1933 Corcordat

Rainbow Bar

The Vatican Corcordat
with Hitler ( 1933 ):

The following is the Catholic League's attempt to exhonorate the Catholic Church and its representatives from any blame for the Reich Concordat, which it signed with Hitler in 1933 :www.catholicleague.org/pius/piusxii_faqs.html
Why did Pacelli as Secretary of State under Pius XI, sign an agreement � a "concordat" � with the Nazis in 1933? Didn't this just serve to give legitimacy to the Nazi government?
Despite vocal opposition from the Catholic Church in Germany where National Socialism's racist views were routinely condemned as contrary to Catholic principles and Catholics were ordered not to support the party, [ no source, and no actual quotation] by 1933 Hitler had become German chancellor. Pacelli was dismayed with the Nazi assumption of power and by August of 1933 he expressed to the British representative to the Holy See his disgust with "their persecution of the Jews, their proceedings against political opponents, the reign of terror to which the whole nation was subjected."[ only part of an actual quotation & no source enabling anyone to find out more] When it was stated that Germany now had a strong leader to deal with the communists, Archbishop Pacelli responded that the Nazis were infinitely worse. [ no source, and no actual quotation]
At the same time, however, the Vatican was forced to deal with the reality of Hitler's rise to power. In June 1933 Hitler had signed a peace agreement with the western powers, including France and Great Britain, called the Four-Power Pact. At the same time Hitler expressed a willingness to negotiate a statewide concordat with Rome. The concordat was concluded a month later. In a country where Protestantism dominated, the Catholic Church was finally placed on a legal equal footing with the Protestant churches. [This is a misrepresentation, as the Catholic "Center Party" was bigger than the National Socialists and half of the country's Chancellors from 1919 on had been, like Hitler, Catholics.] Did the concordat negotiated by Pacelli give legitimacy to the Nazi regime? No. Forgotten is the fact that it was preceded both by the Four-Power Pact and a similar agreement concluded between Hitler and the Protestant churches. The Church had no choice but to conclude such a concordat, [ there were choices made as to each of its provisions] or face draconian restrictions on the lives of the faithful in Germany. Pacelli denied that the concordat meant Church recognition of the regime. Concordats were made with countries, not particular regimes, he stated. [What does THAT mean?] Pope Pius XI would explain that it was concluded only to spare persecution that would take place immediately if there was no such agreement. The concordat also gave the Holy See the opportunity to formally protest Nazi action in the years prior to the war and after hostilities began. It provided a legal basis for arguing that baptized Jews in Germany were Christian and should be exempt from legal disabilities. Though the Concordat was routinely violated before the ink was dry, it did save Jewish lives. [How so?]
The Vatican began to formally protest Nazi action almost immediately after the concordat was signed.[ no source, and no actual quotation] The first formal Catholic protests under the concordat concerned the Nazi government's call for a boycott of Jewish businesses.[ no source, and no actual quotation] Numerous protests would follow over treatment of both the Jews and the direct persecution of the Church in Nazi Germany. The German foreign minister would report that his desk was stuffed with protests from Rome, [ no source, and no actual quotation] protests rarely passed on to Nazi leadership. "

Daniel Goldhagen's response, in A Moral Reckoning: [ p. 43 :]
"The essential facts of the Pope's conduct are clear, even if what we make of some of them may be open to disagreement. As the Vatican's Secretary of State, Pacelli hastened to negotiate for the Church a treaty of cooperation, the Concordat, with Hitler's Germany.
Completed, signed, and publicized to the world in July 1933 and formally ratified that September, the Concordat was Nazi Germany's first great diplomatic triumph. It included the Church's liquidation of the democratic Catholic Center Party (the forerunner of postwar Germany's governing Christian Democratic Party), effectively legitimating Hitler's seizure of power and his destruction of democracy, which Pacelli and Pius XI welcomed. Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Germany reported on Pius XI's support for Hitler's measures in a report to the Bavarian bishops. Cardinal Faulhaber had been in Rome, where he observed on March 13 "the Holy Father [saying], with special emphasis: `Until recently the voice of the Roman Pope remained the only one to point out the serious danger threatening Christian culture which has been introduced into almost all nations. Thus, public praise for Hitler." [ sic ??? ]
In March, Pacelli conveyed to Hitler, in the words of Germany's envoy to the Holy See, the Vatican's "indirect acknowledgment of the action of the Reich Chancellor and the government against Communism." The Concordat helped to legitimate the Nazi regime in the eyes of the world and consolidate its power at home.

