March 1937: Mit brennender Sorge (German for “With burning anxiety”) was a Roman Catholic Church encyclical of Pope Pius XI Ambrogio Achille Ratti. The encyclical included very sharp criticism of all racism.
The encyclical was written in German and not in the usual Latin of official Roman Catholic Church documents in order that it would be readily understood when read in the parish churches of Germany. There was no pre–announcement of the encyclical, and its distribution was kept secret, so as to forestall any Nazi interference with its planned reading.
This encyclical condemned particularly the paganism of the national–socialist ideology, the myth of race and blood, and the fallacy of their conception of God.
selected passages –
“The Holocaust: What Was Not Said”, First Thing Magazine, November 2003 (accessed 30 June 2009)
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…
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 xl, 15).”
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Interestingly, in the context of a 21st century Vatican hell–bent on trying to ram through the “sainthood” of Ratti’s successor, the “silent pope” Pacelli, Pius XII, one does not seem to hear much of “sainthood” for Ratti, Pius XI, Pacelli’s predecessor, the author of Mit Brennender – a pope of unblemished courage, integrity, scholarship and bona fide ecumenicism.
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Regrettably, with the cancer of Jew–hatred having already achieved critical mass of toxicity in the corpus of Europe, courtesy of the Church–demonizations over the centuries by the very same Vatican, Ambrogio Achille Ratti’s courageous encyclical will fall on deaf ears in 1937.
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Hatred, subtly wrapped–in–theology, is one of the unique Vatican contributions to the sordid history of anti–Semitism. And this Church–inspired hatred tended to take deep root, often multi–generational root, even without new reinforcement. For the random twisted Jew hater will not only be doing the devil’s work; in addition, in his own mind, he will also be doing quasi–theological work, i.e. in line with the “theology” imparted to him by his pastor at Church, by his teachers at Passion Sagas, and by his parents at bedtime when he was a youngster. The Jews were diabolical, were they not? They had killed our Deity, had they not? They were doomed to suffer, were they not?
The saintly Pope Pius XI, as well heir to this Vatican legacy of hate–sowing, would prove no match for the tsunami of hatred now reaching critical mass after almost 20 centuries of hatred–sowing by many of his direct–line predecessors. It was hatred looking for a big–time demagogue. And the two primitive forces rendezvoused with each other in Berlin in the 1930s.
The encyclical of Pius XI, a bona fide beacon in a flowing sewer of hatred, would not save the now–doomed Jewish children of Europe and their families. The die of genocide, which the Vatican had instigated over the centuries, was cast.
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Having incubated a climate of hatred and denigration in Europe for 19 centuries, and having adroitly ridden that 1900 year–old wave of hatred to consolidate its power and “corroborate” its theology, the Church would see a mutant offspring of hatred–denigration, Nazism, emerge and turn around and bite the Church itself.
Then the Church would, of course, legitimately position itself as adversarial to—and then as a victim of—Nazism.
Nazism sought to destroy the Jews.
Nazism and the Vatican were in opposition.
However, the adversary of Nazism, the Vatican, was, unfortunately not the friend of the Jews.
Rather, the Vatican had been the “predecessor tormentor” of the Jews. In this regards, it had “paved the way.”
It had even “provided the road signs.”
For nineteen centuries, on–and–off, the Vatican denigrated and instigated persecution of the Jews. Setting the stage for the same by the Nazis in the 1930s, almost chapter and verse, In the 1940s, the Nazis took matters to the “logical” next level, and began the systematic “industrial scale” mass murder of the Jews.
Without the Church’s proactively coating Europe for 19 centuries in hatred and denigration of the Jews, there could never ever have been a Holocaust. And never ever a miscreant psychotic hate–monger Adolf Hitler, consolidating so much terrible power in the 20th century.
By 1937, the Vatican saw the Nazi–monster baring it fangs and gnarling at the Vatican itself. The attack–dog of Jew–hatred, bred and groomed by the Vatican over the centuries, had inadvertently empowered a now potential mortal foe of the Vatican itself.
The Church had for centuries, incubated the emotional ingredients necessary for the emergence of the particular Nazi monster. And then “cried wolf” when the wolf came back to bite it—and cause the deaths and killings of over approximately 70 million people, and the suffering of 100+ million more, including, of course, several million of the Church’s historic target, “the Jews.” Hatred begets hatred. And by the 1930s in Europe, there was plenty of hatred sown, to go around.
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Post–Holocaust, with the stock of anti–Semitism devalued, and Pius XI’s legacy now shining brighter, Mit Brennender would be quite enthusiastically and publicly embraced, expo facto, [after the fact], by a far–wider circle of Church luminaries, than when it was first issued. With the photographs of the living Jewish corpses liberated at Buchenwald circulating around the world in 1945, prescient Mit Brennender of 1937 suddenly looked much more “fashionable” to be associated with. Assorted Church luminaries would claim association with it and arrange corroboration of same, one way or another.
Pius XI happened to put his own legacy and life on the line by signing it. “Ghost–writers” had assiduously stayed carefully “beneath the radar,” when Ratti had sailed against the wind originally, and unleashed his missile against Nazism “in the face” of the Nazi monster. When the wind changed post–Holocaust, with the Nazis annihilated and anti–Semitism déclassé, the “ghost writers” would suddenly make an appearance on stage.
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Of course, only one individual, Achille Ratti, Pope Pius XI, actually had his name on the document. Only one individual actually took the heat both from the Nazis, and then from his Right Wing for his extended comments in 1938 to Belgian pilgrims, condemning anti–Semitism in particular.
But, Mit Brenender, controversial inside the Vatican in 1937, and not without consequence, looked good in retrospect post–Holocaust, and others would now retroactively seek to bask in its retrospective glow.
However, Pius XI’s, explicit condemnation the following calendar year in 1938, of anti–Semitism as directly contrary to Christian theology, was perhaps too explicit for the Right Wing of the College of Cardinals, 6 million Jewish corpses notwithstanding.
The saintly Pius XI would conveniently be skipped over whenever sainthood is brought up by the Church powers that be. Pius XI, had, of course committed the most unpardonable of Church sins. He not only actually practiced “Love Thy Neighbor” vis à vis the Jews, the gravest of all Vatican crimes until recently, but he actually publicly rejected anti–Semitism en toto as both morally and theologically taboo.