©2021 Victor R. Claveau, MJ
It is well known that the National-Socialist totalitarian party made a racist ideology the basis of its insane program, aimed at the physical elimination of those it deemed belonging to “inferior races.” This party became responsible for one of the greatest genocides in history. This murderous folly struck first and foremost the Jewish people in unheard-of proportions, as well as other peoples, such as the Gypsies and the Tziganes, and also categories of persons such as the handicapped and the mentally ill. It was only a step from racism to eugenics, and it was quickly taken.
The Church did not hesitate to raise her voice.1 Pope Pius XI clearly condemned Nazi doctrines in his encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge, stating in particular: “Whosoever takes race, or the people or the State or any other basic value of the human community in order to withdraw them from [their] scale of values and deify them through an idolatrous cult, overturns and falsifies the order of things created and established by God.”2 On April 13, 1938, the pope had the Sacred Congregation for Seminaries and Universities address a letter to all rectors and deans of faculties, asking all professors of theology to refute, using the method proper to each discipline, the scientific pseudo-truths with which Nazism justified its racist ideologies.3 As early as 1937, Pius XI had begun to prepare another major encyclical on the unity of the human race which was to condemn racism and anti-Semitism. Death overtook him before he could make it public. His successor, Pope Pius XII, took certain elements from it for his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus,4 and especially from his 1942 Christmas message in which he stated that among the erroneous postulates of juridical positivism “must be included a theory which claims for such and such a nation, race, class, the ‘juridical instinct,’ supreme imperative and norm without appeal.” The pope launched a vibrant appeal for a new and better social order: “Humanity owes such a commitment to hundreds of thousands of persons who, without the slightest guilt on their part, but simply because they belong to a given race or nationality, are doomed to death or to gradual extinction.”5 In Germany itself, there was a courageous resistance on the part of the Catholic Church to which Pope John Paul II referred on April 30, 19876 during his second visit to that country.”7
Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Anxiety): On the Church and the German Reich is an encyclical of Pope Pius XI, issued during the Nazi era on 10 March 1937 (but bearing a date of Passion Sunday, 14 March).
Copies of the encyclical were delivered by diplomatic courier to the Papal Nuncio in Berlin. He, in turn, passed these on to the local bishops who had them distributed by secret couriers to all the German prelates.
Twelve printers reproduced the text under the noses of the Gestapo. Several bishops had copies printed in the hundreds of thousands. Afterward, again in total secrecy, the text was distributed to every parish priest, chaplain and convent, and the encyclical was read, at the peril of their lives, by the Catholic clergy in Germany on March 21, 1937, Palm Sunday. It was the basis upon which Catholic resistance to Hitler was founded, and its words sustained the hundreds of martyred priests and nuns who were murdered by the Nazis.
The language was clear and explicit: Adolf Hitler was deceiving the Germans and the international community. The encyclical affirmed that the Nazi leader was perfidious, untrustworthy, dangerous and determined to take the place of God.
The international community reacted enthusiastically. The Jewish communities were elated since that encyclical presented the strongest condemnation of racism.
The Holy Father opened the encyclical with the following statement:
“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.”
The encyclical condemned racist ideologies:
“He who takes the race, or the people, or the state, or the form of government, the bearers of the power of the state or other fundamental elements of human society—which in the temporal order of things have an essential and honorable place—out of the system of their earthly valuation, and makes them the ultimate norm of all, even of religious values, and deifies them with an idolatrous worship, perverts and falsifies the order of things created and commanded by God. Such a one is far from true belief in God and a conception of life corresponding to true belief” (8).
The pontifical document underlined:
“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.’” (11).8
There was also an explicit condemnation of the attempt to build a “national German church.”
“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” (22).
We are all well aware that Hitler’s ideas on the superiority of the Aryan race resulted in the murder of countless numbers of innocent men, women, and children.
“For years before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he was obsessed with ideas about race. In his speeches and writings, Hitler spread his beliefs in racial ‘purity’ and in the superiority of the ‘Germanic race’—what he called an Aryan ‘master race.’ He pronounced that his race must remain pure in order to one day take over the world.
“When Hitler and the Nazis came to power, these beliefs became the government ideology and were spread in publicly displayed posters, on the radio, in movies, in classrooms, and in newspapers. The Nazis began to put their ideology into practice with the support of German scientists who believed that the human race could be improved by limiting the reproduction of people considered ‘inferior.’ Beginning in 1933, German physicians were allowed to perform forced sterilizations, operations making it impossible for the victims to have children. Among the targets of this public program were Roma (Gypsies), an ethnic minority numbering about 30,000 in Germany, and handicapped individuals, including the mentally ill and people born deaf and blind. Also victimized were about 500 African-German children, the offspring of German mothers and African colonial soldiers in the Allied armies that occupied the German Rhineland region after World War I.
“Hitler and other Nazi leaders viewed the Jews not as a religious group, but as a poisonous ‘race,’ which ‘lived off’ the other races and weakened them.”9
“About two out of every three Jews living in Europe before the war were killed in the Holocaust. When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead; more than one million of the victims were children. Even this statistic is misleading, because most of those who survived resided in areas of Europe not occupied by Germany during the war: eastern areas of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Bulgaria, and neutral states like Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden. Tens of thousands of Jews also survived in German-occupied Europe mostly in hiding or as prisoners in concentration camps until liberation. The Germans and their collaborators were relentless in hunting down and killing Jews in the areas of Europe that they controlled.”10
1. On March 25, 1928, a decree of the Holy Office condemned anti-Semitism: AAS XX (1928), 103-104.
2. AAS XXIX (1937), 149.
3. Cf. Documentation Catholique (DC), 1938, 579-580. In a discourse to the members of the College of Propaganda Fide on July 28, 1938, Pius XI again stated: “Catholic means universal, not racist, not nationalistic in the separatist meaning of these two attributes…. We do not wish to separate anything in the human family…. The term ‘humankind’ reveals precisely what the human race is. It must be stated that people are first and foremost all one great and single species, one great and single family of living beings…. There is only one human, universal ‘catholic’ race…and with it and in it, different variations…. This is the Church’s response,” in L’Osservatore Romano (OR), July 30, 1938, cf. DC 1938, 1058-1961.
4. Cf. encyclical Summi Pontificatus, October 28, 1939, AAS XXXI (1939), 481-509.
5. 1942 Christmas Radio Message, nn. 20 and 70, AAS XXXV (1943), 14; 23.
6. To the Bishops of the Episcopal Conference meeting in Maternushaus of the Archdiocese of Cologne, John Paul II pointed out the witness given by the Cardinal Count Clemens August von Galen, the Carmelite Edith Stein, the Jesuit Rupert Mayer and “numerous other courageous witnesses who, in the face of inhuman tyranny, stood up on grounds of religious belief or humanitarianism…. All of them together represent the other Germany which refused to bow to arrogance and brute force and which was able, after the final collapse, to serve as a sound nucleus and source of strength for the magnificent moral and material reconstruction which followed” (OR, English ed., May 18, 1987, 17).
7. Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace of Pope John Paul II, The Church and Racism, November 3, 1988, No. 7.
8. Isaiah 11:15.
9. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, https://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007679