Mit brennender Sorge, the Vatican’s formal condemnation of Nazism, was released under the signature of Pope Pius XI, though most people believe that it was drafted in large part by Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII. Unlike most encyclicals, which are written in Latin, Mit brennender Sorge was written in German for wider dissemination in that country. (120,000 copies were distributed in the Münster diocese alone.) It was smuggled out of Italy and into Germany, where it was secretly copied and distributed to parish priests to be read from all of the pulpits on Palm Sunday.
The Nazis were deeply offended. All available copies were confiscated. An internal German memorandum dated March 23, 1937, called the encyclical “almost a call to do battle against the Reich government.” German printers who had made copies were arrested and the presses were seized. Those convicted of distributing it were arrested, Church-affiliated publications which ran the encyclical were banned, and payments due to the Church from the government were reduced. In fact, the mere mention of this encyclical was a crime in Nazi Germany.
Mit brennender Sorge was not published in Nazi-controlled newspapers, but butVölkischer Beobachter carried a strong counterattack on the “Jew-God and His deputy in Rome.” Das Schwarze Korps, official publication of the SS, called the encyclical “the most incredible of Pius XI’s pastoral letters; every sentence in it was an insult to the new Germany.” In Berlin, Hitler warned that the German state would not tolerate any challenge to its authority. When churches “attempt by any other means–writings, encyclicals, etc.–to assume rights which belong solely to the state, we will push them back into their proper spiritual activity.”
