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Pope Pius XII

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                        Pius XII
    Birth name  Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli
   Papacy began 2 March 1939
   Papacy ended 9 October 1958
   Predecessor  Pius XI
    Successor   John XXIII
       Born     2 March 1876
                Rome, Italy
       Died     9 October 1958
                Castel Gandolfo, Italy
   Other Popes named Pius
             Styles of
   Pope Pius XII
   Reference style  His Holiness
   Spoken style     Your Holiness
   Religious style  Holy Father
   Posthumous style Venerable

   Pope Pius XII (Latin: Pius PP. XII), born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe
   Giovanni Pacelli ( March 2, 1876 – October 9, 1958), reigned as the
   260th pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, and sovereign of
   Vatican City State from March 2, 1939 until his death.

   His leadership of the Catholic Church during World War II and the
   Holocaust remains the subject of continued historical controversy.
   Before election to the papacy, Pacelli served as secretary of the
   Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, papal nuncio and
   cardinal secretary of state, in which roles he worked to conclude
   treaties with European nations, most notably the Reichskonkordat with
   Germany. After World War II, he was a vocal supporter of lenient
   policies toward vanquished nations, including amnesty for war
   criminals. He also was a staunch opponent of communism.

   Pius is one of few popes in recent history to exercise his papal
   infallibility by issuing an apostolic constitution, Munificentissimus
   Deus, which defined ex cathedra the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. He
   also promulgated forty-six encyclicals, including Humani Generis, which
   is still relevant to the Church's position on evolution. He also
   decisively eliminated the Italian majority in the College of Cardinals
   with the Grand Consistory in 1946. Most sedevacantists regard Pope Pius
   XII as the last true Pope to occupy the Holy See. His canonization
   process progressed to the Venerable stage on September 2, 2000 under
   Pope John Paul II.

Early life

   Pacelli was born in Rome on March 2, 1876 into a well-off aristocratic
   family with a history of ties to the papacy (the " Black Nobility").
   His grandfather, Marcantonio Pacelli was Uder-Secretary in the Papal
   Ministry of Finances and then Secretary of the Interior under Pope Pius
   IX from 1851 to 1870 and founded the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore
   Romano in 1861; his cousin, Ernesto Pacelli, was a key financial
   advisor to Pope Leo XII; his father, Filippo Pacelli, was the dean of
   the Sacra Rota Romana; and his brother, Francesco Pacelli, became a
   highly-regarded lay canon lawyer, credited for his role in negotiating
   the Lateran treaties in 1929, bringing an end to the Roman Question,
   whom Pius XII would later name a marchese. At the age of twelve Pacelli
   announced his intentions to enter the priesthood instead of becoming a
   lawyer. Most of what is known about Pacelli's early life comes from a
   comprehensive biography by Sister Margherita Marchione.

   After completing state primary schools, Pacelli received his secondary,
   classical education at the Visconti Institute. In 1894, at the age of
   eighteen, he entered the Almo Capranica Seminary to begin study for the
   priesthood and enrolled at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the
   Appolinare Institute of Lateran University. From 1895-1896, he studied
   philosophy at University of Rome La Sapienza. In 1899, he received
   degrees in theology and in utroque jure ( civil and canon law). At the
   seminary, he received a special dispensation to live at home for health
   reasons.

Church career

   Pacelli being ordained on April 2, 1899
   Enlarge
   Pacelli being ordained on April 2, 1899

Priest and Monsignor

   He was ordained a priest on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1899 by Bishop
   Francesco Paolo Cassetta—the vice-regent of Rome and a family
   friend—and received his first assignment as a curate at Chiesa Nuova,
   where he had served as an altar boy. In 1901, he entered the Department
   of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, a sub-office of the Vatican
   Secretariat of State, where he became a minutante, at the
   recommendation of Cardinal Vannutelli, another family friend.

   In 1904, Pacelli became a papal chamberlain and in 1905 a domestic
   prelate. From 1904 until 1916, Father Pacelli assisted Cardinal
   Gasparri in his codification of canon law with the Department of
   Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. He was also chosen by Pope Leo
   XIII to deliver condolences on behalf of the Vatican to Edward VII of
   the United Kingdom after the death of Queen Victoria. In 1908, he
   served as a Vatican representative on the International Eucharistic
   Congress in London, where he met with Winston Churchill. In 1910, he
   represented the Holy See at the coronation of King George V.

