The encyclical Summi Pontificatus

On 20 October 1939, at Castel Gandolfo, Pope Pius XII signed his first encyclical, known from its opening words as “Summi Pontificatus”. In translation it often bears the subtitle “On the Unity of Human Society”. It was the Pope’s first teaching statement since the outbreak of war, written in the very weeks in which Poland was falling. The encyclical identified two “pernicious errors” of the age: forgetfulness of the unity of the human race, from which racial and national hatred springs, and the conviction that the state is subject to no higher law. It also contained a passage on Poland, the only country it named as a victim of the war. It is commonly described as a condemnation of racism and dictatorship. That is a fair summary of its meaning, with one qualification: the Pope named neither the Third Reich nor the Soviet Union, neither National Socialism nor communism, and he himself announced that he was deferring a full doctrinal statement on “the errors of the present day” to another time.

A new pope in the face of war

Eugenio Pacelli had been elected on 2 March 1939, after the death of Pius XI. For nine years he had been Secretary of State, in effect the head of the Holy See’s diplomacy, and before that he had spent twelve years as nuncio in Germany. It was he who in July 1933 signed the concordat with the Reich with Franz von Papen, and he who helped draft the 1937 encyclical “Mit brennender Sorge”, which accused Hitler’s government of violating that concordat. From the first weeks of his pontificate he worked to preserve peace. In May 1939 he proposed a conference of five powers – Germany, Poland, Italy, France and Britain – but Berlin showed no interest, and London and Paris received the idea with reserve. On 24 August, the day after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed, he broadcast an appeal, one sentence of which passed into history: “Nothing is lost with peace. Everything may be lost with war.” On 31 August he called once more on governments to refrain from any step that might aggravate the situation.

When Germany invaded Poland, the Pope remained publicly silent for several weeks. The Vatican was a neutral state surrounded by Mussolini’s Italy, and Pius XII, following the example of Benedict XV during the First World War, wished to remain above the parties. Meanwhile reports reached Rome of cities bombed, of prisoners and civilians shot and of priests arrested. The Primate of Poland, Cardinal August Hlond, also arrived there and pressed the Holy See for a clear word. On 30 September, the day after the capitulation of Warsaw, the Pope received the Poles living in Rome in audience and spoke of “thousands, hundreds of thousands” who were suffering, of refugees without home or country, of the weeping of mothers and the groans of the wounded. By that day the Boundary and Friendship Treaty was already dividing Poland between Germany and the USSR.

The content of the encyclical

The encyclical was long: the Latin original ran to more than ten thousand words. It opened by recalling the act of 1899 in which Pope Leo XIII, in the encyclical “Annum Sacrum”, had consecrated the human race to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. Pacelli had been ordained priest in that year, so for him the fortieth anniversary coincided with the first year of his pontificate. The text was meant to reach the bishops in time for the Feast of Christ the King, which in 1939 fell on 29 October. In the first part the Pope gave thanks for the expressions of devotion that had followed his election and greeted “beloved Italy” with particular warmth, recalling the reconciliation sealed in the Lateran Treaties. He then wrote that as he penned these words the “terrible news” reached him that the storm of war was already raging, “despite all Our efforts to avert it”.

The Pope saw the source of the calamities of the age in the rejection of a universal moral norm and of the natural law, grounded in God. From this “poisoned source” he derived two errors which, in his view, made the peaceful coexistence of nations impossible.

The first was forgetfulness of the “law of human solidarity and charity”, which follows from the common origin and the equality of rational nature of all men, “to whatever people they belong”. The Pope described the human race as a unity: one origin in God, one nature composed of body and immortal soul, one earth whose goods all have the right to use, one supernatural end and one redemption. Nations differ in development and culture, but these differences are meant to enrich humanity, not to break its unity. The Church respects the distinctiveness of every people, and those who enter it, “whatever be their origin or their speech”, enjoy equal rights within it. As proof, the Pope announced that on the Feast of Christ the King he would consecrate as bishops twelve representatives of “widely different peoples and races”, and he quoted St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians: “there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. But Christ is all and in all.” The word “racism” does not appear in the text, but in 1939, after the Nuremberg Laws, after Kristallnacht and after the Italian racial laws, no one had any doubt what the teaching on the equality of races and peoples referred to.

The second error was the idea that frees the authority of the state from all dependence on God and on a “higher law”, handing it over to the mercy of human will, of “chance historical claims” and of the interests of the few. Such authority puts itself in the place of the Almighty and makes the state or a group the final end of life. The Pope wrote that to treat the state as something ultimate, to which everything else must be subordinated, was bound to harm nations – whether unlimited power was conferred on the state in the name of the nation, the people or a social class, or whether it was seized despotically. He vigorously defended the rights of the family and of religious education: the family and the individual exist before the state, and a state that seeks to form the young solely in the virtues useful to politics and turns them away from God does them wrong and gives scandal. One sentence from this part was later quoted with particular frequency: the state may demand of its citizens their goods and their blood, but never the soul redeemed by God.

