This is what Pope Pius XI had to say about, inter alia, the Concordat - Part I, it's too long to fit. It was issued in German and read in all the German Churches.
MIT BRENNENDER SORGE
ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XI ON THE CHURCH AND THE GERMAN REICH
MARCH 14, 1937
To the Venerable Brethren the Archbishops and Bishops of Germany and
other Ordinaries in Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See.
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 in the
midst of a people that once received from St. Boniface the bright message
and the Gospel of Christ and God's Kingdom.
2. And what the representatives of the venerable episcopate, who visited
Us in Our sick room, had to tell Us, in truth and duty bound, has not
modified Our feelings. To consoling and edifying information on the stand
the Faithful are making for their Faith, they considered themselves
bound, in spite of efforts to judge with moderation and in spite of their
own patriotic love, to add reports of things hard and unpleasant. After
hearing their account, We could, in grateful acknowledgment to God,
exclaim with the Apostle of love: "I have no greater grace than this, to
hear that my children walk in truth" (John iii. 4). But the frankness
indifferent in Our Apostolic charge and the determination to place before
the Christian world the truth in all its reality, prompt Us to add: "Our
pastoral heart knows no deeper pain, no disappointment more bitter, than
to learn that many are straying from the path of truth."
3. When, in 1933, We consented, Venerable Brethren, to open negotiations
for a concordat, which the Reich Government proposed on the basis of a
scheme of several years' standing; and when, to your unanimous
satisfaction, We concluded the negotiations by a solemn treaty, We were
prompted by the desire, as it behooved Us, to secure for Germany the
freedom of the Church's beneficent mission and the salvation of the souls
in her care, as well as by the sincere wish to render the German people a
service essential for its peaceful development and prosperity. Hence,
despite many and grave misgivings, We then decided not to withhold Our
consent 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. It
was by acts that We wished to make it plain, Christ's interests being Our
sole object, that the pacific and maternal hand of the Church would be
extended to anyone who did not actually refuse it.
4. If, then, the tree of peace, which we planted on German soil with the
purest intention, has not brought forth the fruit, which in the interest
of your people, We had fondly hoped, no one in the world who has eyes to
see and ears to hear will be able to lay the blame on the Church and on
her Head. 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.
5. We have never ceased, Venerable Brethren, to represent to the
responsible rulers of your country's destiny, the consequences which
would inevitably follow the protection and even the favor, extended to
such a policy. We have done everything in Our power to defend the sacred
pledge of the given word of honor against theories and practices, which
it officially endorsed, would wreck every faith in treaties and make
every signature worthless. Should the day ever come to place before the
world the account of Our efforts, every honest mind will see on which
side are to be found the promoters of peace, and on which side its
disturbers. Whoever had left in his soul an atom of love for truth, and
in his heart a shadow of a sense of justice, must admit that, in the
course of these anxious and trying years following upon the conclusion of
the concordat, every one of Our words, every one of Our acts, has been
inspired by the binding law of treaties. 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. The moderation We showed in spite of all this was not
inspired by motives of worldly interest, still less by unwarranted
weakness, but merely by Our anxiety not to draw out the wheat with the
cockle; not to pronounce open judgment, before the public was ready to
see its force; not to impeach other people's honesty, before the evidence
of events should have torn the mask off the systematic hostility leveled
at the Church. 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 and the anxiety of every
Christian conscience; even now Our responsibility for Christian souls
induces Us not to overlook the last possibilities, however slight, of a
return to fidelity to treaties, and to any arrangement that may be
acceptable to the episcopate. We shall continue without failing, 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.
6. Different, however, Venerable Brethren, is the purpose of this letter.
As you affectionately visited Us in Our illness, so also We turn to you,
and through you, the German Catholics, who, like all suffering and
afflicted children, are nearer to their Father's heart. At a time when
your faith, like gold, is being tested in the fire of tribulation and
persecution, when your religious freedom is beset on all sides, when the
lack of religious teaching and of normal defense is heavily weighing on
you, you have every right to words of truth and spiritual comfort from
him whose first predecessor heard these words from the Lord: "I have
prayed for thee that thy faith fail not: and thou being once converted,
confirm thy brethren" (Luke xxii. 32).
7. Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first
and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany
pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in
his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy
concept of the Divinity. 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 who "Reacheth from end to
end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither
is he a believer in God.
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.
9. Beware, Venerable Brethren, 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.
Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this
aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent,
infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the
unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and
ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and
cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.
10. This God, this Sovereign Master, has issued commandments whose value
is independent of time and space, country and race. As God's sun shines
on every human face so His law knows neither privilege nor exception.
Rulers and subjects, crowned and uncrowned, rich and poor are equally
subject to His word. From the fullness of the Creators' right there
naturally arises the fullness of His right to be obeyed by individuals
and communities, whoever they are. This obedience permeates all branches
of activity in which moral values claim harmony with the law of God, and
pervades all integration of the ever-changing laws of man into the
immutable laws of God.
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" (Isaiah xI, 15).
12. The Bishops of the Church of Christ, "ordained in the things that
appertain to God (Heb. v, 1) must watch that pernicious errors of this
sort, and consequent practices more pernicious still, shall not gain a
footing among their flock. It is part of their sacred obligations to do
whatever is in their power to enforce respect for, and obedience to, the
commandments of God, as these are the necessary foundation of all private
life and public morality; to see that the rights of His Divine Majesty,
His name and His word be not profaned; to put a stop to the blasphemies,
which, in words and pictures, are multiplying like the sands of the
desert; to encounter the obstinacy and provocations of those who deny,
despise and hate God, by the never-failing reparatory prayers of the
Faithful, hourly rising like incense to the All-Highest and staying His
vengeance.
13. We thank you, Venerable Brethren, your priests and Faithful, who have
persisted in their Christian duty and in the defense of God's rights in
the teeth of an aggressive paganism. Our gratitude, warmer still and
admiring, goes out to those who, in fulfillment of their duty, have been
deemed worthy of sacrifice and suffering for the love of God.
14. No faith in God can for long survive pure and unalloyed without the
support of faith in Christ. "No one knoweth who the Son is, but the
Father: and who the Father is, but the Son and to whom the Son will
reveal Him" (Luke x. 22). "Now this is eternal life: That they may know
thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent" (John xvii.
3). Nobody, therefore, can say: "I believe in God, and that is enough
religion for me," for the Savior's words brook no evasion: "Whosoever
denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father. He that confesseth the Son
hath the Father also" (1 John ii. 23).
15. In Jesus Christ, Son of God made Man, there shone the plentitude of
divine revelation. "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke
in times past to the fathers by the prophets last of all, in these days
hath spoken to us by His Son" (Heb. i. 1). 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. But side by side with innumerable touches
of greatness and nobleness, they also record the story of the chosen
people, bearers of the Revelation and the Promise, repeatedly straying
from God and turning to the world. Eyes not blinded by prejudice or
passion will see in this prevarication, as reported by the Biblical
history, the luminous splendor of the divine light revealing the saving
plan which finally triumphs over every fault and sin. It is precisely in
the twilight of this background that one perceives the striking
perspective of the divine tutorship of salvation, as it warms,
admonishes, strikes, raises and beautifies its elect. Nothing but
ignorance and pride could blind one to the treasures hoarded in the Old
Testament.
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, and makes limited
and narrow human thought the judge of God's designs over the history of
the world: he denies his faith in the true Christ, such as He appeared in
the flesh, the Christ who took His human nature from a people that was to
crucify Him; and he understands nothing of that universal tragedy of the
Son of God who to His torturer's sacrilege opposed the divine and
priestly sacrifice of His redeeming death, and made the new alliance the
goal of the old alliance, its realization and its crown.
