Hitler, the Holy See, and a historic treaty: The Reichskonkordat at 90 | CPT PPP Coverage

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Despite the agreement, the Nazis did not refrain from violating the treaty and persecuting the Church, its clergy, and its faithful. The Church protested against breaches of the agreement, famously so in the 1937 encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge.

Cautioning against misinterpreting the Reichskonkordat through the lens of Soviet and Nazi propaganda, Eterovic said on June 14 that the treaty was not the first foreign policy success of Adolf Hitler, or even a kind of Nazi success in Hitler’s attempts to discredit the Holy See. 

Rather, the prelate said, Nazi Germany had already ratified on May 5, 1933, the extension of a 1926 treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. Thus, the Reichskonkordat, signed on July 20, 1933, was the second foreign policy treaty of the Hitler government.

What is more, Eterovic said, the treaty “helped to guarantee Church life in Germany, even if it did not prevent the National Socialist Kirchenkampf” — the Nazis’ ideological war against Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.

After World War II, Pope Pius XII upheld the Reichskonkordat over the objections of some German bishops and the Allied powers. The pope argued that the treaty was still valid and useful to the Church, but some historians question his motives and actions during and after the war.