Pope Pius XII

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Pope Pius XII (Italian: Pio XII), born Eugenio Maria Pacelli (January 1876 – September 9, 1958), was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 1992 to 1958.

He served as Secretary of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, papal nuncio to Germany, and Cardinal Secretary of State, among other aspects of World War II, the Reichskonkordat and the Catholic Church's leadership during the war remain contested, with allegations of official ignorance and inaction about the Jews' fate.

Following the war, he argued for peace and stability, as well as flexible measures against former Axis and Axis-satellite nations.

He was also a vocal critic of Communism and the Italian Communist Party. The Church issued the Dec. against Communism during Pope Paul's pontificate, establishing that Catholics who profess the Communist doctrine will be excommunicated as apostates from the Christian faith.

In addition, the Church suffered significant persecution and mass expulsions of Catholic clergy in the Eastern Bloc.

In his Apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus, he explicitly invoked ex papal infallibility with the dogma of the Assumption of Mary.

Almost 1,000 addresses and radio broadcasts have been included in his magisterium.

Mystici corporis, the Church as the Body of Christ; Mediator Dei on liturgical reform; and Humani generis, in which theologians were instructed to adhere to episcopal doctrine and acknowledged that the human body may have derived from earlier versions.

In 1946, he sacked the Italian majority in the College of Cardinals. Pope John XXIII succeeded him after his 1958 death.

During the final session of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI launched canonization in the process of sainthood on November 18, 1965.

He was made a Servant of God by Pope John Paul II in 1990 and Pope Benedict XVI declared Pius XII Venerable on December 19, 2009.

Early life

Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Pacelli was born in Rome on the second day of Lent, 1876, to a family of deep Catholic piety with a history of links to the papacy (the "Black Nobility"). Filippo Pacelli (1837-1916) and Virginia (née Graziosi) Pacelli (1844-1920) Pacelli's parents were married (since 1922). Marcantonio Pacelli's grandfather served as Under-Secretary in the Papal Ministry of Finances and then Interior Secretary of the Interior under Pope Pius IX from 1851 to 1870, and he founded L'Osservatore Romano in 1861. Ernesto Pacelli, his uncle, was a key financial advisor to Pope Leo XIII; Filippo Pacelli, a Franciscan tertiary, was the dean of the Roman Rota, and his brother, Francesco Pacelli, became a lay canon prosecutor and legal advisor to Pope Pius XI in 1929, putting an end to the Roman Question.

Giuseppina and Elisabetta, his brother Francesco and his two sisters, grew up in Rome's Parione district. He began training at the French Sisters of Divine Providence in Via Vetrina in 1880. At Chiesa Nuova, the family celebrated. Eugenio and the other children celebrated their First Communion at this church, and Eugenio served as an altar boy from 1886. In 1886, he was sent to Professor Giuseppe Marchi's private school, which is close to Piazza Venezia. Eugenio was sent by Pacelli's father in 1891 to the Liceo Quirino Visconti Institute, a state school located in Rome's oldest Jesuit university.

Pacelli, a young 18 year old boy from Rome's oldest seminary, began his theology studies in the Almo Collegio Capranica in 1990, and the Pontifical Roman Athenaeum S. Apollinare began studying philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University and theology in November of the same year. He was also enrolled at the State University of La Sapienza, where he studied modern languages and history. He dropped out of both the Capranica and the Gregorian University at the end of the first academic year, but not in the summer of 1895. The Capranica's diet was to blame, according to Elisabetta's sister Elisabetta. He continued his studies from home and ended up spending the majority of his seminary years as an outsider. He completed his studies in Sacred Theology in 1899 with a doctorate in honor of a short dissertation and an oral examination in Latin.

Later life, illness and death

The Pope's long illness in late 1954 caused him to consider abduction. Changes in his work habits were also apparent later. The Pope skipped long services, canonizations, and consolation, displaying an uncomfortableness with human resources. He found it increasingly difficult to condemn subordinates and appointees, such as Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, who after a string of scandals was barred from Papal service for the next two years, but still holding his position, he was able to photograph the dying Pope, which he sold to French magazines. Pius underwent three courses of cellular rejuvenation therapy, the most important in 1954, when Pius was gravely ill. "These years were also plagued by phantic nightmares." The screams of Pacelli's blood-curdling screams could be heard throughout the papal apartments."

Young priests were often appointed bishops by Pius XII, such as Julius Döpfner (35 years) and Karol Wojtya (later Pope John Paul II, 38 years), one of his last apostatees in 1958. He took a stead stand against pastoral experiments, such as "worker-priests," who worked full-time in factories and joined political parties and unions. He continued to promote Thomism's theological tradition as deserving of continuing reform and as superior to modern trends such as phenomenology or existentialism.