   In 1908 and 1911, Pacelli turned down professorships in canon law at a
   Roman university and The Catholic University of America, respectively.
   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 1914—succeeding Gasparri, who was promoted to
   Cardinal Secretary of State. As secretary, Pacelli concluded a
   concordat with Serbia four days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was
   assassinated in Sarajevo. During World War I, Pacelli maintained the
   Vatican's registry of prisoners of war. In 1915, he travelled to Vienna
   to assist Monsignor Scapinelli—the apostolic nuncio to Vienna—in his
   negotiations with Franz Joseph I of Austria regarding Italy.

Archbishop and Papal nuncio

   Pope Benedict XV appointed Pacelli as papal nuncio to Bavaria effective
   April 1917, consecrating him as a titular bishop of Sardis and
   immediately elevating him to be archbishop in the Sistine Chapel on May
   13, 1917, before he left for Bavaria, where he would meet with King
   Ludwig III on May 28, and later with Kaiser Wilhelm II. As there was no
   nuncio to Prussia at the time, Pacelli was, for all practical purposes,
   the nuncio to all of the German Empire, having his nunciature extended
   to Germany and Prussia officially in June 23, 1920 and 1925
   respectively. Many of Pacelli's Munich staff would stay with him for
   the rest of his life, including Sister Pasqualina Lehnert—housekeeper,
   friend, and adviser to Pacelli for 41 years.

   During the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic in 1919 Pacelli was one
   of the few foreign diplomats to remain in Munich. He faced down a small
   group of Spartacist revolutionaries and reportedly convinced them to
   leave the offices of the nunciature without incident. The oft-repeated
   anecdote—reminiscent of Pope Leo I turning Attila the Hun away from the
   gates of Rome—is often cited as a formative experience which informed
   Pacelli's later impressions of Communism and leftist movements in
   general. Similarly, he later dispersed a mob attacking his car by
   raising his cross and blessing his assailants, as related by Bishop
   Fulton Sheen—the recipient of the cross—on television.

   On the night of the Beer Hall Putsch, Franz Matt, the only member of
   the Bavarian cabinet not present at the Bürgerbräu Keller, was having
   dinner with Pacelli and Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber.

   During the 1920s, Pacelli succeeded in negotiating concordats with
   Latvia (1922), Bavaria (1925), Poland (1925), Romania (1927), and
   Prussia (1929), but failed in regard to Germany. Under his tenure the
   nunciature was moved to Berlin, where one of his associates was the
   German priest Ludwig Kaas, who was known for his expertise in
   Church-state relations and was politically active in the Centre Party.

Cardinal Secretary of State and Camerlengo

   Pacelli was made a cardinal on 16 December 1929 by Pope Pius XI. Within
   a few months, on 7 February 1930, Pius XI appointed Pacelli Cardinal
   Secretary of State. In 1935, Cardinal Pacelli was named Camerlengo of
   the Roman Church.

   As Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli signed concordats with many
   non-Communist states, including Baden (1932), Austria (1933), Germany
   (1933), Yugoslavia (1935) and Portugal (1940). The Lateran treaties
   with Italy (1929) were concluded before Pacelli rose to the office of
   Secretariat. 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).

   He also made many diplomatic visits throughout Europe and the Americas,
   including an extensive visit to the United States in 1936 where he met
   with Charles Coughlin and 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 October 10-14, 1934, and in
   Budapest on May 25-30, 1938.

   Historians have argued that Pacelli, as Cardinal Secretary of State,
   dissuaded Pope Pius XI—who was nearing death at the time—from
   condemning Kristallnacht in November 1938, when he was informed of it
   by the papal nuncio in Berlin.

Reichskonkordat

   The Reichskonkordat, signed on July 20, 1933, between Germany and the
   Holy See remains the most important and controversial of Pacelli's
   concordats. A national concordat with Germany was one of Pacelli's main
   objectives as secretary of state. As nuncio during the 1920s, he had
   made unsuccessful attempts to obtain German agreement for such a
   treaty, and between 1930 and 1933 he attempted to initiate negotiations
   with representatives of successive German governments, but the
   opposition of Protestant and Socialist parties, the instability of
   national governments and the care of the individual states to guard
   their autonomy thwarted this aim. In particular, the questions of
   denominational schools and pastoral work in the armed forces prevented
   any agreement on the national level, despite talks in the winter of
   1932.

