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What It Did and Did Not Do

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What It Did and Did Not Do

The encyclical's standing has been argued about since the war and the argument turns on what one expects an instrument of this kind to do. Read as a protest, it is unambiguous within its subject: it says that the concordat has been broken, and it condemns the theological claims of racial nationalism in terms that leave no room to hold both. Read as an intervention, it is narrow. Its stated grievance is the treatment of the Catholic Church in Germany. It speaks of the Old Testament and of the faith of Abraham in defending the Hebrew scriptures against attempts to purge them, but it does not address the persecution of German Jews as such, and it names no one.

The consequences were also mixed. The regime tightened the pressure it had been applying, opening currency and morality prosecutions against clergy and religious in the following months. The concordat was not denounced by either side and remained in force. Pius XI worked in his last year on a further encyclical on racism and the unity of humanity, Humani Generis Unitas, which was drafted but not issued before his death in February 1939, and which his successor did not publish.

The atlas records the instrument, its date, its method of delivery and its scope, and leaves the assessment where it belongs, in a historical literature that has not settled it.

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