Editing Mit brennender Sorge (section)

==Content==
The numbers conform to the headings used in the Vatican's [https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_14031937_mit-brennender-sorge.html English translation of the text].

=== Violations of the Concordat ===
In the introduction and sections 1–8 of the encyclical Pius XI wrote of his "deep anxiety and growing surprise" on observing the travails of the Catholic Church in Germany with the terms of Concordat being openly broken and the faithful being oppressed as had never been seen before.<ref>Lewy, 1967, p. 156</ref>

{{blockquote|1. It is with deep anxiety and growing surprise that We have long been following the painful trials of the Church and the increasing vexations which afflict those who have remained loyal in heart and action in the midst of a people that once received from St. Boniface the bright message and the Gospel of Christ and God's Kingdom.<ref name="ReferenceA">Mit brennender Sorge Eng, Vatican Web Site</ref>

3. … Hence, despite many and grave misgivings, We then decided not to withhold Our consent [to the Concordat] for We wished to spare the Faithful of Germany, as far as it was humanly possible, the trials and difficulties they would have had to face, given the circumstances, had the negotiations fallen through<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

4. … The experiences of these last years have fixed responsibilities and laid bare intrigues, which from the outset only aimed at a war of extermination. In the furrows, where We tried to sow the seed of a sincere peace, other men – the "enemy" of Holy Scripture – oversowed the cockle of distrust, unrest, hatred, defamation, of a determined hostility overt or veiled, fed from many sources and wielding many tools, against Christ and His Church. They, and they alone with their accomplices, silent or vociferous, are today responsible, should the storm of religious war, instead of the rainbow of peace, blacken the German skies.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

5. At the same time, anyone must acknowledge, not without surprise and reprobation, how the other contracting party emasculated the terms of the treaty, distorted their meaning, and eventually considered its more or less official violation as a normal policy{{nbsp}}… Even now that a campaign against the confessional schools, which are guaranteed by the concordat, and the destruction of free election, where Catholics have a right to their children's Catholic education, afford evidence, in a matter so essential to the life of the Church, of the extreme gravity of the situation.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}

=== Race ===
Pius then affirmed the articles of faith that Nazi ideology was attacking. He stated that true belief in God could not be reconciled with race, people or state raised beyond their standard value to idolatrous levels.<ref name="Lewy, 1967, p. 157">Lewy, 1967, p. 157</ref> National religion or a national God was rejected as a grave error and that the Christian God could not be restricted "within the frontiers of a single people, within the pedigree of one single race." (sections 9–13).<ref name="Lewy, 1967, p. 157"/>  Historian [[Michael Phayer]] wrote:

{{blockquote|In ''Divini Redemptoris'', he [Pius XI] condemned communism once again, while in ''Mit brennender Sorge'' he criticized racism in carefully measured words. As Peter Godman has pointed out, this was a political decision that ignored the immorality of Nazi racism as it had been discerned by in-house committees at the Vatican. … the encyclical stepped lightly around the issue of racism so as to keep the Concordat intact.<ref>Phayer, Pius XII, The Holocaust, and the Cold War, 2008, p. 175-176</ref>}}

Martin Rhonheimer writes that while ''Mit brennender Sorge'' asserts "race" is a "fundamental value of the human community", "necessary and honorable", it condemns the "exaltation of race, or the people, or the state, or a particular form of state", "above their standard value" to "an idolatrous level".<ref>Faulhaber's original draft of this passage read: "Be vigilant that race, or the state, or other communal values, which can claim an honorable place in worldly things, be not magnified and idolized."</ref> According to Rhonheimer, it was Pacelli who added to Faulhaber's milder draft the following passage (8):<ref name="First things, Rhonheimer">First things, Rhonheimer</ref>

{{blockquote|7. … Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}
{{blockquote|8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}

Against this background to the encyclical, Faulhaber suggested in an internal Church memorandum that the bishops should inform the Nazi regime
<blockquote>…that the Church, through the application of its marriage laws, has made and continues to make, an important contribution to the state's policy of racial purity; and is thus performing a valuable service for the regime's population policy.<ref name="First things, Rhonheimer"/></blockquote>