   Heinrich Brüning, leader of the Catholic German Centre Party and
   Chancellor of Germany met with Pacelli on August 8, 1931. According to
   Brüning's memoirs Pacelli suggested that he disband the Centre Party's
   governing coalition with the Social Democrats and "form a government of
   the right simply for the sake of a Reich concordat, and in doing so
   make it a condition that a concordat be concluded immediately." Brüning
   refused to do so, replying that Pacelli "mistook the political
   situation in Germany and, above all, the true character of the Nazis."

   Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933 and sought to
   gain international respectability and to remove internal opposition by
   representatives of the Church and the Catholic Centre Party. He sent
   his vice chancellor Franz von Papen, a Catholic nobleman and former
   member of the Centre Party, to Rome to offer negotiations about a
   Reichskonkordat. On behalf of Cardinal Pacelli, his long-time associate
   Prelate Ludwig Kaas, the out-going chairman of the Centre Party,
   negotiated first drafts of the terms with Papen. The concordat was
   finally signed, by Pacelli for the Vatican and von Papen for Germany,
   on 20 July and ratified on September 10, 1933.

   Between 1933 to 1939, Pacelli issued 55 protests of violations of the
   Reichskonkordat. Most notably, early in 1937, Pacelli asked several
   German cardinals, including Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber to help him
   write a protest of Nazi violations of the Reichskonkordat; this was to
   become Pius XI's encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge. The encyclical,
   condemning the view that "exalts race, or the people, or the State, or
   a particular form of State ... above their standard value and divinizes
   them to an idolatrous level", was written in German instead of Latin
   and read in German churches on Palm Sunday 1937.

Papacy

Election and coronation

   Pope Pius' Coat of Arms featured a dove, a symbol of diplomacy
   Enlarge
   Pope Pius' Coat of Arms featured a dove, a symbol of diplomacy

   Pope Pius XI died on 10 February 1939. Several historians have
   interpreted the conclave to choose his successor as facing a choice
   between a diplomatic or spiritual candidate, and they view Pacelli's
   diplomatic experience, especially with Germany, as one of the deciding
   factors in his election on 2 March 1939, his 63rd birthday, after only
   one day of deliberation and three ballots. Pacelli took the name of
   Pius XII, the same papal name as his predecessor, a title used
   exclusively by Italian Popes. He was the first cardinal secretary of
   state to be elected Pope since Clement IX in 1667. He was also one of
   only two men known to have served as camerlengo immediately prior to
   being elected as pope (the other being Gioacchino Cardinal Pecci, who
   was elected as Pope Leo XIII).

Theology

   Pope Pius XII accepted the Rhythm Method as a moral form of family
   planning, although only in limited circumstances, in two speeches on
   October 29, 1951, and November 26, 1951. Although some Catholics
   interpreted the 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii by Pope Pius XI to allow
   moral use of Rhythm, these two speeches by Pius XII were the first
   explicit Church acceptance of the method. The Catholic Church's modern
   view on family planning was further developed in the 1968 encyclical
   Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI and in Pope John Paul II's Theology of
   the Body.

   Pius was an energetic proponent of the theory of the Big Bang. As he
   told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1951: "...it would seem that
   present-day science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has
   succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial
   Fiat Lux [Let there be Light], when along with matter, there burst
   forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split
   and churned and formed into millions of galaxies."

Apostolic constitutions

   Pius exercised Papal Infallibility in defining dogma when he issued, on
   November 1, 1950 an apostolic constitution, Munificentissimus Deus,
   which defines ex cathedra the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed
   Virgin Mary into heaven. He consecrated the world to the Immaculate
   Heart of Mary in 1942, in accordance with the second "secret" of Our
   Lady of Fatima.

   His other apostolic constitutions are Sponsa Christi (November 21,
   1950), Bis Saeculari Die (September 27, 1948), and Provida Mater
   Ecclesia (February 2, 1947).

Encyclicals

   Summi Pontificatus, Pius's first encyclical, promulgated in 1939
   condemned the "ever-increasing host of Christ's enemies."

   Humani Generis, promulgated in 1950, acknowledged that evolution might
   accurately describe the biological origins of human life, but at the
   same time criticized those who "imprudently and indiscreetly hold that
   evolution... explains the origin of all things". The encyclical
   reiterated the Church's teaching that, whatever the physical origins of
   human beings, the human soul was directly created by God. While Humani
   Generis was significant as the first occasion on which a pope
   explicitly addressed the topic of evolution at length, it did not
   represent a change in doctrine for the Roman Catholic Church. As early
   as 1868, Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote, "the theory of Darwin, true
   or not, is not necessarily atheistic; on the contrary, it may simply be
   suggesting a larger idea of divine providence and skill."

