Generally speaking, there are two dominant historiographic interpretations of the Centre's actions leading up to its passage of the Enabling Act. Both of these camps tend to hew to a more critical interpretation of both the Vatican and the leaders of political Catholicism in Germany. Additionally, these interpretations often overlap; evidence to prove one thesis can be repurposed to prove the other.

The first camp emphasizes the role of Prelate Ludwig Kaas in the negotiations as a three-way conduit between Hitler, the Centre, and the Vatican. The more extreme forms of this interpretation such as Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning hold that the Vatican via Kaas sold out the Centre in exchange for a Concordat with the Papacy, which was being negotiated simultaneously with Germany. Hitler's promises to Kaas of preserving Church independence as well as wider notions of creating a European-wide anticommunist conservative front appealed to the Vatican far more than propping up the ailing Centre party. More nuanced approaches frame the Vatican's response within the larger context of Vatican interwar diplomacy. The Reichskonkordat was not without peers, and the Vatican had signed similar treaties establishing the rights and obligations of national Catholic churches with the Irish Free State,Poland, Hungary, and Italy among others. In this context, the Vatican's move away from the Centre was part of a larger process of disengagement from the messy parliamentary battles that characterized political Catholicism for over a century and instead on a more straightforward approach. Unfortunately, Hitler honored the Reichskonkordat more in breech than practice, making it appear as a rather salient failure on the part of the Vatican.

The other interpretation, and one Follet seems to be falling into (I haven't read the novel), suggests that Kaas was less of the Vatican's catspaw but rather worked in alliance with the Centre to make a deal with Hitler in exchange for certain political favors. Kaas, along with the former Centre Chancellor Heinrich Brüning hammered out these negotiations with Hitler and forced reluctant Centre deputies in the Reichstag to swallow the bitter pill and pass the Act. These deals ranged from protection of Catholic institutions like schools and hospitals to guarantees that the new state would not purge Catholics from the civil service. The historians' criticism of the Centre's actions range from they were in a corner and passing the Act allowed for some preservation of the Church to criticism that the Centre only cared about the position of Catholics and cynically sold their Christian principles for a modicum of Catholic independence.

These two theses are not mutually exclusive and a lot of the general literature on the collapse of Weimar synthesizes the two positions. Richard Evans in his The Coming of the Third Reich, for example, is emblematic of this synthesis when he writes:

The federated states, bastions of Catholicism in the south, would remain intact, despite their takeover by Reich Commissioners appointed from Berlin, and the judiciary would stay independent. These promises, combined with heavy pressure from the Vatican, proved sufficient to win the Centre Party deputies over to supporting the measure that in the long run was bound to mean their own political demise.

The problem though for both interpretations is that the evidence for them is pretty thin. Kaas burned his papers in 1943 when the Germans occupied Rome and the memoirs and accounts of Centre leaders like Brüning were incredibly self-exculpatory for the Act. A good deal of the historiography focuses upon educated speculation of what went on during the private meetings between Kaas and Hitler. There were no minutes or notes from this meeting, and neither party was very honest about backdoor politics in this period. Both theses are plausible, but they are not iron-clad and the evidence is open to other interpretations.

The direction most scholarship on German Catholicism in the interwar period has been tending towards placing the Enabing Act episode within the larger trajectory of Centre and Catholic politics inside Germany. This includes examining the overall attitude of German Catholic leaders both towards democracy and wider politics. This new historiography can still be quite critical. Beth A. Griech-Polelle's at times quite polemical biography of Archbishop Galen contextualizes the German bishops' acceptance of the dictatorship as being somewhat in line with their own interpretations of temporal authority and meshed well with their German nationalism. Larry Eugene Jones's research on the Catholic elite of Westphalia has found a good many of these men harbored antidemocratic sentiments and a dislike for the Republic. Some of this Catholic elite like von Papen, a former Centre leader, saw in the NSDAP a chance to fundamentally break with the Republic and remold Germany along conservative lines. Jones cogently observes that the acid test for these Catholic conservatives was not the Act, but their response to the Night of the Long Knives, where some non-NSDAP conservatives were murdered like former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher alongside the SA leadership. This shocked a number of Catholic leaders and forced a reevaluation of their prior support for the Act and Hitler. Some Catholics justified the purges, but others were aghast and but now found that the Act had tied their hands to resist. Likewise, Anthony McElligott's Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916-1936 concludes that both the Centre and other bourgeois parties':

vote for this Enabling Act represented less an approval for a Hitler dictatorship than an affirmation of government by constitutional dictatorship as framed by more than ten years of Weimar state theory discourse.

Direct appeals to Hitler or resistance from the pulpit became the main routes to express disgruntlement of the Third Reich's violations of Catholic sovereignty guaranteed by the Reichskonkordat.

Of course, not all Catholic leaders were inherently antidemocratic and the disgust of some Catholics over the blood purge does show a moral revulsion with the Nazi's brand of politics. Another line of argumentation on the Centre's actions emphasizes that their support for the Republic, despite being at times rather authoritarian, undercuts the charge that the Centre and other Catholic leaders were just waiting to turn their cloaks against the Republic. Martin R. Menke's article "Misunderstood Civic Duty: The Center Party and the Enabling Act," contends that the German nationalism of its leadership often put the Centre in a bind as to harmonize its Catholic principles with the interests of German unity. The period leading up to the Act presented the Centre with an unappetizing list of alternatives of which passing the Act provided the least-worst outcome from the very narrow perspective of March 1933. From the Centre's perspective, the Act still preserved the federal structure of the Reich and provided some sanction for Hitler's dictatorship by the elected representatives. This Catholic leadership certainly had memories of the Kulturkampf of Bismarck and feared that if they did not relent, then Hitler might pursue more extreme alternatives to the Act that would lead to civil war and possibly the victory of the KPD as the German right and middle tore themselves apart. Menke's interpretation meshes well with Eric Kurlander's Living with Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich which examines the largely Protestant liberals who acquiesced to the dictatorship. While some liberals were enthusiatic about the new turn in German politics in January 1933, others were more skeptical. But those skeptics who voted for the Act also saw it as the least-worst alternative between an Unrechtsstaat (lawless state) and a restricted Rechtsstaat (state defined by laws). By sanctioning the Act, the state was still acknowledging the importance of German law and jurisprudence instead of proceeding without the sanction of law. Still other liberals saw their affirmative vote as a tactical move that preserved their continued opposition to Hitler. A number of liberal recognized that the Act had enough support to pass, but also that Hitler was not above using extralegal means if thwarted. Therefore, it was important not to give Hitler a pretext to further clamp down on liberal politicians and intellectual circles.

Kurlander's interpretation of liberals' responses to the Act could easily apply to the Centre. In justifying the Act to their constituents, Centre leaders were all too ready to trumpet their accomplishment of preserving some elements of the pre-January status quo. The problem was the Enabling Act was -to paraphrase an aphorism of Talleyrand- worse than a crime against democracy, it was a mistake. Whatever agreements Hitler made with Kaas and the Centre leadership, the National Socialist state more than likely flaunted these agreements or violated them just as it did with Reichskonkordat. By 1934, the bloom was off the National Socialist rose for many German conservatives, whether Catholic, Protestant, or agnostic, but they now had to live in a dictatorship they played a part in making.