Pope Pius XII had to rely on a handful of key people, including his aide Domenico Tardini, his speechwriter Robert Leiber, and his long-serving housekeeper Sister Pascalina Lehnert, who were often absent from work. The Pope has also addressed lay people and groups on a variety of topics. He answered specific moral questions that were addressed to him at times. He spoke to professional organizations about concrete occupational ethics in the light of church teachings. Robert Leiber appeared on television and in print at times. Cardinal Augustine Bea SJ was his personal confessor. Sister Pasqualina was his "housekeeper, muse, and lifelong companion" for forty years.

After taking ill the previous day in a series of meetings, he died by around 8:30 a.m. (07:30 GMT) on Monday, October 6th, 1958, putting him greatly in comparison to his other illnesses. He was given the Last rites. However, his health improved until 8 October, when he sustained a second stroke. Pius XII had suffered from a serious cardio-pulmonary disease disorder by the mid-afternoon, and by 3:00 p.m. (14:00 GMT) they had expected his death by 3:00 p.m. (14:00 GMT) that his doctors had predicted that his death was imminent. Pius XII contracted pneumonia right before sunset, and doctors immediately started to pump oxygen and blood plasma. According to reports, his last words were, "pray." "This sad situation for the church may come to an end," Pray that this difficult situation for the church will come to an end." The little crucifix and rosary that he held in his hands when he died were buried with him when Pius XII was interred.

His temperature gradually increased on the last full day of his life, and his breathing became difficult. On Thursday, 3:52 a.m. (02:52 GMT) on Thursday, a Feast of Saint Denis of Paris, he smiled, lowered his head, and died. The cause of death was listed as acute heart failure. In Latin, Domenico Tardini prayed for the Magnificat Anima dominum, the Virgin Mary's thanks to the Lord. "The Holy Father did not die as a result of any specific illness," his doctor Gaspanini explained later. He was completely wiped out. He was overworked beyond his limits. His heart was healthy, and his lungs were strong. If he had saved himself, he may have lived another 20 years." Spain declared ten days of mourning; Italy declared three days of remembrance and the closing of offices and schools as a mark of respect; Cuba declared three days of mourning.

Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, the pontiff's doctor in Pius XII, announced that his body was embalmed in the room where he died using a novel technique invented by Oreste Nuzzi.

Pope Pius XII did not want the vital organs removed from his body but instead requested that it be maintained in the same state "in which God created it." According to Galeazzi-Lisi, this was the reason why he and Nuzzi, a Naples embalmer, took an unusual route with the embalming procedure. Galeazzi-Lisi described in great detail the late pontiff's embalming. He said he used the same oil and resin system with which the body of Jesus Christ was preserved.

Galeazzi-Lisi said that the new process would "preserve the body in perpetuity." However, whatever chance the new embalming process might have of efficiently preserving the body, the body was obliterated by extreme heat in Castel Gandolfo during the embalming process. As a result, the body decomposed rapidly, and the faithful's viewing had to be ended abruptly.

Galeazzi-Lisi reported that heat in the halls, where the late Pope's body lay in state, caused chemical reactions that required it to be treated twice after the initial preparation. During their vigil, Swiss Guards stationed around Pius XII's body were reported to have become ill.

His funeral procession into Rome was the largest congregation of Romans as of that date. The Romans mourned "their" pope, who was born in their own town, but also as a hero in the time of war. Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (later to be Pope John XIII) wrote in his diary on Saturday that perhaps no Roman emperor had celebrated such a triumph, which he regarded as a sign of the emperor's spiritual majesty and religious dignity of the late Pius XII.

The late pope appeared on a bier surrounded by four Swiss Guards, and he was then placed in the coffin for burial. In a small chapel, Pius XII was buried in the grottos beneath St. Peter's Basilica.

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Church career

Although all other candidates from Rome's diocese were ordained in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, Pacelli was ordained a priest on Sunday, 2 April 1899 alone in the private chapel of a family friend, Vicegerent of Rome, Mgr Paolo Cassetta. He began postgraduate studies in canon law at Sant'Apollinaire right after ordination. In Chiesa Nuova, he was first hired as a curate. He entered the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, a sub-office of the Vatican Secretariat of State, in 1901.

Pietro Gasparri, the recently posted undersecretary at the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, had emphasized his call to Pacelli to work in the "Vatican's equivalent of the Foreign Ministry" by arguing that the Church must be protected against the "necess of secularism and liberalism throughout Europe. Pacelli, an apprentice, joined Gasparri's department as an apprendista. Following King Edward VII of the United Kingdom's death, he was also chosen by Pope Leo XIII himself in January 1901.