   Pope John Paul II went further in acknowledging the success of
   evolutionary theory in his 1996 Message to Pontifical Academy of
   Sciences. He called evolution "more than a hypothesis" and said, "It is
   indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by
   researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of
   knowledge."

   Divino Afflante Spiritu, published in 1953, encouraged Christian
   theologians to revisit original versions of the Bible in Greek and
   Latin. Noting improvements in archaeology, the encyclical reversed Pope
   Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus (1893), which had only advocated going
   back to the original texts to resolve ambiguity in the Latin Vulgate.

Canonizations and beatifications

   During his reign, Pius XII canonized thirty-four saints, including
   Saint Margaret of Hungary, Gemma Galgani, Mother Cabrini, Catherine
   Labouré, John de Britto, Joseph Cafasso, Saint Louis de Montfort,
   Nicholas of Flue, Joan of France, Duchess of Berry, Maria Goretti,
   Dominic Savio, Pope Pius X, and Peter Chanel. He beatified six people,
   including Justin de Jacobis. He named Saint Casimir the patron saint of
   all youth.

Grand Consistory

   Only twice in his pontificate did Pius XII hold a consistory to create
   new cardinals, in contrast to Pius XI, who had done so seventeen times
   in seventeen years. Pius XII chose not to name new cardinals during
   World War II, and the number of cardinals shrank to 38, with Cardinal
   Denis Dougherty being the only living U.S. cardinal. The first occasion
   on February 18, 1946—which has become known as the "Grand
   Consistory"—yielded the elevation of a record thirty-two new cardinals
   (previously Leo X's elevation of thirty-one cardinals in 1517 had held
   this title). John Paul II would later surpass this number on February
   21, 2001, elevating forty-four cardinals. Together with the first
   post-war consistory in 1953—where Msgr. Tardini and Msgr. Montini were
   notably not elevated—the "Grand Consistory" brought an end to over five
   hundred years of Italians constituting a majority of the College of
   Cardinals.

   Earlier, in 1945, Pius XII had dispensed with the complicated papal
   conclave procedures which attempted to ensure secrecy while preventing
   Cardinals from voting for themselves, compensating for this change by
   raising the requisite majority from two-thirds to two thirds plus one.

World War II

   Pius XII's pontificate began on the eve of the World War II. During the
   war, the Pope followed a policy of neutrality mirroring that of Pope
   Benedict XV during World War I.

   In April 1939, after the submission of Charles Maurras and the
   intervention of the Carmel of Lisieux, Pius XII ended his predecessor's
   ban on Action Française, a virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Communist
   organization. The Pope employed Professor Almagia in 1939 to work on
   old maps in the Vatican library. On January 25, 1940, Pius received
   Almagia in private audience and thanked him in writing for "his
   splendid work. The Pope's appointment of two Jews to the Vatican
   Academy of Science as well as the hiring of Almagia were reported by
   the New York Times in the editions of November 11, 1939, and January
   10, 1940.

   On 18 January 1940, after over 15,000 Polish civilians had been killed,
   Pius XII said in a radio broadcast, "The horror and inexcusable
   excesses committed on a helpless and a homeless people have been
   established by the unimpeachable testimony of eye-witnesses."

   After Germany invaded the Benelux during 1940, Pius XII sent
   expressions of sympathy to the Queen of the Netherlands, the King of
   Belgium, and the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. When Mussolini learned of
   the warnings and the telegrams of sympathy, he took them as a personal
   affront and had his ambassador to the Vatican file an official protest,
   charging that Pius XII had taken sides against Italy's ally Germany. In
   any case, Mussolini's foreign minister claimed that Pius XII was "ready
   to let himself be deported to a concentration camp, rather than do
   anything against his conscience".

   In the spring of 1940, a group of German generals seeking to overthrow
   Hitler and make peace with the British approached Pope Pius XII, who
   acted as a negotiator between the British and the abortive plot.

   In April 1941, Pius XII granted a private audience to Ante Pavelić, the
   leader of the newly proclaimed Croatian state (rather than the
   diplomatic audience Pavelić had wanted). Pius was criticised for his
   reception of Pavelić: an unattributed British Foreign Office memo on
   the subject described Pius as "the greatest moral coward of our age".
   The Vatican did not officially recognise Pavelić's regime. Pius XII did
   not publicly condemn the expulsions and forced conversions to
   Catholicism perpetrated on Serbs by Pavelić; however, the Holy See did
   expressly repudiate the forced conversions in a memorandum dated
   January 25, 1942, from the Vatican Secretiat of State to the
   Yugoslavian Legation.
   Pius XII addresses a crowd after the bombing of Rome on July 19, 1943.
   Enlarge
   Pius XII addresses a crowd after the bombing of Rome on July 19, 1943.

