Mit Brennender Sorge

Almost everything unusual about Mit Brennender Sorge follows from the problem of delivery. An encyclical is normally composed in Latin, published in the Roman gazette and circulated openly. This one was drafted in German, at the urging of the German bishops who came to Rome in January 1937, principally by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich with revisions by Cardinal Pacelli, the Secretary of State who had negotiated the 1933 concordat and who would become Pius XII.

Copies were carried into Germany by hand, set in twelve printing houses, and distributed to parishes by couriers on foot and by bicycle. On Palm Sunday, 21 March 1937, it was read from Catholic pulpits across the country before the authorities knew it existed. The state's response was immediate: presses were seized and closed, staff were arrested, and possession of the text was treated as a criminal act.

The text itself is careful. It begins from the concordat and lists what has been done in breach of it: the dissolution of Catholic youth organisations, interference with confessional schools, the harassment of clergy and press. It then turns to doctrine, and rejects the elevation of race, of a people, of the state or of any other created value into an absolute, and the reduction of God to a national deity. It never names Adolf Hitler, the National Socialist party or the regime.

The encyclical's standing has been argued about since the war and the argument turns on what one expects an instrument of this kind to do. Read as a protest, it is unambiguous within its subject: it says that the concordat has been broken, and it condemns the theological claims of racial nationalism in terms that leave no room to hold both. Read as an intervention, it is narrow. Its stated grievance is the treatment of the Catholic Church in Germany. It speaks of the Old Testament and of the faith of Abraham in defending the Hebrew scriptures against attempts to purge them, but it does not address the persecution of German Jews as such, and it names no one.

The consequences were also mixed. The regime tightened the pressure it had been applying, opening currency and morality prosecutions against clergy and religious in the following months. The concordat was not denounced by either side and remained in force. Pius XI worked in his last year on a further encyclical on racism and the unity of humanity, Humani Generis Unitas, which was drafted but not issued before his death in February 1939, and which his successor did not publish.

The atlas records the instrument, its date, its method of delivery and its scope, and leaves the assessment where it belongs, in a historical literature that has not settled it.