Editing Mit brennender Sorge (section)

=== Defense of natural law ===
Burleigh views the encyclical as confounding the Nazi philosophy that "Right is what is advantageous to the people" through its defense of Natural Law:<ref name="Burleigh, 2006, p. 192"/>

<blockquote>29. …{{nbsp}}To hand over the moral law to man's subjective opinion, which changes with the times, instead of anchoring it in the holy will of the eternal God and His commandments, is to open wide every door to the forces of destruction. The resulting dereliction of the eternal principles of an objective morality, which educates conscience and ennobles every department and organization of life, is a sin against the destiny of a nation, a sin whose bitter fruit will poison future generations.<ref name="ReferenceA"/></blockquote>The Nazi principle is rejected on the basis that what is morally illicit cannot be of true advantage.<ref name="Lewy, 1967, p. 157" /> Human laws opposed to natural law were described as not "obligatory in conscience". 

In his history of the German Resistance, [[Anton Gill]] interprets the encyclical as having asserted the "inviolability of human rights".<ref name="Anton Gill p.58" /> Historian Emma Fattorini wrote that the Pope's

<blockquote>indignation was obviously not addressed at improbable democratic-liberal human rights issues, nor was there a generic and abstract appeal to evangelical principles. It was rather the Church's competition with the totalitarian regression of the concept of Volk that in the Nazi state-worship totally absorbed the community-people relationship<ref>""Mit brennender Sorge", the cry of Pius XI", Emma Fattorini, Reset Dialogues on Civilizations, 25 November 2008 [http://www.resetdoc.org/story/00000001138]</ref></blockquote>

{{blockquote|30. …{{nbsp}}Human laws in flagrant contradiction with the natural law are vitiated with a taint which no force, no power can mend. In the light of this principle one must judge the axiom, that "right is common utility," a proposition which may be given a correct significance, it means that what is morally indefensible, can never contribute to the good of the people. But ancient paganism acknowledged that the axiom, to be entirely true, must be reversed and be made to say: "Nothing can be useful, if it is not at the same time morally good" (Cicero, De Off. ii. 30). Emancipated from this oral rule, the principle would in international law carry a perpetual state of war between nations; for it ignores in national life, by confusion of right and utility, the basic fact that man as a person possesses rights he holds from God, and which any collectivity must protect against denial, suppression or neglect.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}

Thomas Banchoff considers this the first explicit mention of human rights by a Pope, something the Pope would affirm the following year in a little-noticed letter to the American Church. Banchoff writes: "the church's full embrace of the human rights agenda would have to wait until the 1960s".<ref>"Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights", Thomas Banchoff, Robert Wuthnow, Oxford University Press, pp. 291–292, 2011. {{ISBN|0199841039}}</ref>