17. The peak of the revelation as reached in the Gospel of Christ is
final and permanent. It knows no retouches by human hand; it admits no
substitutes or arbitrary alternatives such as certain leaders pretend to
draw from the so-called myth of race and blood. Since Christ, the Lord's
Anointed, finished the task of Redemption, and by breaking up the reign
of sin deserved for us the grace of being the children God, since that
day no other name under heaven has been given to men, whereby we must be
saved (Acts iv. 12). No man, were every science, power and worldly
strength incarnated in him, can lay any other foundation but that which
is laid: which is Christ Jesus (1 Cor. iii 11). 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).
18. Faith in Christ cannot maintain itself pure and unalloyed without the
support of faith in the Church, "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1
Tim. iii. 15); for Christ Himself, God eternally blessed, raised this
pillar of the Faith. His command tO hear the Church (Matt. xviii. 15), to
welcome in the words and commands of the Church His own words and His own
commands (Luke x. 16), is addressed to all men, of all times and of all
countries. The Church founded by the Redeemer is one, the same for all
races and all nations. Beneath her dome, as beneath the vault of heaven,
there is but one country for all nations and tongues; there is room for
the development of every quality, advantage, task and vocation which God
the Creator and Savior has allotted to individuals as well as to ethnical
communities. The Church's maternal heart is big enough to see in the
God-appointed development of individual characteristics and gifts, more
than a mere danger of divergency. She rejoices at the spiritual
superiorities among individuals and nations. In their successes she sees
with maternal joy and pride fruits of education and progress, which she
can only bless and encourage, whenever she can conscientiously do so. But
she also knows that tO this freedom limits have been set by the majesty
of the divine command, which founded that Church one and indivisible.
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.
19. The Church, whose work lies among men and operates through men, may
see her divine mission obscured by human, too human, combination,
persistently growing and developing like the cockle among the wheat of
the Kingdom of God. Those who know the Savior's words on scandal and the
giver of scandals, know, too, the judgment which the Church and all her
sons must pronounce on what was and what is sin. But if, besides these
reprehensible discrepancies be between faith and life, acts and words,
exterior conduct and interior feelings, however numerous they be, anyone
overlooks the overwhelming sum of authentic virtues, of spirit of
sacrifice, fraternal love, heroic efforts of sanctity, he gives evidence
of deplorable blindness and injustice. If later he forgets to apply the
standard of severity, by which he measures the Church he hates, to other
organizations in which he happens to be interested, then his appeal to an
offended sense of purity identifies him with those who, for seeing the
mote in their brother's eye, according to the Savior's incisive words,
cannot see the beam in their own. But however suspicious the intention of
those who make it their task, nay their vile profession, to scrutinize
what is human in the Church, and although the priestly powers conferred
by God are independent of the priest's human value, it yet remains true
that at no moment of history, no individual, in no organization can
dispense himself from the duty of loyally examining his conscience, of
mercilessly purifying himself, and energetically renewing himself in
spirit and in action. In Our Encyclical on the priesthood We have urged
attention to the sacred duty of all those who belong to the Church,
chiefly the members of the priestly and religious profession and of the
lay apostolate, to square their faith and their conduct with the claims
of the law of God and of the Church. And today we again repeat with all
the insistency We can command: it is not enough to be a member of the
Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in
truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God,
either in innocence or in sincere repentance. If the Apostle of the
nations, the vase of election, chastised his body and brought it into
subjection: lest perhaps, when he had preached to others, he himself
should become a castaway (1 Cor. ix. 27), could anybody responsible for
the extension of the Kingdom of God claim any other method but personal
sanctification? Only thus can we show to the present generation, and to
the critics of the Church that "the salt of the earth," the leaven of
Christianity has not decayed, but is ready to give the men of
today--prisoners of doubt and error, victims of indifference, tired of
their Faith and straying from God--the spiritual renewal they so much
need. A Christianity which keeps a grip on itself, refuses every
compromise with the world, takes the commands of God and the Church
seriously, preserves its love of God and of men in all its freshness,
such a Christianity can be, and will be, a model and a guide to a world
which is sick to death and clamors for directions, unless it be condemned
to a catastrophe that would baffle the imagination.
20. Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity
of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to
stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves
because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and
reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of
springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced
unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more
than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt
"the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John iii. 8): "of stones He is able
to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. iii. 9). He
chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those
of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at
Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is
moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and
inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the
tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on
Pentecost day to an erratic world.
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. Our wholehearted
paternal sympathy goes out to those who must pay so dearly for their
loyalty to Christ and the Church; but directly the highest interests are
at stake, with the alternative of spiritual loss, there is but one
alternative left, that of heroism. If the oppressor offers one the Judas
bargain of apostasy he can only, at the cost of every worldly sacrifice,
answer with Our Lord: "Begone, Satan! For it is written: The Lord thy God
shalt thou adore, and Him only shalt thou serve" (Matt. iv. 10). And
turning to the Church, he shall say: "Thou, my mother since my infancy,
the solace of my life and advocate at my death, may my tongue cleave to
my palate if, yielding to worldly promises or threats, I betray the vows
of my baptism." As to those who imagine that they can reconcile exterior
infidelity tO one and the same Church, let them hear Our Lord's
warning:--"He that shall deny me before men shall be denied before the
angels of God" (Luke xii. 9).
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). Thus was sealed
the connection between the faith in Christ, the Church and the Primacy.
True and lawful authority is invariably a bond of unity, a source of
strength, a guarantee against division and ruin, a pledge for the future:
and this is verified in the deepest and sublimest sense, when that
authority, as in the case of the Church, and the Church alone, is sealed
by the promise and the guidance of the Holy Ghost and His irresistible
support. Should men, who are not even united by faith in Christ, come and
offer you the seduction of a national German Church, be convinced that it
is nothing but a denial of the one Church of Christ and the evident
betrayal of that universal evangelical mission, for which a world Church
alone is qualified and competent. The live history of other national
churches with their paralysis, their domestication and subjection to
worldly powers, is sufficient evidence of the sterility to which is
condemned every branch that is severed from the trunk of the living
Church. Whoever counters these erroneous developments with an
uncompromising No from the very outset, not only serves the purity of his
faith in Christ, but also the welfare and the vitality of his own people.
23. You will need to watch carefully, Venerable Brethren, that religious
fundamental concepts be not emptied of their content and distorted to
profane use. "Revelation" in its Christian sense, means the word of God
addressed to man. The use of this word for the "suggestions" of race and
blood, for the irradiations of a people's history, is mere equivocation.
False coins of this sort do not deserve Christian currency. "Faith"
consists in holding as true what God has revealed and proposes through
His Church to man's acceptance. It is "the evidence of things that appear
not" (Heb. ii. 1). The joyful and proud confidence in the future of one's
people, instinct in every heart, is quite a different thing from faith in
a religious sense. To substitute the one for the other, and demand on the
strength of this, to be numbered among the faithful followers of Christ,
is a senseless play on words, if it does not conceal a confusion of
concepts, or worse.
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.
25. "Original sin" is the hereditary but impersonal fault of Adam's
descendants, who have sinned in him (Rom. v. 12). It is the loss of
grace, and therefore of eternal life, together with a propensity to evil,
which everybody must, with the assistance of grace, penance, resistance
and moral effort, repress and conquer. The passion and death of the Son
of God has redeemed the world from the hereditary curse of sin and death.
Faith in these truths, which in your country are today the butt of the
cheap derision of Christ's enemies, belongs to the inalienable treasury
of Christian revelation.
26. The cross of Christ, though it has become to many a stumbling block
and foolishness (1 Cor. i. 23) remains for the believer the holy sign of
his redemption, the emblem of moral strength and greatness. We live in
its shadow and die in its embrace. It will stand on our grave as a pledge
of our faith and our hope in the eternal light.
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.
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; God's intervention which raises man to
that intimate communion of life with Himself, called by the Gospel
"adoption of the children of God." "Behold what manner of charity the
Father hath bestowed on us, that we should be called and should be the
sons of God" (1 John iii. 1). 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. |