Pacelli's doctorate was awarded in 1904 by 1904 Pacelli. When a contagon and the use of canon law came into disuse, a concordant came into abeyance. He was promoted to the position of minutante and absorbed news from around the world that had been sent to the Secretariat from around the world and in the same year became a papal chamberlain. In 1905, he was granted the title domestic prelate. He assisted Cardinal Pietro Gasparri in the codification of canon law with the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs from 1904 to 1916. The text, together with Anti-Modernist Oath, became the means by which the Holy See was to establish and maintain the new, unequal, and rare power alliance that had arisen between the papacy and the Church, according to John Cornwell.

Pacelli traveled to London in 1908 as a Vatican representative on the International Eucharistic Congress, accompanying Rafael Merry del Val to London, where he first met Winston Churchill. In 1911, he represented the Holy See at the coronation of King George V. Pacelli, adjunct-secretary in 1911, and retained under Pope Benedict XV) and secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. The Vatican was represented by Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, Pacelli, just four days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated. Serbia's triumph in the First Balkan War against Turkey in 1912 had increased the number of Catholics in Serbia than in 1912. Serbia, which was aided by Russia, was threatening Austria-Hungary's sphere of influence in the Balkans at this time. Pius X died on August 20, 1914. Gasparri, his son, was commissioned as secretary of state and Gasparri took Pacelli with him into the Secretariat of State, making him undercover. Pacelli maintained the Vatican's prisoner registry during World War I and worked to implement papal relief efforts. In 1915, he traveled to Vienna to assist Raffaele Scapinelli, the nuncio to Vienna, in his talks with Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria in Italy.

On April 23, 1917, Pope Benedict XV named Pacelli as the titular Archbishop of Sardis in the Sistine Chapel, the same day as the First apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal. Eugenio Pacelli departed for Bavaria after his consecration. Pacelli was, for all practical reasons, the nuncio to all of the German Empire as there was no nuncio to Prussia or Germany at the time.

He told German authorities that the papal initiative to bring the war to an end once he was in Munich. On May 29, he met with King Ludwig III and Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, who responded positively to the Papal initiative. However, Bethmann-Hollweg was compelled to resign and the German High Command, wishing for a military victory, postponed the German response until September 20.

The Nuncio's heartbroken that the Kaiser had a "deaf ear to all his plans," Sister Pascalina later recalled. "Thinking back today, when we Germans still believed that our weapons would be successful and the Nuncio was deeply sorry that the opportunity had been missed to save what was not"," she said. 'No doubt this will be lost as well,' he said as he followed the Rhine course with his finger on a map.' I didn't want to believe it, but here, too, he was going to be proven wrong."

Pacelli remained focused on Benedict's humanitarian efforts, particularly among Allied POWs in German detention. A disconcerted Pacelli asked Benedict XV's permission to leave Munich, where Kurt Eisner had founded the Free State of Bavaria, and he stayed for a while to Rorschach, as a peaceful Swiss sanatorium run by nuns. Schioppa, the uditore, was left in Munich.

"His musical journey began with a 'rapport'" with 24-year-old Sister Pascalina Lehnert, who will soon be transferred to Munich after Pacelli "pulled strings at the highest level" in the Alps.

Count Anton von Arco on Valley, a young Russian woman, a young Russian woman, a divorcee, and a young male [-] in Munich, Levien's mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew, and a divorcée were all seated, according to her. [-] Levien, a young man and a Jew, was a Jew, a Jew, was a young man, who was an e heir Pale, filsive, with prescriptions of drugged eyes, vulgar, repulsive..." John Cornwell says that in "an epithet book describing their physical and moral repulsiveness" and Pacelli's "continuous harping on the Jewish origins of the Bolshevik revival, "the Jews were the initiators of this movement, with their main aim being the destruction of Christian civilization. "Britia's capital is also suffering under a brutal Jewish-Russian revolutionary tyranny," Cornwell told Gasparri.

According to Sister Pascalina Lehnert, the Nuncio was repeatedly attacked by Bavarian emissaries. The Nunciature's car was confiscated at gunpoint once more, in breach of international treaty. Pacelli resigned from his post despite their pleas, but they refused to remove him from his position.

Following the failure of the Munich Soviet Republic and overthrown by Freikorps and Reichswehr troops, the Nuncio concentrated on "alleviating the agony of the postwar period, consoling, aiding all in word and deed."

