Pope Pius XII (; born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli; 2 March 18769 October 1958) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City from 2 March 1939 until his death on 9 October 1958. Pius reigned as pope during a highly consequential 19 years that included the Second World War, the Holocaust and the beginning of the Cold War.
Born, raised, educated, ordained and resident for most of his life in Rome, prior to his papacy he was secretary of the Vatican's Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, nuncio to Germany, Camerlengo of the Apostolic Chamber, and Cardinal Secretary of State for the Holy See, in which capacity he was entrusted with negotiating treaties with other sovereign states.
The Vatican was officially neutral during World War II. The Reichskonkordat — the treaty Pacelli had signed with Nazi Germany — and Pius' actions during the war remain the subject of debate, including accusations of public silence and inaction concerning the fate of the Jews.Gerard Noel, The Hound of Hitler, p. 3 Encyclopædia Britannica Online — Reflections on the Holocaust: Further Reading; web 26 April 2013 Pius' defenders state that he employed diplomacy to aid the victims of the Nazis and directed the Church to provide discreet aid to Jews and others, thereby saving thousands of lives; that the Nazis viewed him as an Allied sympathizer who had dishonored his policy of Vatican neutrality; and that Pius maintained links to the German resistance and shared intelligence with the Allies. His detractors state that he did not issue any widespread orders to hide or shield Jews and that Church rescue efforts depended instead on the initiatives of local clergy (including those in Vatican City and Rome) and nuncios; and that Pius's generalized public statements about genocide did not specifically mention Jewry and were considered inadequate by the Allies and Polish government-in-exile.
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. He explicitly invoked ex cathedra papal infallibility with the dogma of the Assumption of Mary in his Apostolic constitution .Encyclopedia of Catholicism by Frank K. Flinn, J. Gordon Melton; , p. 267 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 international cardinal appointments, the Italian majority in the College of Cardinals in 1946.
After he died in 1958, Pius was succeeded by Pope John XXIII. Pius' beatification process was opened in 1965 by Pope Paul VI during the final session of the Second Vatican Council. Upon the opening of the beatification process in 1990, Pius was titled a Servant of God. Pope Benedict XVI declared Pius venerable in 2009.
Early life
Eugenio Pacelli was born in Rome into an upper-class family with a history of ties to the papacy (the Black Nobility). His parents were Filippo (1837–1916) and Virginia (née Graziosi) (1844–1920) Pacelli. His grandfather had been Undersecretary in the Papal Ministry of FinancesPollard, 2005, p. 70 and then Secretary of the Interior under Pope Pius IX from 1851 to 1870, and helped found the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.Marchione, 2004, p. 1Gerard Noel, Pius XII: The Hound of Hitler, p. 5 His cousin, Ernesto Pacelli, was a key financial advisor to Pope Leo XIII, his father a Franciscan tertiaryO'Brien, p. 1 and dean of the Roman Rota. His brother, Francesco Pacelli (1872-1935), 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.
Together with his brother and two sisters, Giuseppina (1874–1955) and Elisabetta (1880–1970), Eugenio grew up in the Parione district in the centre of Rome. He began school at the convent of the French Sisters of Divine Providence and served as an altar boy at the church his family attended; in 1886, he was sent to the private school of Professor Giuseppe Marchi.Paul O'Shea, A Cross Too Heavy, 2011, p. 79 In 1891, he entered the Ennio Quirino Visconti Liceo Ginnasio, a state school situated in what had been the Collegio Romano.