James Carroll's response from "Constantine's Sword" [p. 496] :
The role of Eugenio Pacelli ( the future Pope Pius XII ) in promotiing the historic Code of Catholic Church Law, which he had be instrumental in creating :
Pacelli was one of two Vatican priests who spent more than a decade developing the Code of Canon Law, which was finally promulgated in 1917. [ Until then there had been no official body of law governing every aspect of Church life throughout the world]. Canon 218 defines the pope's authority as "the supreme and most complete jurisdiction throughout the Church, both in matters of faith and morals and in those that affect discipline and Church government throughout the world."
In Europe, where church and state were traditionally intermingled, with much overlap of political and religious authority (schools, the appointment of those bishops), the implementation of the new code required the cooperation of governments, which led to Pacelli's next assignment. John Cornwell, Pacelli's biographer, points out that the task of negotiating treaties (concordats) that recognized the freshly claimed prerogatives of the papacy fell to Pacelli. In 1917, shortly after his consecration as bishop, and after having successfully concluded treaties with Serbia and other countries, Pacelli was sent to Munich as papal nuncio. Cornwell writes that his "principal task in Germany was now nothing less than the imposition, through the 1917 Code of Canon Law, of supreme papal authority over the Catholic bishops, clergy, and faithful."To that end, he set out to renegotiate existing concordats with the German regional states. Ultimately he hoped for a concordat with the German nation itself, one that would solidify Vatican power, especially in the matter of the appointment of bishops, which, as we have seen, had dogged papal--German relations going back to the eleventh century.
The anti-Catholic suspicions of Protestants and liberals of the Weimar Republic, which governed Germany from 1919 until 1933, were not the only obstacle to the new definition of Church authority. Germany's bishops were accustomed to holding sway in their own sphere, and the Catholic Center Party, soon to be one of the most powerful institutions in Weimar, had always defined itself as a defender of the Catholic people, not simply of the institutional Catholic Church -- a distinction that might not serve the Vatican's purposes under the new code.
Since the Kulturkampf, the Center Party had become a truly successful political organization. In 1919, it drew six million votes, second only to the Social Democrats. Occupying the contested middle ground in the mounting chaos of the Weimar era, the Center would provide five chancellors in the ten governments that came and went from 1919 to 1933.
[ p. 497 ]. . . But the leaders of the Center Party were not uniformly as malleable as Pacelli wanted them to be. For example, they consistently ignored Pacelli's and the pope's express wish that they keep the party out of coalitions with the left-wing Social Democrats . Once the new Code of Canon Law was imposed on German Catholics, with the approbation of the German state, it would end such defiance.
The Cooperation between the Church and the Reich:
[The preceeding ] is the fateful background to what followed when Hitler, soon after coming to power in early 1933, entered into treaty negotiations with Eugenio Pacelli, by then the powerful cardinal secretary of state.
[ p.498] A seismic shift had occurred in Catholic attitudes toward the Nazis, partly related to Hitler's having taken over the government, but also related to the Vatican's eagerness to deal with the Fuehrer. Within a week of his first cabinet meeting, in early March 1933, Hitler received a friendly message from Pacelli, who was moving quickly to take advantage of a long-awaited opportunity to achieve the Reichskonkordat.The message included, as the Vatican envoy told Hitler, "an indirect endorsement of the action of the Reich chancellor and the government against Communism."