According to the encyclical, the same idea of the state’s omnipotence also destroys relations between nations, because it robs international law of its foundation and leads to the violation of the rights of others. Nations have a right to independence, to life and to development. Treaties that have become unjust over time should be revised in good time through sincere negotiation, but to regard them on principle as provisional, and tacitly to claim the right to break them unilaterally once they cease to be advantageous, destroys all mutual trust between states. Readers in 1939 applied these words above all to Germany, which within five years had torn up the Treaty of Versailles, the Locarno Treaties, the Munich Agreement and the Declaration of Non-Aggression with Poland. The Pope also warned the future victors: the hour of victory is an hour of temptation, and a peace imposed with the cry of “woe to the vanquished” would be no more than injustice cloaked in the mantle of justice.

The passage on Poland

Towards the end of the encyclical, calling the time of war “the hour of darkness”, the Pope wrote that the nations drawn into the tragic whirlpool of war were perhaps only at the “beginning of sorrows”, but that already death, devastation and misery reigned in thousands of families. Then came the sentence for which the encyclical was remembered in Poland: the blood of countless human beings, non-combatants among them, raises a piteous dirge over a nation so dear as Poland, which, for its fidelity to the Church and its services in the defence of Christian civilisation, written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, and awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace.

The Pope did not write who was shedding that blood. He made no mention of the bombing of Wieluń or of Warsaw, of the murders of the Polish intelligentsia and clergy, or of the fact that on 17 September the Red Army too had struck Poland. Even so, the word about Poland’s “resurrection” was more than an expression of sympathy in October 1939. It meant that the Holy See did not regard the partition as final. The Polish Ambassador, Kazimierz Papée, remained in office at the Vatican, now representing the government-in-exile, and the Holy See rejected Berlin’s demands that dioceses in the territories annexed to the Reich be filled with German bishops, stipulating that it would not recognise new borders before a peace treaty had been concluded. Cardinal Hlond and the Polish bishops received the encyclical with gratitude. Barely two weeks earlier, on 6 October, Hitler had presented Poland in a speech to the Reichstag as a creation of Versailles that had ceased to exist.

Reception

The encyclical was published in the last days of October. On 28 October the New York Times carried it on its front page under the headline “Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism”, and the paper’s commentator wrote that, above any other country, it was the Germany of Hitler and National Socialism that the encyclical condemned. The Reich’s diplomats read it the same way. Diego von Bergen, the ambassador to the Holy See, reported that the Pope had meant it above all as a blow against the Third Reich. The German authorities restricted its printing and distribution, and the Gestapo took an interest in those who tried to circulate it. Nor could the text appear in the USSR or in the Polish lands under Soviet occupation.

Britain and France welcomed the encyclical. During the Phoney War, when Allied aircraft dropped leaflets over Germany instead of bombs, the French printed a German translation and scattered it over German cities – according to various sources, some 80,000–88,000 copies. An encyclical signed by the head of a Church to which tens of millions of the Reich’s citizens belonged thus became part of the propaganda war, though the Pope had not intended it so.

Questions about what the text left out were raised even then. Shortly before his death Pius XI had commissioned from the Jesuits an encyclical against racism and antisemitism, “Humani generis unitas”. The draft was never promulgated. Some historians believe that certain of its ideas on the unity of the human race found their way into “Summi Pontificatus”, but unlike the draft the new encyclical did not speak openly of the persecution of the Jews, nor did it condemn antisemitism. The reservation that a full statement on “the errors of the present day” could be deferred to another time foreshadowed, moreover, the style of the whole pontificate: principles stated forcefully, but without naming the perpetrators.

The dispute over its assessment

Historians still differ in their assessment of the encyclical. For some it is proof that from the very beginning of the war Pius XII clearly rejected the ideology of race and the totalitarian state, and that contemporaries – in Berlin as much as in London or New York – understood perfectly well against whom his words were directed. They stress that the Pope had to take into account the fate of tens of millions of Catholics under the rule of Hitler and Stalin, as well as the position of the Vatican itself in Fascist Italy, and that an open condemnation might have brought reprisals on the very people he wished to defend. Others point out that the encyclical’s general language allowed everyone to read it in their own way, that the Pope mourned Poland without naming its aggressors, and that the encyclical was silent about the Jews, the first victims of the Reich’s racial policy. This dispute is in essence part of a wider controversy over Pius XII’s conduct throughout the war.

Its place in the history of the war

“Summi Pontificatus” was the clearest, and at the same time one of the last such general, statements by the Pope against the ideologies that had unleashed the war. In the winter of 1939–1940 Vatican Radio still broadcast reports of German crimes in Poland, based among other things on Cardinal Hlond’s reports, but after protests from Berlin and warnings from bishops in the occupied countries that such broadcasts only worsened the lot of the faithful, they were curtailed. Throughout the war the Polish bishops and the government-in-exile asked the Pope for plain words, while some of the Polish clergy at home at the same time feared their consequences. In his Christmas message of 1942 Pius XII spoke of hundreds of thousands of people who, through no fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or descent, were condemned to death or to gradual extinction – but again he named neither Germany nor the Jews. After the war, beginning with Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play The Deputy, it was precisely this silence that became the subject of one of the longest historical controversies of the twentieth century, one revived by the opening of the Vatican archives in 2020.

For Poles in the autumn of 1939, however, the encyclical mattered above all morally. At the moment when their state had vanished from the map and Kleeberg had laid down his arms at Kock, the highest authority in Christendom publicly called Poland a nation with the right to resurrection.