Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

Chapter XIXHINDENBURG'S STICKTHE SPIRITUAL FOUNDER OF THE MODERN CATHOLICChurch, Pope Leo XIII, said in his encyclical, Libertas Humana (1888):'It is quite unlawful to demand, to defend, or to grant unconditionalfreedom of thought, of speech, of writing, of worship.' Some yearsearlier he had dealt with certain philosophers who 'say that all powercomes from the people . . . but from these, Catholics dissent, affirmingthat the right to rule is from God.'The Church was not, as many radicals believed, the defender ofpresent-day society, for in his most famous encyclical, Rerutn Not/arum,Leo XIII sharply attacked the economic age: 'A small number ofvery rich people are in a position to subject the mass of the poor to ayoke that is little better than slavery . . .' Altogether: 'On the other hand,the socialists . . . are endeavoring to destroy private property. Butprivate property is the natural right of every man.'The spirit of the age is truly mirrored in these ecclesiastical documents.With the Communist Manifesto and, in their particular way, theProtocols, they are among the most potent documents of our times.What they reflected was not so much the imprint of ex-isting things asthe shadow of coming ones. Deeply human and Christian as they were,there was an overtone, inaudible at the time, which was to be re-echoeddecades later, in many phrases of Hitler.That successor of Leo who made peace with fascism in 1929, PopePius XI, published in 1931 another encyclical, Quadragesimo