Pacelli was ordained Apostolic Nuncio to Germany on June 23, 1920, and his nunciature was moved to Berlin in August 1925, following the conclusion of a Bavarian conclave. Many members of Pacelli's Munich staff stayed with him for the remainder of their lives, including his advisor Robert Leiber and Sister Pascalina Lehnert—housekeeper, cook, acquaintance, and advisor for 41 years. Pacelli, the Diplomatic Corps' Dean, was active in diplomatic and other social causes in Berlin. He was assisted by German priest Ludwig Kaas, who was known for his expertise in Church-state relations and was a full-time politician with political involvement in the Catholic Centre Party, the group he led following Wilhelm Marx's demise in October 1928. While in Germany, he went to all regions, attended Katholikentag (national gatherings of the faithful), and delivered more than 50 sermons and addresses to the German people. He lived in Berlin and threw parties for the political and diplomatic classes. Regular visitors included Paul von Hindenburg, Gustav Stresemann, and other Cabinet members.

Pacelli also worked in postwar Germany, in the absence of a nuncio in Moscow, who was absent from a nuncio, and was involved in diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the Soviet Union. He arranged food exports for Russia, where the Catholic Church was persecuted. He spoke with Soviet Prime Minister Georgi Chicherin, who condemned any kind of religious education, the ordination of priests and bishops, but he rejected Vatican legislation that was vital to the Vatican.

Pacelli forged the clandestine talks amid Vatican mismunicism and a lack of visible change before Pius XI ordered them to be suspended in 1927. Pacelli praised German diplomatic initiatives aimed at the rejection of punitive steps taken from former prisoners. He denied French calls for an ecclesiastical partition of the Saar region, endorsed the appointment of a papal administrator for Danzig, and assisted with the reintegration of priests barred from Poland. On June 14, 1929, Prussian Concordat was signed. The days of the Weimar Republic were counted in the aftermath of 1929's Wall Street Crash, the beginning of a global economic recession appeared, and the beginnings of a global economic recession appeared. Pacelli was summoned back to Rome at this moment, despite the call coming by telegram while resting at his favorite retreat, the Rorschach convent sanatorium. On December 10, 1929, he left Berlin. "Of the forty-four speeches Pacelli delivered in Germany between 1917 and 1929, forty denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology," David Dalin wrote. He wrote a letter to the bishop of Cologne in 1935 describing the Nazis as "false prophets with the pride of Lucifer." As "bearers of a new faith and a new Evangile" who were trying to establish "a masculine antimony between faithfulness to the Church and Fatherland," the Church and the Fatherland were attempting to establish "a mendacious antimony." He named Germany as "the noble and wealthy nation" for which bad shepherds would lead astray into a nation of race ideology at Notre Dame in Paris two years ago.

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

Pacelli, the Cardinal Secretary of State, has signed conclavats with a variety of countries and states. Pacelli and Ludwig Kaas began talks about a Baden Concordat, which did not exist until 1932's spring and summer. Conrad Gröber, the current Archbishop of Freiburg, and Papal Fiat appointed Conrad Gröber, a supporter of Pacelli and his conciliation policy, in August 1932. Others followed Austria (1933), Germany (1933), Yugoslavia (1935), and Portugal (1940). Before Pacelli became Secretary of State, the Lateran treaties with Italy (1929) were concluded. Catholicism had risen to become the sole recognized faith, with the influential democratic Catholic Popular Party, which had been disbanded in certain ways, and the Holy See in place of political Catholicism boosted Catholic Action, "an anaemic manifestation of clerically dominated religious rousing." It was only allowed so long as "its presence outside of any political party and in direct dependence on the Church hierarchy for the propagation and application of Catholic values." Such consortships enabled the Catholic Church to co-organise youth groups, make ecclesiastical appointments, operate hospitals, hospitals, and charities, or even conduct religious services. They also made sure that canon law would be recognized in certain areas (e.g., church decrees of nullity in the area of marriage).

Pacelli, the German Centre Party, was determined to move away from the socialists' as the decade began. He argued with Catholic chancellor Heinrich Brüning, who openly told Pacelli that he "misunderstood the political situation in Germany and the true 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 conform to their values." He made several diplomatic trips around Europe and the Americas, including a lengthy visit to the United States in 1936, where he saw President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who did not require Senate confirmation—re-establishing a diplomatic tradition that had been lost since 1870, when the pope lost temporal power.

