“With burning concern and mounting consternation, we have been observing for some time now the Cross carried by the church in Germany [or insert your nation/state here] and the increasingly difficult situation of those men and women who have kept the faith…
Anyone who still has within him the slightest feeling for truth…will have to admit that in these difficult and eventful years which have followed the Concordat, every one of our words have been regulated by loyalty to the agreement…He will, however, also have to note with consternation…how for the other side [the Nazis – or whoever is oppressing - insert your antithetical tyrant here] it has become the unwritten law of their conduct to misconstrue, evade, undermine, and in the end more or less openly violate the treaty.
Race, nation, state…all have an essential and honourable place within the secular orders. To abstract them…from the earthly scale of values and make them the supreme norm of all values, including religious ones…is to be guilty of perverting and falsifying the order of things created and commanded by God.
Our God is the personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence, Lord, King, and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival god by His side.
Society was intended by the Creator for the full development of individual possibilities… The believer has an absolute right to profess his Faith and live according to its dictates. Laws which impede this profession and practice of Faith are against the natural law.
Conscientious parents, aware of their educational duties, have a primal and original right to determine that the children which God has given them should be educated in the spirit of true faith.”
Pope Pius XI Encyclical smuggled into Germany to all Roman Catholic Bishops to be read out on Palm Sunday 14th March 1937 (click for complete document)