Vidmar wrote that the encyclical condemned particularly the purported [[paganism]] of the national socialist ideology, the myth of race and blood, and the fallacy of its conception of [[God]]. It warned Catholics that the growing Nazi ideology, which exalted one race over all others, was incompatible with Catholic Christianity.<ref name="Vidmar327">Vidmar, pp. 327–331</ref>

<blockquote>11. None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket"<ref name="ReferenceA"/></blockquote>

Historian [[Garry Wills]], in the context of Jews having traditionally been described as deicides, says that the encyclical affirms {{" '}}Jesus received his human nature from a people who crucified him' – not some Jews, but the Jewish people" and that it was also Pius XI who had disbanded the Catholic organization "[[Opus sacerdotale Amici Israel|Friends of Israel]]" that had campaigned to have the charge of deicide dropped.<ref>Wills, Papal Sin, p. 19</ref> The charge of deicide against all Jewish people was later dropped during the Second Vatican Council.{{fact|date=July 2023}}

=== Defending the Old Testament ===
Historian Paul O'Shea says the encyclical contains a vigorous defense of the [[Old Testament]] out of belief that it prepared the way for the [[New Testament|New]].<ref name="Paul O p.156-157"/>

{{blockquote|15. The sacred books of the Old Testament are exclusively the word of God, and constitute a substantial part of his revelation; they are penetrated by a subdued light, harmonizing with the slow development of revelation, the dawn of the bright day of the redemption. As should be expected in historical and didactic books, they reflect in many particulars the imperfection, the weakness and sinfulness of man&nbsp;… Nothing but ignorance and pride could blind one to the treasures hoarded in the Old Testament.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}
{{blockquote|16. Whoever wishes to see banished from church and school the Biblical history and the wise doctrines of the Old Testament, blasphemes the name of God, blasphemes the Almighty's plan of salvation<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}

=== Claimed attacks on Hitler ===
There is no mention of Hitler by name in the encyclical but the "mad prophet" described in the text may be a veiled reference to him. The Catholic writer [[Anthony Rhodes]]<ref>{{Cite news |date=August 25, 2004 |title=Anthony Rhodes - Cosmopolitan travel writer, biographer, novelist and memoirist |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/anthony-rhodes-550343.html}}</ref><ref>"Anthony Rhodes: Cosmopolitan and well-connected man of letters who write a deeply researched three-volume history of the Vatican", Obituary, The Times, 8 September 2004 [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article479642.ece]{{dead link|date=September 2024|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}}</ref> wrote in ''The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators:'' "Nor was the Führer himself spared [in the encyclical], for his 'aspirations to divinity', 'placing himself on the same level as Christ'; 'a mad prophet possessed of repulsive arrogance".<ref>The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, pp 204–205</ref> Subsequent works have repeated Rhodes' characterization that Hitler is described as a "mad prophet" in the encyclical.<ref>e.g see Bokenkotter, pp. 389–392</ref>

Historian [[John Connelly (historian)|John Connelly]] writes:

<blockquote>Some accounts exaggerate the directness of the pope's criticism of Hitler. Contrary to what Anthony Rhodes in ''The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators'' writes, there were oblique references to Hitler. It was not the case that Pius failed to "spare the Führer," or called him a "mad prophet possessed of repulsive arrogance." The text limits its critique of arrogance to unnamed Nazi "reformers".<ref>John Connelly, Harvard University Press, 2012, "From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965", p. 315, fn 52</ref></blockquote>

Historian [[Michael Phayer]] wrote that the encyclical does not condemn Hitler or National Socialism, "as some have erroneously asserted".<ref>Phyaer, 2002, p. 2</ref> Historian [[Michael Burleigh]] sees the passage as pinpointing "the tendency of the Führer-cult to elevate a man into god."

The relevant passage in the English version of the encyclical is:
<blockquote>17. …{{nbsp}}Should any man dare, in sacrilegious disregard of the essential differences between God and His creature, between the God-man and the children of man, to place a mortal, were he the greatest of all times, by the side of, or over, or against, Christ, he would deserve to be called prophet of nothingness, to whom the terrifying words of Scripture would be applicable: "He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them" (Psalms ii. 3).<ref>Burleigh, p. 191-192</ref></blockquote>
(The German text uses the term "{{italics correction|''ein Wahnprophet''}}", in which the component ''[[wikt:Wahn|Wahn]]'' can mean "illusion" or "delusion", while the Italian text uses "''un profeta di chimere''" (a prophet of chimeras; that is, a prophet as the product of the imagination).)