   In 1941, Pius XII interpreted Divini Redemptoris, an encyclical of Pope
   Pius XI, which forbade Catholics to help Communists, as not applying to
   military assistance to the Soviet Union. This interpretation assuaged
   American Catholics who had previously opposed Lend-Lease arrangements
   with the Soviet Union.

   In March 1942, Pius XII established diplomatic relations with the
   Japanese Empire. In May 1942, Kazimierz Papée, Polish ambassador to the
   Vatican, complained that Pius had failed to condemn the recent wave of
   atrocities in Poland; when Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione replied
   that the Vatican could not document individual atrocities, Papée
   declared, "when something becomes notorious, proof is not required."

   Pius XII's famous Christmas broadcast on the Vatican Radio delivered
   December 24, 1942—which at 26 pages and over 5000 words took more than
   45 minutes to deliver—remains a "lightning rod" in debates about Pope
   Pius XII during the war, particularly the Holocaust. The majority of
   the speech spoke generally about human rights and civil society; at the
   very end of the speech, Pius seems to turn to current events, albeit
   not specifically, referring to "all who during the war have lost their
   Fatherland and who, although personally blameless, have simply on
   account of their nationality and origin, been killed or reduced to
   utter destitution."

   As the war was approaching its end in 1945, Pius advocated a lenient
   policy by the Allied leaders in an effort to prevent what he perceived
   to be the mistakes made at the end of World War I.

The Holocaust

   Pius engineered an agreement—formally approved on June 23, 1939—with
   Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas to issue 3,000 visas to "non-Aryan
   Catholics". However, over the next eighteen months Brazil’s Conselho de
   Imigração e Colonização (CIC) continued to tighten the restrictions on
   their issuance—including requiring a baptismal certificate dated before
   1933, a substantial monetary transfer to the Banco de Brasil, and
   approval by the Brazilian Propaganda Office in Berlin—culminating in
   the cancellation of the program fourteen months later, after fewer than
   1,000 visas had been issued, amid suspicions of "improper conduct"
   (i.e. continuing to practice Judaism) among those who had received
   visas.

   In the spring of 1940, Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, asked
   Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione to intercede on behalf of
   Lithuanian Jews facing deportation to Germany. Pius called Ribbentrop
   on March 11, repeatedly protesting against the treatment of Jews.

   In 1941, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna informed Pius of Jewish
   deportations in Vienna. Later that year, when asked by French Marshal
   Philippe Pétain if the Vatican objected to anti-Jewish laws, Pius
   responded that the church condemned anti-semitism, but would not
   comment on specific rules. Similarly, when Pétain's puppet government
   adopted the "Jewish statutes," the Vichy ambassador to the Vatican,
   Léon Bérard, was told that the legislation did not conflict with
   Catholic teachings. Valerio Valeri, the nuncio to France was
   "embarrassed" when he learned of this publicly from Pétain and
   personally checked the information with Cardinal Secretary of State
   Maglione who confirmed the Vatican's position. In September 1941 Pius
   objected to a Slovakian Jewish Code, which, unlike the earlier Vichy
   codes, prohibited intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews. In October
   1941 Harold Tittman, a U.S. delegate to the Vatican, asked the pope to
   condemn the atrocities against Jews; Pius replied that the Vatican
   wished to remain "neutral," reiterating the neutrality policy which
   Pius invoked as early as September 1940.

   In 1942, the Slovakian charge d'affaires, told Pius that Slovakian Jews
   were being sent to concentration camps. On March 11, 1942, several days
   before the first transport was due to leave, the charge d'affaires in
   Bratislava reported to the Vatican: "I have been assured that this
   atrocious plan is the handwork of.....Prime Minister ( Tuka), who
   confirmed the plan... he dared to tell me - he who makes such a show of
   his Catholicism - that he saw nothing inhuman or un-Christian in
   it...the deportation of 80,000 persons to Poland, is equivalent to
   condemning a great number of them to certain death." The Vatican
   protested to the Slovak government that it "deplore(s) these...measures
   which gravely hurt the natural human rights of persons, merely because
   of their race."

