This Week in Christian History: Popular Preacher Shoots a Man, Vatican and Nazis, Isaac Watts
Vatican Signs Concordat With Nazi Germany - July 20, 1933
This week marks the anniversary of when the Roman Catholic Church signed an agreement with the Third Reich of Germany to protect the rights of Catholics in the new Nazi regime.
The Concordat was signed by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII, and Vice-Chancellor of the German Reich, Herr Franz von Papen.
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Among other things, the Concordat promised freedom of religious practice for the Catholic Church, including the right to manage its own internal affairs.
"It acknowledges the right of the Catholic Church, within the limit of those laws which are applicable to all, to manage and regulate her own affairs independently, and, within the framework of her own competence, to publish laws and ordinances binding on her members," read the Concordat in part.
"Clerics and Religious are freed from any obligation to undertake official offices and such obligations as, according to the provisions of Canon Law, are incompatible with the clerical or religious state."
Less than four years later, however, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical denouncing National Socialism and arguing that Germany was violating provisions of the Concordat.
"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," declared the pope's encyclical.
