Holocaust
Survivors and Remembrance Project: "Forget You Not"™
The Vatican Concordat
With Hitler's
Reich
The Concordat of 1933 was
ambiguous in its day and remains
so.
Robert A.
Krieg*
September 1, 2003
Seventy
years ago a fateful meeting occurred in Rome. The
Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli
(the future Pope Pius XII), and Germany's vice
chancellor, Franz von Papen, formally signed a concordat
between the Holy See and the German Reich on July 20,
1933. This event ended negotiations that began after
Adolf Hitler became Germany's chancellor on Jan. 30,
1933. Among the witnesses to this event were Msgr.
Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Pope Paul VI) and
Msgr. Ludwig Kaas, the leader of Germany's Catholic
Center Party. Neither Pope Pius XI nor Hitler attended
the meeting; both had already approved of the concordat.
The pope ratified the agreement two months later on Sept.
10. The Concordat of 1933 specified the church's rights
in the Third Reich.
The political significance of
the signing of the Concordat of 1933 was, however,
ambiguous in its day and still remains so. Hitler
interpreted the concordat to mean that he had won the
church's approval, thereby gaining international
recognition of his Nazi regime. At least some German
Catholics took the signing of the treaty as an indication
that church officials had softened their opposition to
National Socialism. Some political commentators,
journalists and historians --then and now-- have viewed
this event as a manifestation of Pope Pius XI's and
Cardinal Pacelli's underlying motives, which allegedly
included their preference for dictatorships over
democracies, their readiness to use Nazi Germany as a
bulwark against the spread into Europe of Stalin's
Communism and their disregard for German Jews. The pope
and his secretary of state insisted, however, that they
approved the agreement simply to protect the church.
Cardinal Pacelli said as much in August 1933 to Ivone
Kirkpatrick, the British minister to the Vatican: "The
spiritual welfare of 20 million Catholic souls in Germany
was at stake, and that was the first and, indeed, only
consideration" in agreeing to the concordat. The Holy See
"had to choose between an agreement on [Nazi]
lines and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church
in the Reich."
This statement is noteworthy
because it expresses the theology of church that shaped
the words and deeds of Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli and
the German bishops. As Cardinal Avery Dulles explained in
Models of the Church (1974), this ecclesiology regards
the church as a hierarchical institution, indeed as a
"perfect society," founded by Jesus Christ in order to
make grace available to all people. Given this view,
church officials saw themselves responsible before God
for protecting the church's organization and its
functions of sanctifying, teaching and governing. In Pius
XII and the Holocaust (2002), José M.
Sánchez has pinpointed a pope's "first obligation"
according to the ecclesiology of perfect society: "As
head of an institutional church, he is charged with
protecting that church; according to Catholic theology,
the church is the necessary means of providing the
sacraments which give the grace needed for salvation.
Without the priests to administer the sacraments and the
freedom to receive them, Catholics can be hindered in
their search for salvation" (p. 36).
Pius XI and Cardinal Pacelli
judged that their first duty was to secure civil
guarantees for the autonomy of ecclesiastical
institutions and their activities. After the abdication
of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918, the Holy See had tried to
sign a concordat with the Weimar Republic but did not
succeed. The sticking point was the church's insistence
on state support for Catholic schools and for Catholic
religious instruction in the public schools. This
stipulation was not acceptable to Weimar's parliament,
especially to its Socialists, who held that it violated
the separation between church and state. As the Vatican's
nuncio to Bavaria (1917-20) and then to the Weimar
Republic (1920-29), Eugenio Pacelli had arranged
concordats with individual German states&emdash;namely
with Bavaria in 1925, Prussia in 1929 and Baden in 1932.
Given this history, Pius XI and Pacelli had reason to be
pleased when Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen came to Rome
on April 7, 1933, to negotiate a concordat with the
Reich's new government.
The Concordat of 1933 gave the
papacy what it wanted most, but it also required some
concessions from Pius XI and Pacelli, as Joseph Beisinger
has described in Controversial Concordats (edited by
Frank J. Coppa, 1999). It stipulated that the state would
permit parishes to administer the sacraments to the
faithful and to instruct its members in the faith and
that civil authorities would not interfere in the naming
of bishops and pastors. These safeguards were important,
because the predominantly Protestant Prussian government
had closed Catholic churches, imprisoned bishops and
pastors, and stopped the appointment of new bishops
during Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf (1870-80). The
concordat asserted, too, that the state would give
financial support to the church's schools and that it
would make Catholic religious education available in the
public schools&emdash;religious education taught only by
instructors approved by the bishops.