   In August 1942, by which time it has been estimated that thousands of
   Ukrainian Jews had been killed in the eastern front, in response to a
   letter from Andrej Septyckyj, Pius advised Septyckyj to "bear adversity
   with serene patience" (a quote from Psalms). On 18 September 1942,
   Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini (who would later become Pope Paul
   VI), wrote to Pius, "the massacres of the Jews reach frightening
   proportions and forms." Later that month, when Myron Taylor, U.S.
   representative to the Vatican, warned Pius that silence on the
   atrocities would hurt the Vatican's "moral prestige"—a warning which
   was echoed simultaneously by representatives from Great Britain,
   Brazil, Uruguay, Belgium, and Poland— the Cardinal Secretary of State
   replied that the rumors about genocide could not be verified. In
   December 1942, when Tittman asked Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione
   if Pius would issue a proclamation similar to the Allied declaration
   "German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race," Maglione replied
   that the Vatican was "unable to denounce publicly particular
   atrocities."

   In late 1942, Pius XII advised German and Hungarian bishops that
   speaking out against the massacres in the eastern front would be
   politically advantageous. On April 7, 1943, Msgr. Tardini, one of
   Pius’s closest advisors, told Pius that it would be politically
   advantageous after the war to take steps to help Slovakian Jews.

   In January 1943, Pius would again refuse to publicly denounce the Nazi
   violence against Jews, following requests to do so from Wladislaw
   Raczkiewicz, president of the Polish government-in-exile, and Bishop
   Konrad von Preysing of Berlin. On September 26, 1943, following the
   German occupation of northern Italy, Nazi officials gave Jewish leaders
   in Rome 36 hours to produce 50 kilograms of gold (or the equivalent)
   threatening to take 300 hostages. Then Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel
   Zolli recounts in his memoir, that he was selected to go to the Vatican
   and seek help. The Vatican offered to loan 15 kilos, but the offer
   proved unnecessary when the Jews received an extension. Soon
   afterwards, when deportations from Italy were imminent, 477 Jews were
   hidden in the Vatican itself and another 4,238 were protected in Roman
   monasteries and convents.

   On April 30, 1943, Pius wrote to Archbishop Von Preysing of Berlin to
   say : "We give to the pastors who are working on the local level the
   duty of determining if and to what degree the danger of reprisals and
   of various forms of oppression occasioned by episcopal
   declarations...seem to advise caution....The Holy See has done whatever
   was in its power, with charitable, financial and moral assistance. To
   say nothing of the substantial sums which we spent in American money
   for the fares of immigrants."

   On October 28, 1943, Weizsacker, the German Ambassador to the Vatican,
   telegrammed Berlin that the pope "has not allowed himself to be carried
   away [into] making any demonstrative statements against the deportation
   of the Jews."

   In March 1944, through the papal nuncio in Budapest, Angelo Rotta urged
   the Hungarian government to moderate its treatment of the Jews. These
   protests, along with others from the King of Sweden, the International
   Red Cross, the United States, and Britain led to the cessation of
   deportations on 8 July 1944. Also in 1944, Pius appealed to 13 Latin
   American governments to accept "emergency passports", although it also
   took the intervention of the U.S. State Department for those countries
   to honour the documents.

   When the church transferred 6,000 Jewish children in Bulgaria to
   Palestine, Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione reiterated that the
   Holy See was not a supporter of Zionism.

   In August 2006 extracts from the 60-year-old diary of a nun of the
   Convent of Santi Quattro Coronati were published in the Italian press,
   stating that Pope Pius XII ordered Rome's convents and monasteries to
   hide Jews during the Second World War.

Post-World War II

   Pius's anti-Communist activities became more potent following the war.
   In 1948, Pius declared that any Italian Catholic who supported
   Communist candidates in the parliamentary elections of that year would
   be excommunicated and also encouraged Azione Cattolica to support the
   Italian Christian Democratic Party. In 1949, he authorized the
   Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to excommunicate any
   Catholic who joined or collaborated with the Communist Party. He also
   publicly condemned the Soviet crackdown on the 1956 Hungarian
   Revolution.

   After the war, Pius also became an outspoken advocate of clemency and
   forgiveness for all, including war criminals. He also applied pressure
   through his U.S. nuncio to commute the sentences of Germans convicted
   by the occupation authorities. The Vatican also asked for a blanket
   pardon for all those who had received death sentences, after the ban on
   execution of war criminals was lifted in 1948.

