Pius XII

Pope Pius XII (; born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli; 2 March 18769 October 1958) was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 2 March 1939 until his death on 9 October 1958. He is the most recent pope to take the pontifical name "Pius".

The papacy of Pius XII was long, even by modern standards; it lasted almost 20 years, and spanned a consequential fifth of the 20th century. Pius was a diplomat pope during the destruction wrought by the Second World War, the recovery and rebuilding which followed, the beginning of the Cold War, and the early building of a new international geopolitical order, which aimed to protect human rights and maintain global peace through the establishment of international rules and institutions (such as the United Nations). Born, raised, educated, ordained, and resident for most of his life in Rome, his work in the Roman Curia—as a priest, then bishop, then cardinal—was extensive. He served as secretary of the Vatican's diplomatic Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, papal nuncio to Germany, Camerlengo of the Apostolic Chamber, and Cardinal Secretary of State for the Holy See, in which capacity he worked to conclude treaties with various European and Latin American nations, including the '' Reichskonkordat'' treaty with Nazi Germany.

While the Vatican was officially neutral during the Second World War, the '' Reichskonkordat'' and Pius' leadership of the Catholic Church during the war remain the subject of controversy—including allegations of public silence and inaction concerning the fate of the Jews. Pius employed diplomacy to aid the victims of the Nazis during the war and, by directing the church to provide discreet aid to Jews and others, saved thousands of lives. Pius maintained links to the German resistance, and shared intelligence with the Allies. His strong public condemnation of genocide was considered inadequate by the Allied Powers, while the Nazis viewed him as an Allied sympathizer who had dishonoured his policy of Vatican neutrality.

During his papacy, the Catholic Church issued the Decree against Communism, declaring that Catholics who profess the atheistic and materialist doctrines of communism are to be excommunicated as apostates from the Christian faith. The church experienced severe persecution and mass deportations of Catholic clergy in the Eastern Bloc. He explicitly invoked ''ex cathedra'' papal infallibility with the dogma of the Assumption of Mary in his Apostolic constitution . His forty-one encyclicals include '' Mystici Corporis Christi'', on the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ; '' Mediator Dei'' on liturgy reform; and ''Humani generis'', in which he instructed theologians to adhere to episcopal teaching and allowed that the human body might have evolved from earlier forms. He removed, by additional international cardinal appointments, the Italian majority in the College of Cardinals in 1946.

After he died in 1958, Pope Pius XII was succeeded by John XXIII. In the process towards sainthood, his cause for canonization was opened on 18 November 1965 by Paul VI during the final session of the Second Vatican Council. He was made a Servant of God (the first threshold step towards sainthood) by John Paul II in 1990, and Benedict XVI declared Pius XII Venerable (the second step) on 19 December 2009.

Early life

Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli was born on the second day of Lent, 2 March 1876, in Rome into an upper-class family of intense Catholic piety with a history of ties to the papacy (the " Black Nobility"). His parents were (1837–1916) and Virginia (née Graziosi) Pacelli (1844–1920). His grandfather had been Under-Secretary in the Papal Ministry of Finances and then Secretary of the Interior under Pope Pius IX from 1851 to 1870 and helped found the Vatican's newspaper, ''L'Osservatore Romano'' in 1861. His cousin, Ernesto Pacelli, was a key financial advisor to Pope Leo XIII; his father, Filippo Pacelli, a Franciscan tertiary, was the dean of the Roman Rota; and his brother, Francesco Pacelli, became a lay canon lawyer and the legal advisor to Pope Pius XI, in which role he negotiated the Lateran Treaty in 1929 with Benito Mussolini, bringing an end to the Roman Question.

Together with his brother Francesco (1872–1935) and his two sisters, Giuseppina (1874–1955) and Elisabetta (1880–1970), he grew up in the Parione district in the centre of Rome. Soon after the family had moved to Via Vetrina in 1880, he began school at the convent of the French Sisters of Divine Providence in the Piazza Fiammetta. The family worshipped at Chiesa Nuova. Eugenio and the other children made their First Communion at this church and Eugenio served there as an altar boy from 1886. In 1886, he also was sent to the private school of Professor Giuseppe Marchi, close to the Piazza Venezia. In 1891 Pacelli's father sent Eugenio to the Ennio Quirino Visconti Liceo Ginnasio, a state school situated in what had been the Collegio Romano, the premier Jesuit university in Rome.

In 1894, aged 18, Pacelli began his theology studies at Rome's oldest seminary, the Almo Collegio Capranica, and in November of the same year, registered to take a philosophy course at the Jesuit Pontifical Gregorian University and theology at the Pontifical Roman Athenaeum S. Apollinare. He was also enrolled at the State University, La Sapienza where he studied modern languages and history. At the end of the first academic year however, in the summer of 1895, he dropped out of both the Capranica and the Gregorian University. According to his sister Elisabetta, the food at the Capranica was to blame. Having received a special dispensation he continued his studies from home and so spent most of his seminary years as an external student. In 1899, he completed his education in Sacred Theology with a doctoral degree awarded on the basis of a short dissertation and an oral examination in Latin.