The Holy See's concessions
included the concordat's requirement that clergy not
engage in political activities and not hold political
offices. Bishops were required to swear an oath of
loyalty to the Reich and its legally constituted
government. The bishops would sponsor only those lay
organizations dedicated to charitable works and to social
activities of a religious nature. Although it was agreed
that a list would specify which organizations were
protected under the concordat, this list was never
completed. In addition, diocesan newspapers and
church-affiliated publishers were left vulnerable to the
state's interference and suppression, because the
concordat did not explicitly protect them.
The Concordat of 1933 embodied a
problematic theology of the church, for it implicitly
reduced the church to an organization concerned solely
about a private, otherworldly realm unrelated to the
social and political aspects of human life. It devalued
the fuller reality of the church expressed in German
Catholicism's rich tradition of social and political
activism, as realized in the Kolping Society, the
programs of Mainz's Bishop Wilhelm Ketteler (d. 1877) and
the Catholic Center Party. As a result, it lost sight of
Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) and Pius XI's
Quadragesimo Anno (1931). Moreover, it cast ambiguity
upon the church's civil autonomy by requiring the
bishops' oath of loyalty to the Reich.
The concordat was also flawed in
its timing and implementation. Cardinal Pacelli signed
the agreement too early in the regime's history, for this
treaty gave Hitler the international respectability he
craved. The signing of the concordat also demoralized
German Catholics, who had stood with their bishops in
opposing National Socialism from the early 1920's until
March 28, 1933. On that date the bishops, relying on
Hitler's solemn pledge to make "the two churches
[Catholic and Protestant] the cornerstone of our
work of national renewal," rescinded their bans against
membership in the Nazi Party. Pius XI and Pacelli may
have operated in the best interests of the church as an
institution, but they implicitly diminished the church as
an advocate of human rights and justice. Here was one of
the ill effects of the ecclesiology of perfect society.
The metaphor of the church as a medieval castle or a
Gothic cathedral so dominated Catholic thought that it
lessened the role of the church as a proponent of
universal human values as embodied in natural
law.
The ecclesiology of perfect
society had a negative impact also upon the
implementation of the Concordat of 1933. Since this
theology accentuated the church's hierarchical character,
it called for top-down decision making and secrecy. Pius
XI, Pius XII and the German bishops avoided public
disagreements with the Third Reich, choosing instead to
voice their protests in confidential messages and behind
closed doors. As a result, German Catholics were puzzled
by the silence of church officials amid Nazi injustices,
for example, after the national boycott of Jewish
businesses on April 1, 1933, after the murder of Hitler's
political opponents on June 30, 1934, and after the
destruction of synagogues and the imprisonment and murder
of Jews on November 9-10, 1938. By contrast, German
Catholics were heartened by the encyclical Mit Brennender
Sorge (March 14, 1937), in which Pius XI criticized
Hitler for violating the terms of the Concordat of 1933
and exhorted Catholics to uphold their Christian faith
amid Nazi paganism.
Analyzing the Concordat of 1933,
the Rev. John Jay Hughes has rightly observed that
"[t]oo much reliance was placed on diplomatic
protests; and too little was done to acquaint rank and
file Catholics in Germany with the existence and content
of these protests and to mobilize them in support of
church rights." Fueling this inadequate implementation of
the concordat was the theology of the church as a
hierarchical institution. "The fundamental cause of this
failure was theological: the view of the church as
consisting of a more or less passive laity, an obedient
body of pastoral clergy, and a hierarchy that directed
and led both laity and clergy, making all decisions in
lonely and splendid isolation."
Theological ideas have concrete
consequences. The notion of the church as a perfect
society guided Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli and the German
bishops in 1933 to concentrate on the preservation of
ecclesiastical structures and religious activities to the
neglect of social justice. This monolithic ecclesiology
no longer dominates Catholic thought, for the Second
Vatican Council embraced a diversified ecclesiology,
speaking of the church as mystery or sacrament, as people
of God, as body of Christ, as collegial community and as
servant of the world in the causes of justice, peace and
human rights. The Second Vatican Council clarified, too,
that the church has a duty to "acknowledge, preserve and
encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among
non-Christians," especially among Jews.
The pope and the bishops now
have theological resources that call them to promote
human rights, even when their efforts jeopardize
ecclesiastical structures. Pope John Paul II is conveying
this rich ecclesiology in his inspiring statements and
actions for the dignity of all people. The bishops are
usually doing the same, though some have placed the
interests of the institutional church ahead of the
well-being of the victims of sexual abuse. If the Holy
See and the bishops were facing the Third Reich today,
one hopes they would be impelled by Vatican II's
ecclesiology to act differently than Pius XI, Cardinal
Pacelli and the German bishops did in 1933.