   Pius concluded concordats with Francisco Franco's Spain in 1953 and
   Rafael Trujillo's Dominican Republic in 1954. In both countries, the
   rights of the Catholic Church had been violated by repressive regimes.
   Pius would also excommunicate Juan Perón in 1955 for his arrests of
   church officials.

Jewish orphans controversy

   In 2005, Corriere della Sera published a document dated 20 November
   1946 on the subject of Jewish children baptized in war-time France. The
   document ordered that baptized children, if orphaned, should be kept in
   Catholic custody and stated that the decision "has been approved by the
   Holy Father". Nuncio Angelo Roncalli (who would become Pope John XXIII)
   ignored this directive. Abe Foxman, the national director of the
   Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who had himself been baptized as a child
   and had undergone a custody battle afterwards, called for an immediate
   freeze on Pius's beatification process until the relevant Vatican
   Secret Archives and baptismal records were opened. Two Italian
   scholars, Matteo Luigi Napolitano and Andrea Tornielli, confirmed that
   the memorandum was genuine although the initial reporting by the
   Corriere della Sera was misleading, as the document had originated in
   the French Catholic Church archives rather than the Vatican archives
   and strictly concerned itself with children wihout living blood
   relatives that were supposed to be handed over to Jewish organisations.

Later life, death, and legacy

   Pius was dogged with ill health later in life, largely due to a
   charlatan, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, whom Pius made an honorary member of
   the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Pius suffered from gastritis
   brought on by kidney dysfunctions. Galeazzi-Lisi, with the aid of a
   Swiss colleague, prescribed injections made from the glands of fetal
   lambs that gave Pius chronic hiccups and rotting teeth.

   The role of Sister Pasqualina Lehnert—who had served Pacelli since he
   was nuncio to Bavaria—also became controversial as Pius fell under
   ill-health. Many—including Pius's family members who called her
   scaltrissima ( Italian for "very cunning") and asked Pius to dismiss
   her from the Prefecture for the Pontifical Household—distrusted the
   level of influence she allegedly had, including controlling access to
   the ailing pope. Most notably, many in the curia speculated that she
   convinced Pius to deny a cardinalate to Archbishop Giovanni Montini
   (who later became Pope Paul VI), thus making him ineligible to
   participate in the 1958 papal conclave. Montini was the first person
   appointed cardinal by Pope John XXIII, Pius's eventual successor.

   Pius died at on October 9, 1958 in Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer
   residence. Galeazzi-Lisi gained admittance as the pope lay dying and
   took photographs of Pius which he tried unsuccessfully to sell to some
   magazines, forcing him to resign as chief physician of the Vatican
   ("pontifical archiater") in the wake of massive public protests.

   When Pius died, Galeazzi-Lisi assumed the role of Pius' embalmer.
   Rather than slow the process of decay, the doctor-mortician's self-made
   technique (aromatizazzione), which involved encasing Pius in a
   cellophane bag with herbs and spices, sped it up, causing the Holy
   Father's corpse to disintegrate rapidly, turning purple; at one point,
   the remain's nose fell off. It is reported that while transporting the
   pope's body from Castel Gandolfo to the Vatican, pressure within the
   coffin due to gases given off by decay blew off the seals. The stench
   caused by the decay was such that guards had to be rotated every 15
   minutes, otherwise they would collapse. The condition of the body
   became so bad that the remains were secretly removed at one point for
   further treatments before being returned in the morning. This caused
   considerable embarrassment to the Vatican and one of the first acts of
   Pius' successor, Pope John XXIII, was to ban the charlatan from Vatican
   City for life.

   The Italian Medical Council expelled Galeazzi-Lisi for "infamous
   conduct", but the High Court of the Italian Central Health Commission
   reversed the decision.

   On September 2, 2000, during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II,
   Pius's cause for canonization was elevated to the level of Venerable.
   Rome's Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff also began promoting the cause of Pius to
   receive such posthumous recognition from Yad Vashem as a "righteous
   gentile". The Boy Scouts of America named the highest Catholic Award
   after him.

Views, interpretations, and scholarship

Contemporary

   During the war, the pope was widely praised for making a principled
   stand. For example, Time Magazine credited Pius XII and the Catholic
   Church for "fighting totalitarianism more knowingly, devoutly, and
   authoritatively, and for a longer time, than any other organized
   power". Some early works echoed these favorable sentiments, including
   Polish historian Oskar Halecki's Pius XII: Eugenio Pacelli: Pope of
   peace (1954) and Nazareno Padellaro's Portrait of Pius XII (1949).