Church career

Priest and monsignor

While all other candidates from the Rome diocese were ordained in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran,Noel, p. 9 Pacelli was ordained a priest on Easter Sunday, 2 April 1899, alone in the private chapel of a family friend the Vicegerent of Rome, Francesco di Paola Cassetta. Shortly after ordination he began postgraduate studies in canon law at Sant'Apollinaire. He received his first assignment as a curate at Chiesa Nuova.Marchione, 2000, p. 193 In 1901, he entered the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, a sub-office of the Vatican Secretariat of State.

Pietro Gasparri, the recently appointed undersecretary at the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, had underscored his proposal to Pacelli to work in the "Vatican's equivalent of the Foreign office" by highlighting the "necessity of defending the Church from the onslaughts of secularism and liberalism throughout Europe".Noel, p. 10 Pacelli became an ''apprendista'', an apprentice, in Gasparri's department. In January 1901 he was also chosen, by Pope Leo XIII himself, according to an official account, to deliver condolences on behalf of the Vatican to King Edward VII of the United Kingdom after the death of Queen Victoria.Marchione, 2004, p. 9

By 1904 Pacelli received his doctorate. The theme of his thesis was the nature of concordats and the function of canon law when a concordat falls into abeyance. Promoted to the position of ''minutante'', he prepared digests of reports that had been sent to the Secretariat from all over the world and in the same year became a papal chamberlain. In 1905 he received the title domestic prelate. From 1904 until 1916, he assisted Cardinal Pietro Gasparri in his codification of canon law with the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs.Marchione, 2004, p. 10 According to John Cornwell "the text, together with the Anti-Modernist Oath, became the means by which the Holy See was to establish and sustain the new, unequal, and unprecedented power relationship that had arisen between the papacy and the Church".

In 1908, Pacelli served as a Vatican representative on the International Eucharistic Congress, accompanying Rafael Merry del Val to London, where he met Winston Churchill. In 1911, he represented the Holy See at the coronation of George V and Mary. Pacelli became the under-secretary in 1911, adjunct-secretary in 1912 (a position he received under Pope Pius X and retained under Pope Benedict XV), and secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs in February 1914. On 24 June 1914, just four days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo, Pacelli, together with Cardinal Merry del Val, represented the Vatican when the Serbian Concordat was signed. Serbia's success in the First Balkan War against Turkey in 1912 had increased the number of Catholics within greater Serbia. At this time Serbia, encouraged by Russia, was challenging Austria-Hungary's sphere of influence throughout the Balkans. Pius X died on 20 August 1914. His successor Benedict XV named Gasparri as secretary of state and Gasparri took Pacelli with him into the Secretariat of State, making him undersecretary. During World War I, Pacelli maintained the Vatican's registry of prisoners of war and worked to implement papal relief initiatives. In 1915, he travelled to Vienna to assist Raffaele Scapinelli, nuncio to Vienna, in his negotiations with Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria regarding Italy.

Archbishop and papal nuncio

Pope Benedict XV appointed Pacelli as nuncio to Bavaria on 23 April 1917, consecrating him as titular Archbishop of Sardis in the Sistine Chapel on 13 May 1917, the same day as the first apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal. After his consecration, Eugenio Pacelli left for Bavaria. As there was no nuncio to Prussia or Germany at the time, Pacelli was, for all practical purposes, the nuncio to all of the German Empire.

Once in Munich, he conveyed the papal initiative to end the war to German authorities. He met with King Ludwig III on 29 May, and later with Kaiser Wilhelm IIMarchione, 2004, p. 11 and Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, who replied positively to the Papal initiative. However, Bethmann Hollweg was forced to resign and the German High Command, hoping for a military victory, delayed the German reply until 20 September.

Sister Pascalina Lehnert later recalled that the Nuncio was heartbroken that the Kaiser turned a "deaf ear to all his proposals". She later wrote, "Thinking back today on that time, when we Germans still all believed that our weapons would be victorious and the Nuncio was deeply sorry that the chance had been missed to save what there was to save, it occurs to me over and over again how clearly he foresaw what was to come. Once as he traced the course of the Rhine with his finger on a map, he said sadly, 'No doubt this will be lost as well'. I did not want to believe it, but here, too, he was to be proved right."

For the remainder of the Great War, Pacelli concentrated on Benedict's humanitarian efforts especially among Allied prisoners of war in German custody. In the upheaval following the Armistice, a disconcerted Pacelli sought Benedict XV's permission to leave Munich, where Kurt Eisner had formed the Free State of Bavaria, and he left for a while to Rorschach, and a tranquil Swiss sanatorium run by nuns. Schioppa, the ''uditore'', was left in Munich.

