Vatican responds to German note of March 14 and defends German Bishops’ resistance to swastika - May 14, 1934
Source: Timeline
May 14, 1934 Vatican responds to German note of March 14 and defends German Bishops’ resistance to swastika.
Cardinal Pacelli’s response states: “Beginning on the day when the swastika is no longer connected by its partisan champions with meanings and missions whose anti-Christian tendency offends the faithful, the resistance based on religious considerations will diminish of its own accord.”
May 14, 1934 Cardinal Pacelli’s diplomatic note of this date was one of his longest to the German Government; in the middle of the note is this passage responding to the German Government’s complaint of March 14 about the Bishops’ resistance to the swastika:
... How generous and peacefully-inclined the Bishops of Germany were from the first moment onward, when the former stance of National Socialism toward the Church appeared to accomplish a turnaround-to-the-positive, was evident in the position of the Bishops following the March 23, 1933 speech in the Parliament by the Reich Chancellor making solemn statements of a cultural- and Church-policy-nature, and his [Hitler’s] promise to honor the Concordats previously concluded with German states and to strengthen relations with the Holy See, as these [statements] were immediately taken by the Bishops as an occasion for considering as a given that the ruling Party was guaranteeing an accommodating policy, and thus as an occasion for revoking the measures previously imposed by the Church and having them [prohibitions on Catholics joining the Nazi Party] decreed to be positions that are now overtaken by events...
... The Promemoria maintains that the scruples of the Bishops against the hoisting of the swastika flag on the churches should be seen as “a deplorable lack of sympathy” with the new reality of the nation. Anyone familiar with the many un-Christian or even anti-Christian meanings that often have been and are being given to this symbol by National Socialists, will be able to understand that the Bishops’ scruples were and are justified. To see in this any kind of hostile attitude toward the state is false. Beginning on the day when the swastika is no longer connected by its partisan champions with meanings and missions whose anti-Christian tendency offends the faithful, the resistance based on religious considerations will diminish of its own accord. It should also be considered that in other countries where relations between Church and State are amicable – countries with no less claim to be “authoritarian” states – the display of national flags on the churches has never been demanded, as for example in Italy. Anyone who appreciates the character of the Catholic Church as house of God and abode of the eucharistic presence and the liturgical sacrifice will understand the reasons why the truly religiously sensitive person must wish that this realm, dedicated to the eternal, not be dragged into the din and conflict of the day. A Catholic way of expressing solidarity with the people on patriotic holidays will never be rejected if the bishops are allowed freedom to find the forms that they consider appropriate.
Source: German Foreign Office Archive, reprinted in Dieter Albrecht, ed., Der Notenwechsel Zwischen dem Heiligen Stuhl und der Deutschen Reichsregierung [The Note Exchange Between the Holy See and the German Reich Government] (1965-1980), vol. 1, pp. 138-139, hereafter cited as Albrecht, Note Exchange.