 Between 1933 and 1939 , Pacelli issued 55 protests of violations of the Reichskonkordat . Most notably , early in 1937 , Pacelli asked several German cardinals , including Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber to help him write a protest of Nazi violations of the Reichskonkordat ; this was to become Pius XI 's 1937 encyclical , Mit brennender Sorge . The encyclical was written in German and not the usual Latin of official Roman Catholic Church documents . Secretly distributed by an army of motorcyclists and read from every German Catholic Church pulpit on Palm Sunday , it condemned the paganism of the National Socialism ideology . Pius XI credited its creation and writing to Pacelli . It was the first official denunciation of Nazism made by any major organization and resulted in persecution of the Church by the infuriated Nazis who closed all the participating presses and " took numerous vindictive measures against the Church , including staging a long series of immorality trials of the Catholic clergy . " On 10 June 1941 , the pope commented on the problems of the Reichskonkordat in a letter to the Bishop of Passau , in Bavaria : " The history of the Reichskonkordat shows , that the other side lacked the most basic prerequisites to accept minimal freedoms and rights of the Church , without which the Church simply cannot live and operate , formal agreements notwithstanding " . 
