article also retraces also how the Catholic Church followed German political discourses and how it sought to influence public debates. Konrad Adenauer and the Christian Democratic Party sought to maintain the 1933 Reichskonkordat, negotiated by Eugenio Pacelli. However, an internal German opposition started scrutinizing the Church’s role under the Nazi regime. Already by the 1950s, an alliance of Social Democrats, liberals, and Protestant thinkers charged the Vatican and Adenauer government members with bolstering Nazism to institute “clerical fascism.” Though frequently polemical, these allegations sparked reconfiguring church-state ties and revealed constraints on Adenauer’s political aims and Pius XII’s hopes to resurrect Catholic authority in postwar culture.