Mit brennender Sorge: Pius XI on the Church in the German Reich

On 20 July 1933 Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, Secretary of State to Pius XI, and the German vice-chancellor Franz von Papen signed a concordat between the Holy See and the German Reich (Reichskonkordat (1933), preamble and signatures). The Reich guaranteed the freedom of profession and public practice of the Catholic religion, the keeping and founding of Catholic confessional schools, and the protection of Catholic organisations serving exclusively religious, purely cultural and charitable purposes; the Holy See undertook to bar clergy from membership of political parties (Reichskonkordat (1933), arts. 1, 23, 31 and 32).

In January 1937 Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich was in Rome; his diary notes that he was twice with the bishops at Cardinal Pacelli’s, and that on Sunday 17 January he was with the pope for an hour in his sickroom (Faulhaber, Diaries, 14–28 January 1937). The encyclical that followed says that representatives of the German episcopate had visited the pope in his sickroom and reported things hard and unpleasant (Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge 2). The editors of Faulhaber’s diaries state that he took a decisive part in the preparatory work for it (Faulhaber, Diaries, editors’ biography).

The letter, addressed to the archbishops and bishops of Germany, is dated Passion Sunday, 14 March 1937 (Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge heading and closing date). The pope writes that he agreed to the concordat in 1933 despite grave misgivings, and that the other party has emptied its terms of meaning and made its violation a normal policy (Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge 3–5). Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the state, or those who hold power, above their proper worth and makes idols of them, he writes, perverts the order created by God and is far from true faith in God (Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge 7–8). Only superficial minds could speak of a national God or a national religion (Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge 11). Whoever wants the history and teaching of the Old Testament banished from church and school blasphemes the name of God (Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge 16). The believer has a right to profess his faith, parents have the first right to educate their children in it, and laws that deny these rights are against natural law (Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge 31). The letter does not use the name of Hitler or of his party (Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge 1–43).

A second encyclical of Pius XI, on atheistic communism, is dated five days later, 19 March; it calls communism intrinsically wrong and says that no one who would save Christian civilisation may collaborate with it (Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris 58 and date).