Historian [[Susan Zuccotti]] sees the above passage as an unmistakable jibe at Hitler.<ref>Under His Very Windows, p. 22</ref>

=== Fidelity to the Church and Bishop of Rome ===
Pius then went on to assert that people were obliged to believe in Christ, divine revelation, and the primacy of the Bishop of Rome  (Sections 14–24).<ref name="Lewy, 1967, p. 157"/>

{{blockquote|18. Faith in Christ cannot maintain itself pure and unalloyed without the support of faith in the Church&nbsp;… Whoever tampers with that unity and that indivisibility wrenches from the Spouse of Christ one of the diadems with which God Himself crowned her; he subjects a divine structure, which stands on eternal foundations, to criticism and transformation by architects whom the Father of Heaven never authorized to interfere.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

21. In your country, Venerable Brethren, voices are swelling into a chorus urging people to leave the Church, and among the leaders there is more than one whose official position is intended to create the impression that this infidelity to Christ the King constitutes a signal and meritorious act of loyalty to the modern State. Secret and open measures of intimidation, the threat of economic and civic disabilities, bear on the loyalty of certain classes of Catholic functionaries, a pressure which violates every human right and dignity&nbsp;…<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

22. Faith in the Church cannot stand pure and true without the support of faith in the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. The same moment when Peter, in the presence of all the Apostles and disciples, confesses his faith in Christ, Son of the Living God, the answer he received in reward for his faith and his confession was the word that built the Church, the only Church of Christ, on the rock of Peter (Matt. xvi. 18)&nbsp;… <ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}

=== Soteriology ===
Historian Michael Burleigh views the following passage as a rejection of the Nazis' conception of collective racial immortality:<ref name="Burleigh, 2006, p. 191">Burleigh, 2006, p. 191</ref>

<blockquote>24. "Immortality" in a Christian sense means the survival of man after his terrestrial death, for the purpose of eternal reward or punishment. Whoever only means by the term, the collective survival here on earth of his people for an indefinite length of time, distorts one of the fundamental notions of the Christian Faith and tampers with the very foundations of the religious concept of the universe, which requires a moral order. [Whoever does not wish to be a Christian ought at least to renounce the desire to enrich the vocabulary of his unbelief with the heritage of Christian ideas.]</blockquote>

The bracketed text is in Burleigh's book and the German version (section 29), but not in the Vatican's English version: ''Wenn er nicht Christ sein will, sollte er wenigstens darauf verzichten, den Wortschatz seines Unglaubens aus christlichem Begriffsgut zu bereichern.''

=== Compatibility of humility and heroism ===
Burleigh also mentions the encyclical's rejection of Nazi contempt for the redemptive value of suffering:<ref name="Burleigh, 2006, p. 192">Burleigh, 2006, p. 192</ref><blockquote>27. Humility in the spirit of the Gospel and prayer for the assistance of grace are perfectly compatible with self-confidence and heroism. The Church of Christ, which throughout the ages and to the present day numbers more confessors and voluntary martyrs than any other moral collectivity, needs lessons from no one in heroism of feeling and action. The odious pride of reformers only covers itself with ridicule when it rails at Christian humility as though it were but a cowardly pose of self-degradation.</blockquote>

=== Christian grace contrasted with natural gifts ===
{{blockquote|28. "Grace," in a wide sense, may stand for any of the Creator's gifts to His creature; but in its Christian designation, it means all the supernatural tokens of God's love... To discard this gratuitous and free elevation in the name of a so-called German type amounts to repudiating openly a fundamental truth of Christianity. It would be an abuse of our religious vocabulary to place on the same level supernatural grace and natural gifts. Pastors and guardians of the people of God will do well to resist this plunder of sacred things and this confusion of ideas.}}

=== 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>

=== Defense of Catholic schooling ===
The encyclical also defends the natural rights of parents in the education of their children, and describes as "void of all legality" the "notorious coercion" of Catholic children away from Catholic schooling into interdenominational schools, part of Nazi attempts to monopolize education (sections 33–37).<ref name="Lewy, 1967, p. 157" /><ref>Burleigh, 2005, p. 192</ref>

{{blockquote|31. The believer has an absolute right to profess his Faith and live according to its dictates. Laws which impede this profession and practice of Faith are against natural law. Parents who are earnest and conscious of their educative duties, have a primary right to the education of the children God has given them in the spirit of their Faith, and according to its prescriptions. Laws and measures which in school questions fail to respect this freedom of the parents go against natural law, and are immoral.