Even an indirect endorsement meant everything to Hitler as he sought to establish his legitimacy at home and abroad. In these early months of 1933, Catholic leaders went from being Hitler's staunch opponents to his latest allies. This transformation was dramatically symbolized by the fact that in 1932, the Fulda Episcopal Conference, representing the Catholic hierarchy of Germany, banned membership in the Nazi Party" and forbade priests from offering communion to anyone wearing the swastika; then, on March 28, 1933, two weeks after Pacelli offered his overture to Hitler, the same Fulda conferees voted to lift the ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party. The bishops expressed, as they put it, "a certain confidence in the new government, subject to reservations concerning some religious and moral lapses." Swastika bearers would now be welcomed at the communion rail. Cornwell writes, "The acquiescence of the German people in the face of Nazism cannot be understood in its entirety without taking into account the long path, beginning as early as 1920, to the Reich Concordat of 1933; and Pacelli's crucial role in it; and Hitler's reasons for signing it. The negotiations were conducted exclusively by Pacelli on behalf of the Pope over the heads of the faithful, the clergy, and the German bishops."
Pacelli's negotiations must be seen in the full context of the siege under which Roman Catholicism had found itself in Europe in the previous decades, but there was a distinction in his mind, and in his purpose, between a defense of the Catholic Church in Germany and a defense of the Vatican. Indeed, his disregard for the prerogatives of the local Church is indicated by his readiness to ignore, and even to deceive, important figures in its hierarchy. Whatever its stated goal, the effect of Pacelli's maneuvering was hardly to advance the standing of the German Catholic Church. "When Hitler became Pacelli's partner in negotiations," Cornwell observes, "the concordat thus became the supreme act of two authoritarians, while the supposed beneficiaries were correspondingly weakened, undermined, and neutralized."
The first true beneficiary was Hitler himself. The Reichskonkordat, agreed to on July 8,1933 was his first bilateral treaty with a foreign power, and as such gave him much-needed international prestige, whether the Vatican intended it or not.
The Surrender of German Catholicism 499
(The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano published a statement on July 2 saying that the concordat should not be taken as a moral endorsement of Nazism, and Pacelli would make the same point later.) Yet the price Hitler demanded for the concordat was stiff: the complete withdrawal from politics (and therefore from any possible resistance to the Nazis) of all Catholics as Catholics. In negotiations with German officials, Pacelli had offered the 1929 Lateran Treaty between Italy and the Vatican as a model for the concordat, and Hitler would surely have been aware that the pope had agreed there to Mussolini's demand that the antifascist Catholic political party, Partito Popolare, be suppressed. Bismarck had sought to have the Vatican disown the Center Party, which it refused to do. Now Hitler made that a key demand, and the Vatican acquiesced. On July 4, in the final runup to the agreement, the leader of the Center Party, Heinrich Bruning, who had served as Germany's chancellor from 1930 to 1932, consented "with bitterness in his heart to dissolve the party." Hitler wanted the Center Party gone because it represented the last potential impediment to his program. In truth, Pacelli wanted it gone for the same reason -- for the sake of his own program. But there is evidence that the unseemly rapidity of the Center Party's demise startled Pacelli, and, perhaps, embarrassed him. Even before the Concordat was formally signed, the Center Party ceased to exist.
. . . As would quickly become clear, the Nazis were prepared to stop at nothing to achieve their goals. Soon enough, blood would be flowing in the streets, the opposition press shut down, and the constitution abrogated. But in 1933, Hitler was not remotely what he would become, and the connivance of the Roman Catholic Church in these months of transition is part of what enabled him to emerge as a dictator. The Catholic people -- there were more members of Catholic youth associations than there were of the Hitler Youth -- were the last possible obstacle in Hitler's way.

