Editing Mit brennender Sorge (section)

=== 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}}