Did You Hear the Fanfare for March 14th? You Should Have!

Pope Pius XI

March 14th was the 81st anniversary of Mit Brennender Sorge, Pope Pius XI's encyclical on Nazism. He wrote it in 1937, four years after Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. That same year, 1933, Hitler was raised to dictator; the Reich initiated the burnings to purge works that reflected an "unGerman spirit"including books by Helen Keller, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway; construction of Dachau was completed; eugenic sterilization laws were passed and the Vatican signed a Concordat trying to protect the rights of the Church and the Catholic faithful.

Hitler, of course, never intended to keep any of the agreements of the Concordat, a reminder of another tyrant and another Concordat between Napoleon and the Vatican in the 19th century. Hitler was simply one more game-playing tyrant who wanted to suppress intervention by the Church in his political affairs, and the Church was his major opponent. Hitler, a baptized Catholic who hadn't practiced the faith since childhood, was creating his own religion, a combination of teutonic paganism with new age-type spirituality that incorporated distorted elements of Christianity like the "naming ceremony" for babies born in the "Lebensborns" which were essentially brothels for Nazi officers. Hitler saw himself as the Lord and Master of the super race, even manipulating the birth of "perfect" Aryans.