The rift between the Reich and the Vatican, reopened today by the Pope’s sensational anti-Nazi encyclical, appeared widening to a definite rupture tonight, the Havas News Agency reported.
Virulent Nazi forces unleashed a campaign slurring “Jewish Popes.”
The storm over the Vatican encyclical, which condemned the Nazi’s racial theories and denounced them for violating the 1933 concordat, coincided with a blast in Julius Streicher’s weekly, Der Stuermer, labelling the famous 15th century Pope Alexander VI “a Jew on the pontifical throne.”
Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, was called a “baptized Jew.”
The text of the encyclical significantly was not printed in the Reich. Answering the Pontiff’s charges of treaty violation, a prominent Nazi official declared: “Loyalty to a treaty stops being a duty when it compromises the highest laws, such as the safety of a people or of a race.”
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