33. …{{nbsp}}Many of you, clinging to your Faith and to your Church, as a result of your affiliation with religious associations guaranteed by the concordat, have often to face the tragic trial of seeing your loyalty to your country misunderstood, suspected, or even denied, and of being hurt in your professional and social life{{nbsp}}… Today, as We see you threatened with new dangers and new molestations, We say to you: If any one should preach to you a Gospel other than the one you received on the knees of a pious mother, from the lips of a believing father, or through teaching faithful to God and His Church, "let him be anathema" (Gal. i. 9).<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

34. No one would think of preventing young Germans establishing a true ethnical community in a noble love of freedom and loyalty to their country. What We object to is the voluntary and systematic antagonism raised between national education and religious duty. That is why we tell the young: Sing your hymns to freedom, but do not forget the freedom of the children of God. Do not drag the nobility of that freedom in the mud of sin and sensuality&nbsp;…<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}

=== Call to priests and religious ===
{{blockquote|36.&nbsp;…The priest's first loving gift to his neighbors is to serve truth and refute error in any of its forms. Failure on this score would be not only a betrayal of God and your vocation, but also an offense against the real welfare of your people and country. To all those who have kept their promised fidelity to their Bishops on the day of their ordination; to all those who in the exercise of their priestly function are called upon to suffer persecution; to all those imprisoned in jail and concentration camps, the Father of the Christian world sends his words of gratitude and commendation.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}

{{blockquote|37. Our paternal gratitude also goes out to Religious and nuns, as well as Our sympathy for so many who, as a result of administrative measures hostile to Religious Orders, have been wrenched from the work of their vocation. If some have fallen and shown themselves unworthy of their vocation, their fault, which the Church punishes, in no way detracts from the merit of the immense majority, who, in voluntary abnegation and poverty, have tried to serve their God and their country&nbsp;…<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}Pius ends the encyclical with a call to priests and religious to serve truth, to unmask and refute error, with the laity being urged to remain faithful to Christ and to defend the rights which the Concordat had guaranteed them and the Church.<ref name="Lewy, 1967, p. 157" /> The encyclical dismisses "[Nazi] attempts to dress up their ghastly doctrines in the language of religious belief.":<ref name="Burleigh, 2006, p. 191" /> 

=== Call to parents ===
{{blockquote|39. We address Our special greetings to the Catholic parents. Their rights and duties as educators, conferred on them by God, are at present the stake of a campaign pregnant with consequences. The Church cannot wait to deplore the devastation of its altars, the destruction of its temples, if an education, hostile to Christ, is to profane the temple of the child's soul consecrated by baptism, and extinguish the eternal light of the faith in Christ for the sake of counterfeit light alien to the Cross&nbsp;…<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}

=== Moderation of the encyclical but with warnings ===
{{blockquote|41. We have weighed every word of this letter in the balance of truth and love. We wished neither to be an accomplice to equivocation by an untimely silence, nor by excessive severity to harden the hearts of those who live under Our pastoral responsibility;&nbsp;…<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

42.&nbsp;…Then We are sure, the enemies of the Church, who think that their time has come, will see that their joy was premature, and that they may close the grave they had dug. The day will come when the Te Deum of liberation will succeed to the premature hymns of the enemies of Christ: Te Deum of triumph and joy and gratitude, as the German people return to religion, bend the knee before Christ, and arming themselves against the enemies of God, again resume the task God has laid upon them.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

43. He who searches the hearts and reins (Psalm vii. 10) is Our witness that We have no greater desire than to see in Germany the restoration of a true peace between Church and State. But if, without any fault of Ours, this peace is not to come, then the Church of God will defend her rights and her freedom in the name of the Almighty whose arm has not shortened&nbsp;…<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}