"His recovery began with a 'rapport with the 24-year-old Sister Pascalina Lehnert – she would soon be transferred to Munich when Pacelli "pulled strings at the highest level".

When he returned to Munich, following Eisner's assassination by the Bavarian nationalist Count Anton von Arco auf Valley, he informed Gasparri-using Schioppa's eye-witness testimony of the chaotic scene at the former royal palace as the trio of Max Levien, Eugen Levine, and Tobias Akselrod sought power: "the scene was indescribable the confusion totally chaotic in the midst of all this, a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like the rest of them hanging around the boss of this female rabble was Levien's mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcée and it was to her that the nunciature was obliged to pay homage in order to proceed Levien is a young man, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, vulgar, repulsive ..." John Cornwell alleges that a worrying impression of anti-Semitism is discernible in the "catalogue of epithets describing their physical and moral repulsiveness" and Pacelli's "constant harping on the Jewishness of this party of power usurpers" chimed with the "growing and widespread belief among Germans that the Jews were the instigators of the Bolshevik revolution, their principal aim being the destruction of Christian civilization". Also according to Cornwell, Pacelli informed Gasparri that "the capital of Bavaria, is suffering under a harsh Jewish-Russian revolutionary tyranny".

According to Sister Pascalina Lehnert, the Nuncio was repeatedly threatened by emissaries of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Once, in a violation of international law, the Bavarian Revolutionary Government attempted to confiscate the Nunciature's car at gunpoint. Despite their demands, however, Pacelli refused to leave his post.

After the Bavarian Soviet Republic was defeated and toppled by '' Freikorps'' and ''Reichswehr'' troops, the Nuncio focused on, according to Lehnert, "alleviating the distress of the postwar period, consoling, supporting all in word and deed".

Pacelli was appointed Apostolic Nuncio to Germany on 23 June 1920, and – after the completion of a Bavarian Concordat (1924) – his nunciature was moved to Berlin in August 1925. Many of Pacelli's Munich staff stayed with him for the rest of his life, including his advisor Robert Leiber and Sister Pascalina Lehnert—housekeeper, cook, friend, and adviser for 41 years. In Berlin, Pacelli was Dean of the Diplomatic Corps and active in diplomatic and many social activities. He was aided by the German priest Ludwig Kaas, who was known for his expertise in Church-state relations and was a full-time politician, politically active in the Catholic Centre Party, a party he led following Wilhelm Marx's resignation in October 1928. While in Germany, he travelled to all regions, attended Katholikentag (national gatherings of the faithful), and delivered some 50 sermons and speeches to the German people. In Berlin he lived in the Tiergarten quarter and threw parties for the official and diplomatic elite. Paul von Hindenburg, Gustav Stresemann, and other members of the Cabinet were regular guests.

In post-war Germany, in the absence of a nuncio in Moscow, Pacelli worked also on diplomatic arrangements between the Vatican and the Soviet Union. He negotiated food shipments for Russia, where the Catholic Church was persecuted. He met with Soviet representatives including Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin, who rejected any kind of religious education, the ordination of priests and bishops, but offered agreements without the points vital to the Vatican.

Despite Vatican pessimism and a lack of visible progress, Pacelli continued the secret negotiations, until Pius XI ordered them to be discontinued in 1927. Pacelli supported German diplomatic activity aimed at rejection of punitive measures from victorious former enemies. He blocked French attempts for an ecclesiastical separation of the Saar region, supported the appointment of a papal administrator for Danzig and aided the reintegration of German priests expelled from Poland. A Prussian Concordat was signed on 14 June 1929. Following the Wall Street crash of 1929, the beginnings of a world economic slump appeared, and the days of the Weimar Republic were numbered. Pacelli was summoned back to Rome at this time—the call coming by telegram when he was resting at his favourite retreat, the Rorschach convent sanatorium. He left Berlin on 10 December 1929. David G. Dalin wrote "of the forty-four speeches Pacelli gave in Germany as papal nuncio between 1917 and 1929, forty denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology".''The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII'', David G. Dalin, Joseph Bottum, Lexington Books, 2010, p. 17 In 1935 he wrote a letter to Karl Joseph Schulte, the archbishop of Cologne, describing the Nazis as "false prophets with the pride of Lucifer". and as "bearers of a new faith and a new Evangile" who were attempting to create "a mendacious antimony between faithfulness to the Church and the Fatherland". Two years later at Notre Dame de Paris he named Germany as "that noble and powerful nation whom bad shepherds would lead astray into an ideology of race".