As a baptized Catholic himself, he would have been intimately aware of the courageous and wily history of the victorious Catholic campaign during the Kulturkampf. But instead of being called by the Church - by the pope himself - to "passive resistance," as their parents and grandparents had been, Catholics were encouraged to look for what they had in common with Nazis. And they would find it.
The Reichskonkordat effectively removed the German Catholic Church from any continued role of opposition to Hitler. More than that, as Hitler told his cabinet on July 14, it established a context that would be "especially significant in the urgent struggle against international Jewry."

[ p. 500 ] The deep well of Catholic antisemitism would be tapped, to run as freely as any stream of hate in Germany. The positive side of the long-standing ambivalence, which had again and again been the source of impulses to protect Jews, would now be eliminated, allowing the negative side to metastasize. "This was the reality," Cornwell comments, " of the moral abyss into which Pacelli the future Pontiff " - he would become Pius XII in 1939 - "had led the once great and proud German Catholic Church."
[ p. 504 ] The concordat's significance to Hitler at that crucial moment is hard to overemphasize. "The long drive against the alleged atheistic tendencies of our Party is now silenced by Church authority," one Nazi Party organ crowed. "This represents an enormous strengthening of the National Socialist government." We saw that L'Osservatore Romano had refuted the claim that the concordat meant Church approval of Nazism, but the German bishops made it seem otherwise.
[p. 505] The full import of the Vatican agreement with the Third Reich was perhaps best described by a later dispatch from those same bishops. They sent it from their formal meeting at Fulda two eventful years later. On August 20, 1935, the prelates defended Pius XI (1922-1939) by presuming to remind Hitler that His Holiness had "exchanged the handshake of trust with you through the concordat - the first foreign sovereign to do so . . . Pope Pius XI spoke high praise of you . . . Millions in foreign countries, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, have overcome their original mistrust because of this expression of papal trust and have placed their trust in your regime.� Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich, in a sermon in 1937, declared, "At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat, expressed its confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the new government abroad."
Hitler had other reasons for welcoming the concordat, one to do with his plans for the army, and the other with his plans for the Jews. A "secret annex" to the treaty, finalized some months after the promulgation and not publicized, granted Catholic clergy an exemption from any conscription imposed on German males in the event of universal military service. Since Germany was still expressly forbidden by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles to raise a large army, Hitler could regard this provision as the Vatican's tacit acquiescence before a campaign of German rearmament. As Papen wrote to Hitler at the time, this provision was important for Germany less "for the content of the regulation than for the fact that here the Holy See is already reaching a treaty agreement with us for the event of general military service.� Papen concluded his brief on the secret annex with a note of smug ingratiation. "I hope this agreement will therefore be pleasing to you�.
We noted earlier that an article in the July 2,1933, issue of L'Osservato, Romano had insisted that no Vatican endorsement of Nazi teaching should be inferred from the concordat, but Hitler himself saw it otherwise. The treaty with the Holy See had both spiritual resonance and political implication, for it was a world-stage rebuttal to those who accused him of being antireligious, and it established diplomatic recognition for the famously neutral Vatican at a time when other powers were still eyeing him with suspicion.
[p. 506] Especially in hindsight, defenders of the Vatican's readiness to enter into such a treaty with Hitler insist that it was nothing more than realpolitik. diplomacy designed to safeguard the political and social rights of Catholics in a hostile climate, a way in which the Church hoped to temper Nazi extremes to the benefit of all concerned. In this view, Pacelli�s own wariness at the time of the treaty is emphasized. But is it conceivable that Pacelli would have negotiated any such agreement with the Bolsheviks in Moscow? Gordon Zahn, the American scholar of Hitler-era German Catholicism, reports that Cardinal Faulhaber and other bishops dismissed such a notion, and in the act defined the concordat as a Church endorsement of the Nazi regime. Pacelli's defenders say he wanted the treaty as a basis for future protests against Nazi excesses, and indeed the Church would use it as such. But to Catholics in Germany at that pivotal time including leaders like Bornewasser, the concordat was, and would remain the soul of a compliant Catholic conscience that saw the way clear to support Hitler and his program. Even after the true nature of that program was laid bare, and after numerous provisions of the treaty had violated, the Vatican would never repudiate the concordat. Many bishops and priests, even through the paroxysms of the war, cited the intact Vatican treaty as a sign of the Third Reich's ongoing legitimacy, allowing � no requiring - German Catholics to carry out its orders.
Despite the contrasts with the city's earlier prelates, it is probably no surprise that one of Hitler's most enthusiastic backers in 1933 should have been the bishop of Trier [Bornewasser]. Taking the long view, many Catholics saw the Vatican--Berlin agreement as promising a return to the �Sacrum Empirium� [Holy Empire] that had been given its first expression by Trier's own Constantine, and that had reached its apogee under the Holy Roman Emperor, whom Trier served as an elector. The shadow of Constantine had never fully lifted from Trier. The Aula Palatina, the enormous throne hall of his otherwise ruined palace, had been restored, as we saw, and transformed by the Prussians into a Lutheran church. The golden cross that hung in the vast imperial basilica had never seemed more full of implication. �In hoc signo�: Constantine's vision had changed the religious and martial nations forever.
�Cross and Eagle�, about which we will see more, was the name of the Catholic group - consisting of bishops, priests, theologians, and policians, including Papen - that saw the advent of the Third Reich as a way to restore the medieval ideal of a united throne and altar. That ideal had been lost to the hated forces of Enlightenment liberalism, which, as Catholics told themselves, invariably led to godless Bolshevism. If Hitler was anything, wasn't he the enemy of that?
[p. 507] Catholic euphoria was widespread in the summer of the concordat. The Te Deum was sung in Catholic churches across the country. Once the treaty was formally ratified by both governments in September, a pontifical Mass was celebrated by the papal nuncio in an overflowing cathedral in Berlin. Above the worshipers, flags emblazoned with the papal colors and the swastika hung side by side. It was a long way - although a short time - from the prohibition of the Nazis' wheel of a broken cross in church. The preacher at the Berlin Cathedral that day praised Hitler as "a man marked by his devotion to God, and sincerely concerned for the well-being of the German people." At least one bishop enlisted in the SS. Obviously, these churchmen had been deluded by Hitler, and they had deluded themselves.

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