Pacelli presided in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on October 10-14, 1934, and in Budapest on May 29 to 1938. Anti-semitic legislation in Hungary was in the process of being developed at this moment. Pacelli referred to Jews "whose lips curse [Christ] and whose hearts refuse to love him even now." In Nostra aetate, the traditional adversary relationship with Judaism would be reversed in the Second Vatican Council's Nostra aetate. Joseph Bottum, Pacelli's 1936 "warned A. W. Klieforth, the American consul to Berlin, said Hitler was "an untrustworthy scoundrel and fundamentally wicked individual," according to Klieforth, who later wrote that Pacelli "did not believe Hitler was a model of moderation and "fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi protests. This corresponded to the discovery of Pacelli's anti-Nazi book, which was written the following year for President Roosevelt and submitted with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, which said that the church opposed compromise with the Third Reich as "out of the question."

Historian Walter Bussmann argued that Pacelli, the 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 alerted of it by the papal nuncio in Berlin.

The draft encyclical Human Race Unitas ("On the Unity of the Human Race") was ready in September 1938, but according to those involved in the document and other sources, it was not forwarded to the Holy See by Jesuit General Wlodimir Ledóchowski. The encyclical's draft contained an open and explicit condemnation of colonialism, racial persecution, and antisemitism. Historians Passelecq and Suchecky have argued that Pacelli learned of the document only after the death of Pius XI and did not promote it as Pope. In his inaugural encyclical Summi Pontificatus, which he titled "Unity of Human Society." The Holy See announced his various positions on church and policy during his tenure as Cardinal Secretary of State in 1939. His review of Church-State problems in Budapest in 1938 was the most notable of the 50 addresses.

The Reichskonkordat was an integral part of four concordats Pacelli's concluding on behalf of the Vatican and the German States. Because the German federalist Weimar constitution granted the German states power in the field of education and culture, the churches' authority in these areas was reduced; the Vatican's greatest fear was the erosion of church authority. Pacelli, the Bavarian chief, successfully negotiated with the Bavarian authorities in 1925. He wanted the contagon with Catholic Bavaria to be the model for the remainder of Germany. Only after the Bavarian conclave, Prussia expressed concern in talks. Pacelli did not have less favorable conditions for the church in 1929's Prussian conclave, which forbade educational concerns. After he had migrated to Rome, Pacelli completed a conquest of Baden, Germany. In 1933, he initiated a confederation with Austria. In the ten-year period 1922-192, a total of 16 confederations and treaties with European states had been concluded.

The Reichskonkordat, which was signed between Germany and the Holy See on July 20, 1933, but was also part of a larger Vatican program. It is still the most important of Pacelli's concordats. It is debating not for the sake of its content, which is still valid today, but also for its timing. Pacelli's main aim as secretary of state was a national conclave with Germany, as he attempted to improve the church's legal standing. Pacelli, a German scholar who understood German conditions well, emphasized in particular the defense of Catholic groups (31), education and Catholic schools, and freedom for publishing.

He had failed attempts to get German agreement for such a treaty between 1930 and 1933, but opposition from Protestant and Socialist parties, political instability, and the care of individual states to protect their sovereignty stifled this goal. Despite talks in the winter of 1932, the issues of denominational schools and pastoral service in the armed forces prevented any agreement on a national level.

Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30 in 1933 and sought international recognition and to ban internal opposition from inside the church and the Catholic Centre Party's ranks. He sent his vice chancellor Franz von Papen, a Catholic nobleman, to Rome to discuss a Reichskonkordat. Prelate Ludwig Kaas, the outgoing chairman of the Centre Party, negotiated the first drafts of the terms with Papen on behalf of Pacelli. Pacelli's Pontiferen and von Papen for Germany had signed the concordat on August 20th and ratified on September 10th. Bishop Preysing warned against joining the new regime, against those who think the Nazi persecution of the Church of Christ as an aberration that Hitler would ignore.

Pacelli issued 55 protests of the Reichskonkordat between 1933 and 1939. Pacelli had invited several German cardinals, including Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, to assist him in writing a protest of Nazi imperialism of the Reichskonkordat early in 1937; this was to be Pius XI's 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. The encyclical was published in German rather than the traditional Latin of official Catholic Church documents. On Palm Sunday, an army of motorcyclists and read from every German Catholic Church pulpit sacked the National Socialism ideology, which was largely rejected by an escalationist tradition. Pacelli credited Pius XI's inception and writing. It was the first official declaration of Nazism by any major group, which culminated in persecution of the church by the infuriated Nazis who closed all of the participating presses and "took a number of vindictive steps against the Church," the cardinal said. In a letter sent by the Pope in Bavaria on June 10, 1941, he spoke about the Reichskonkordat's problems in a letter sent to the Bishop of Passau, "the other hand failed to recognize minimal freedoms and rights of the Church without which the Church cannot exist and function," the pope wrote.

On April 17, 1936, Cardinal Pacelli delivered a lecture titled "La Presse et L'Apostolat" at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum.

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