Cardinal Secretary of State and Camerlengo

Pacelli was made a Cardinal-Priest of Santi Giovanni e Paolo al Celio on 16 December 1929 by Pope Pius XI, and within a few months, on 7 February 1930, Pius XI appointed him Cardinal Secretary of State, responsible for foreign policy and state relations throughout the world. In 1935, Pacelli was named Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church.

As Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli signed concordats with a number of countries and states. Immediately on becoming Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli and Ludwig Kaas took up negotiations on a Baden Concordat which continued until the spring and summer of 1932. Papal fiat appointed a supporter of Pacelli and his concordat policy, Conrad Gröber, the new Archbishop of Freiburg, and the treaty was signed in August
1932. Others followed: Austria (1933), Germany (1933), Yugoslavia (1935) and Portugal (1940). The Lateran treaties with Italy (1929) were concluded before Pacelli became Secretary of State. Catholicism had become the sole recognized religion; the powerful democratic Catholic Popular Party, in many ways similar to the Centre Party in Germany, had been disbanded, and in place of political Catholicism the Holy See encouraged Catholic Action. It was permitted only so long as it developed "its activity outside every political party and in direct dependence upon the Church hierarchy for the dissemination and implementation of Catholic principles". Such concordats allowed the Catholic Church to organize youth groups, make ecclesiastical appointments, run schools, hospitals, and charities, or even conduct religious services. They also ensured that canon law would be recognized within some spheres (e.g., church decrees of nullity in the area of marriage).

As the decade began Pacelli wanted the Centre Party in Germany to turn away from the socialists. In the summer of 1931 he clashed with Catholic Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, who frankly told Pacelli he believed that he "misunderstood the political situation in Germany and the real character of the Nazis". Following Brüning's resignation in May 1932 Pacelli, like the new Catholic chancellor Franz von Papen, wondered if the Centre Party should look to the Right for a coalition, "that would correspond to their principles". He made many diplomatic visits throughout Europe and the Americas, including an extensive visit to the United States in 1936 where he met President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed a personal envoy—who did not require Senate confirmation—to the Holy See in December 1939, re-establishing a diplomatic tradition that had been broken since 1870 when the Pope lost temporal power.

Pacelli presided as Papal Legate over the International Eucharistic Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina on 10–14 October 1934, and in Budapest on 25–30 May 1938. At this time, antisemitic laws were in the process of being formulated in Hungary. Pacelli made reference to the Jews "whose lips curse hristand whose hearts reject him even today". This traditional adversarial relationship with Judaism would be reversed in '' Nostra aetate'' issued during the Second Vatican Council. According to Joseph Bottum, Pacelli in 1937 "warned A. W. Klieforth, that Hitler was 'an untrustworthy scoundrel and fundamentally wicked person', to quote Klieforth, who also wrote that Pacelli 'did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, and ... fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand'. This was matched with the discovery of Pacelli's anti-Nazi report, written the following year for President Roosevelt and filed with Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., which declared that the church regarded compromise with the Third Reich as 'out of the question'."Joseph Bottum. April 2004
"The End of the Pius Wars"
, ''First Things''; retrieved 1 July 2009.

Historian Walter Bussmann argued that Pacelli, as Cardinal Secretary of State, dissuaded Pope Pius XI – who was nearing death at the time—from condemning the '' Kristallnacht'' in November 1938, when he was informed of it by the papal nuncio in Berlin.Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1136

The draft encyclical '' Humani generis unitas'' ("On the Unity of the Human Race") was ready in September 1938 but, according to those responsible for an edition of the document and other sources, it was not forwarded to the Holy See by the Jesuit General Wlodimir Ledóchowski.Hill, Roland. 1997, 11 August
"The lost encyclical"
, ''The Tablet''. On 28 January 1939, eleven days before the death of Pius XI, a disappointed Gundlach informed LaFarge, the encyclical's author, "It cannot go on like this". The text had not been forwarded to the Vatican. He had talked to the American assistant to Father General, who promised to look into the matter in December 1938, but did not report back. The draft encyclical contained an open and clear condemnation of colonialism, racial persecution and antisemitism. Historians Passelecq and Suchecky have argued that Pacelli learned about the existence of the draft only after the death of Pius XI and did not promulgate it as Pope. He did use parts of it in his inaugural encyclical '' Summi Pontificatus'', which he titled "On the Unity of Human Society". His various positions on church and policy issues during his tenure as Cardinal Secretary of State were made public by the Holy See in 1939. Most noteworthy among the 50 speeches is his review of Church-State issues in Budapest in 1938.

A year before his papal election, on 26 January 1938, the Cardinal Secretary of State officiated at the baptism of the Infante Juan Carlos (King of Spain from 1975 to 2014), in a ceremony held at the Palazzo Malta in Rome.

''Reichskonkordat'' and ''Mit brennender Sorge''

The ''Reichskonkordat'' was an integral part of four concordat

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases