“Mit Brennender Sorge” (1937)

Extracts from Mit Brennender Sorge (‘With Burning Concern’), an encyclical of Pope Pius XI. This document was circulated to the Catholic clergy in Nazi Germany in March 1937:

“Venerable Brethren, Greetings, and Apostolic Blessing.

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…

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…

The evidence of events has torn the mask off the systematic hostility levelled at the Church. Even now that a campaign against the confessional schools, which are guaranteed by the concordat, and the destruction of free elections, where Catholics have a right to their children’s Catholic education, afford evidence, in a matter so essential to the life of the Church… We shall continue to stand before the rulers of your people as the defender of violated rights, and in obedience to Our Conscience and Our pastoral mission, whether We be successful or not, to oppose the policy which seeks, by open or secret means, to strangle rights guaranteed by a treaty…

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 divinises 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. Beware of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation…

We thank you, Venerable Brethren, your priests and Faithful, who have persisted in their Christian duty and in the defence of God’s rights in the teeth of an aggressive paganism. Our gratitude, warmer still and admiring, goes out to those who, in fulfilment of their duty, have been deemed worthy of sacrifice and suffering for the love of God… We address a special word of congratulation, encouragement and exhortation to the priests of Germany, who, in difficult times and delicate situations, have, under the direction of their Bishops, to guide the flocks of Christ along the straight road, by word and example, by their daily devotion and apostolic patience.”

Given at the Vatican on Passion Sunday, March 14th 1937
Pius XI