In 1894, aged 18, Pacelli began his theology studies at the Almo Collegio Capranica,O'Shea, p. 81 and in November of that year registered to take philosophy at the Jesuit Pontifical Gregorian University and theology at the Pontifical Roman Athenaeum S. Apollinare. He also enrolled at the State University, La Sapienza where he studied modern languages and history. At the end of the first academic year, 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.Cornwell, p. 23
Church career
Priest and monsignor
Pacelli was ordained in 1899 in the private chapel of a family friend, the Vicegerent of Rome, Francesco di Paola Cassetta. Shortly afterwards, he began postgraduate studies in canon law at Sant'Apollinaire. In 1901, he entered the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, a sub-office of the Vatican Secretariat of State.O'Shea, p. 82
Pietro Gasparri, the recently appointed Extraordinary Affairs undersecretary, proposed that Pacelli work in the "Vatican's equivalent of the Foreign office," highlighting the "necessity of defending the Church from the onslaughts of secularism and liberalism throughout Europe".Noel, p. 10 As an apprendista (apprentice) in Gasparri's department, he was chosen to deliver the Vatican's condolences to Edward VII after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.Marchione, 2004, p. 9
By 1904, Pacelli received his doctorate. The topic 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. In the same year, he became a papal chamberlain, and in 1905 was named domestic prelate.Marchione, 2000, p. 193 From 1904 until 1916, he assisted Gasparri in the Vatican's codification of canon law;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".Cornwell, Hitler's Pope, p. 42
In 1908, Pacelli served as a Vatican representative on the International Eucharistic Congress, accompanying Rafael Merry del ValCornwell, p. 32 to London, where he met Winston Churchill.Dalin, 2005, p. 47 In 1911, he represented the Holy See at the coronation of George V and Mary. Pacelli became undersecretary in 1911, adjunct secretary in 1912, and, in February 1914, secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. On 24 June 1914, four days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, Pacelli, together with 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 a time when Serbia, encouraged by Russia, was challenging Austria-Hungary's sphere of influence in the Balkans.) Pius X died in August 1914. His successor, Benedict XV, named Gasparri secretary of state, and Gasparri took Pacelli with him into the Secretariat, making him undersecretary.O'Shea, pp. 86, 88 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 Franz Joseph I of Austria regarding Italy.Levillain, 2002, p. 1211
Archbishop and papal nuncio
Benedict appointed Pacelli nuncio to Bavaria on 23 April 1917, consecrating him as titular Archbishop of Sardis on 13 May, after which Pacelli left to take up his new post. As there was no nuncio to Prussia or Germany at the time, Pacelli was now for all practical purposes nuncio to the German Empire.
Once in Munich, he conveyed a papal initiative to end the war to German authorities.Fatoni, 1992, pp. 45–85 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. However, Bethmann Hollweg was forced to resign, and the initiative lost any momentum it might have had.
For the remainder of the war, Pacelli concentrated on Benedict's humanitarian effortsRychlak, 2000, p. 6, especially among prisoners of war in German custody.Lehnert (2014), 6–7. In the upheaval following the Armistice, a disconcerted Pacelli sought Benedict's permission to leave Munich, where Kurt Eisner had formed the Free State of Bavaria, and spent some time in a Swiss sanatorium run by nuns in Rorschach. Lorenzo Schioppa, the uditore ("auditor" or attaché), was left in Munich.Cornwell, p. 73
When he returned to Munich following Eisner's assassination, Pacelli wrote Gasparri — basing his remarks at least in part on Schioppa's account — about the scene at the former royal palace as the trio of Max Levien, Eugen Levine, and Tobias Akselrod sought power: The scene that presented itself at the palace was indescribable. The confusion totally chaotic, the filth completely nauseating; soldiers and armed workers coming and going; the building, once the home of a king, resounding with screams, vile language, profanities. Absolute hell. An army of employees were dashing to and fro, giving out orders, waving bits of paper, and in the midst of all this, a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in all the offices with lecherous demeanor and suggestive smiles. The boss of this female rabble was Levien's mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcée, who was in charge. And it was to her that the nunciature was obliged to pay homage in order to proceed. This Levien is a young man, of about 30 or 35, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly. He deigned to receive the monsignor uditore in the corridor, surrounded by an armed escort, one of whom was an armed hunchback, his faithful bodyguard. With a hat on his head and smoking a cigarette, he listened to what Monsignor Schioppa told him, whining repeatedly that he was in a hurry and had more important things to do. Cornwell comments that a worrying impression of anti-Semitism is discernible in the "catalogue of epithets describing... physical and moral repulsiveness," and that "Pacelli's constant harping on the Jewishness of this party of power usurpers is consistent 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 in 1919, Pacelli described Munich to Gasparri as "suffering under a harsh Jewish-Russian revolutionary tyranny."