With Burning Concern
“Mit brennender Sorge” or “With Burning Concern” was a papal letter secretly smuggled into Germany and read from every Catholic pulpit on Palm Sunday, 1937. The letter was written in German, not the usual Latin, so everyone could understand. It condemned the Reich Government. It implied that everyone in Heaven was laughing at Hitler, a “prophet of nothingness”. It denounced the exaltation of one race or blood over another, ie racism.
The day after “Mit Brennender Sorge,” the Gestapo raided the churches to confiscate all the copies they could find, and the presses that had printed the letter were closed.
Well that’s neat. I thought the nazis kept up claiming they were catholic/christian though? Were they summarily excommunicated or was there politics blocking formally doing that?
The Nazis were more Lutheran-focused as far as I can tell. Catholics were a minority in Germany, and Hitler mostly just appropriated what he could, which wasn’t much, and marginalised or ignored what he couldn’t. Within Germany there was no mass persecution of lay Catholics based only on confession, while in the places they conquered like Poland, the Church was targeted for annihilation.
The Protestantism side of things is horrifying, though. Rather than the idiot’s anti-Semitism that does not know that the Christ was a Jew or the well-read fool’s version that claims that rabinnical Judaism is not Jewish, they established a true horror: an idolatrous, triply heretical, and generally grotesque un-Church called Positive Christianity that presented Jesus as an Ayran hero who was martyed for his resistance against the Jews and which agreed neither with the Apostle’s Creed nor with the very simple notion that Mankind should give honor to the Lord of Hosts, the Holy Spirit, Jesus the Christ, and which rather established the mortal Fürher as its central figure.
This was in *combination* with the ugliness of Nazi neo-paganism and the nihilism of cynical atheism.
As to the (lack of) reaction of the Holy See, the Pope had harshly criticized Mussolini’s Fascism as well as Nazism. I can think of a number of possible reasons: the interwar interpretation of the Holy See’s neutrality principle, the fact that Italy could hit the Vatican where it lived, the Nazis being apostates who didn’t merit formal excommunication and weren’t quite the Church’s responsibility, or who even knows.
At times it is understandable to wish that the Pope had instead preached an ecumenical Crusade, buried Hitler under a flowing wave of Christian partisans, and be tempted to have burned him and his lieutenants in pennance for their horriffic sins.
Quadragesimo anno marked a turn of the Church towards the right in the wake of the Great Depression, turning (or at least corresponding to the turning of) Catholic parties, where they functioned as swing votes, against democracy, which Pius XI had always been skeptical of. So I do think there’s some positive responsibility there, though of course the Church itself as well as all the individual Catholic parties were composed of many different actors who acted in different ways.
@warpedellipsis: the keystone of Nazi-Catholic relations was the Reichskonkordat of 1933, basically a peace and neutrality treaty between the Reich and the Church.
OK so before the rise of modern states, the Church took on much of what would be considered domestic or social policy today, and in the German lands that remained Catholic through the Wars of Religion the Church retained significant presence not just as a liturgical body, but through institutions of schooling, health care, poor relief, etc.
This brought on great tensions with the rest of the Protestant, centralizing, modernizing society, most prominently with the Kulturkampf (from which we take the term “culture war”) of the mid-19th century – effectively, a government-led crusade against the Church, ultimately blunted for reasons of pragmatic realpolitik but constantly threatening to reemerge under new conditions.
German Catholics were represented by the Centre Party, and the Nazis appeared the only coalitionmate not existentially antagonistic. Liberals, communists, and social democrats alike resented the church for its ties to a feudal aristocracy it longed to resurrect. Jews and atheists, with their historic grievances, concentrated on the left, as did the public servants who stood to gain from the replacement of Church with government institutions. Meanwhile the traditional right had its roots in strong-central-state Protestant aristocrats who saw the Church as a rival, and industrialists wary of its anti-capitalist social teachings and outreach to workers.
The Reichskonkordat was the price the Centre Party extracted in return for voting with the NSDAP for the Enabling Act of 1933, which removed legislative checks on the executive and ushered in dictatorship. The Nazis themselves never acquired a majority under open elections. I think a lot of interwar comparisons to contemporary politics are overblown, but that’s one thing worth considering – how can right-extremists build a broad enough base to assume power? By credibly promising not to crush a religious faction when no one else can.
Anyway there were tensions, this encyclical included (which the Reich understood as a violation of the negotiated peace by the Church) and who knows how the thousand-year reign would have gone, but so long as the Reich stood it was more or less upheld – when under the policy of Gleichschaltung private civil society institutions were collapsed into party-state appparatuses, Catholic groups were some of the few left independent.