Is the Church’s condemnation of National Socialism definitive?

Good morning Father. 

I was wondering whether the condemnation of National Socialism by the Church is totally clear. I know about the “Mit brennender sorge” but I don’t know if it is a temporary or definitive condemnation and therefore if it makes it impossible for a Christian to be a National Socialist. I know that persecutions, etc., are unacceptable in and of themselves.

But I was asking myself these questions whether, in the case of historical revisionism, it can be acceptable for a Christian to be in favor of National Socialism.

As always, thank you very much for everything you do.

Priest’s reply

Dearest, 

1. the condemnation of National Socialism in the mit brennendeer sorge is unequivocal.

It should be added that National Socialism has not endured, but ended with the collapse and defeat of Germany at the end of the Second World War.

Since it has not developed, as was the case with socialism, to the point that the German Social Democrats of the 1960s had renounced Marxism, the condemnation of the Magisterium has remained the same.

2. The Mit brenneder Sorge (which in English means: with great anxiety) was published on 14.3.1937 by Pope Pius XI in March 1937. Its subject is the condition of the Church in the German Reich.

In Germany, philosophical and political tendencies were increasingly emerging that aimed to replace the Christian religion, which was the religion of the vast majority of the German people, with a new religion.

Hitler’s and Hitler’s closest collaborators’ real aspiration, in their hatred of everything Jewish, was to expel Christianity from Germany, by replacing it with a racialist religion, based on Nordic blood whose deity, variously named, was in fact the Führer.

The greatest obstacle to the spreading of these theories, which were mandatorily taught in schools, conferences, barracks, newspapers, etc., was of course the Catholic Church.

Hence a policy of gradual suffocation, but without making martyrs, despite the fact that in 1933 a Concordat had been signed by Germany with the Holy See that guaranteed the free exercise of the Catholic faith.

3. In the Mit brennender sorge we read “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”” (n. 11).

4. From those times we should remember the Rosenberg school, from the author of the Myth of the Twentieth Century, which spread the idea that love and Christian humility were an expression of weakness typical of pale, inferior races (the Latin people for example), while honor was the typical feeling of the Nordic races, proud and dominating (cf. La Civiltà Cattolica, 1931, vol. III, quad. 1947, p. 256).

5. Igino Giordani, a Catholic writer involved in politics, noted in 1946 that at that time there was an “anti-Catholic and pagan literature that brought into play fictitious deities of all kinds, which were anti-Christian, Nietzschean manifestations of authentic atheism. General Ludendorf, who with his wife led one of the de-Christianizing movements, said: “With all the strength of my Teutonic soul, I hate Christianity, this oriental religion preached by an idealistic young Hebrew, and in which the Hebrew Old Testament, although reworked, is still a hateful and despicable work. All the miseries suffered by the German people, the twilight of history, are due to the Jewish race and to Christianity, to which it gave birth”. (I. GIORDANI, Le Encicliche sociali dei Papi, p. 506).

Igino Giordani sarcastically concludes: “which is why the German people and everyone else were given… the kind of happiness that we know about: these anti-Christians were also the greatest collectors of military and political disasters”.

6. It is worth quoting what Pius XI wrote at the end of the encyclical, about the presumption of Nazi ideology: “Then We are sure, the enemies of the Church, who think that their time has come, will see that their joy was premature, and that they may close the grave they had dug. The day will come when the Te Deum of liberation will succeed to the premature hymns of the enemies of Christ: Te Deum of triumph and joy and gratitude, as the German people return to religion, bend the knee before Christ, and arming themselves against the enemies of God, again resume the task God has laid upon them.” (no. 42).

7. As we can see, the condemnation was definitive, above all because that political and cultural movement self-destroyed.

In no way is it possible to reconcile Christianity with Nazism, especially with its idea of bringing Germany back to ancestral religions.

Pius XI spoke of a mad attempt to bring back the idea of a national God.

Mad, because it has no basis in fact, not even from a rational point of view.

I wish you well, I bless you and I remember you in my prayers.

Father Angelo

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