   Many Jews publicly thanked the pope for his help. For example, Pinchas
   Lapide, a Jewish theologian and Israeli diplomat to Milan in the 1960s,
   estimated that Pius "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000 but
   probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands."
   Some historians have questioned these figures. Catholic scholar Kevin
   Madigan interprets this and other praise from prominent Jewish leaders,
   including Golda Meir, as less than sincere, an attempt to secure
   Vatican recognition of the State of Israel.

   Pius was also criticized during his lifetime. For example, Leon
   Poliakov wrote five years after World War II that Pius had been a tacit
   supporter of Vichy France's anti-Semitic laws, calling him "less
   forthright" than Pope Pius XI either out of "Germanophilia" or the hope
   that Hitler would defeat communist Russia.

   On September 21, 1945, the general secretary of the World Jewish
   Council, Dr. Leon Kubowitzky, presented an amount of money to the pope,
   "in recognition of the work of the Holy See in rescuing Jews from
   Fascist and Nazi persecutions."

   After the war, in the autumn of 1945, Harry Greenstein from Baltimore,
   a close friend of Chief Rabbi Herzog of Jerusalem, told Pius how
   grateful Jews were for all he had done for them. "My only regret," the
   pope replied, "is not to have been able to save a greater number of
   Jews."

The Deputy

   In 1963, Rolf Hochhuth's controversial drama Der Stellvertreter. Ein
   christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian tragedy, released in
   English in 1964) portrayed Pope Pius XII as a hypocrite who remained
   silent about the Holocaust. Books such as Dr. Joseph Lichten's A
   Question of Judgment (1963), written in response to The Deputy,
   defended Pius XII's actions during the war. Lichten labelled any
   criticism of the pope's actions during World War II as "a stupefying
   paradox" and said, "no one who reads the record of Pius XII's actions
   on behalf of Jews can subscribe to Hochhuth's accusation." Critical
   scholarly works like Guenther Lewy's The Catholic Church and Nazi
   Germany (1964) also followed the publication of The Deputy. In 2002 the
   play was adapted into the film Amen.

Actes

   In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding The Deputy, in 1964
   Pope Paul VI authorized four Jesuit scholars to access the Vatican's
   secret archives, which are normally not opened for seventy-five years.
   A selected collection of primary sources, Actes et Documents du Saint
   Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, was published in eleven
   volumes between 1965 and 1981. The Actes documents are not translated
   from their original language (mostly Italian) and the volume
   introductions are in French. Only one volume has been translated into
   English.

   Notable documents not included in the Actes include most of the letters
   from Bishop Konrad Preysing of Berlin to Pope Pius XII in 1943 and
   1944, the papers of Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, and virtually
   everything appertaining to Eastern Europe. Saul Friedlander's Pope Pius
   and the Third Reich: A Documentation (1966) did not cite the Actes and
   drew instead on unpublished diplomatic documents from German embassies.
   Most later historical works, however, draw heavily on the Actes.

Hitler's Pope

   In 1999, John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope criticized Pius for not doing
   enough, or speaking out enough, against the Holocaust. Cornwell argues
   that Pius's entire career as the nuncio to Germany, cardinal secretary
   of state, and pope was characterized by a desire to increase and
   centralize the power of the Papacy, and that he subordinated opposition
   to the Nazis to that goal. He further argues that Pius was anti-Semitic
   and that this stance prevented him from caring about the European Jews.

   Cornwell's work was the first to have access to testimonies from Pius's
   beatification process as well as to many documents from Pacelli's
   nunciature which had just been opened under the seventy-five year rule
   by the Vatican State Secretary archives. Cornwell concluded, "Pacelli's
   failure to respond to the enormity of the Holocaust was more than a
   personal failure, it was a failure of the papal office itself and the
   prevailing culture of Catholicism."

   Cornwell's work has received much praise and criticism. Much praise of
   Cornwell centered around his statement that he was a practising
   Catholic who had attempted to absolve Pius with his work. Works such as
   Susan Zuccotti's Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust
   in Italy (2000) and Michael Phayer's The Catholic Church and the
   Holocaust, 1930–1965 (2000) are critical of both Cornwell and Pius.

   Cornwell's scholarship has been criticized. For example, Kenneth L.
   Woodward stated in his review in Newsweek that "errors of fact and
   ignorance of context appear on almost every page." Cornwell himself
   gives a more ambiguous assessment of Pius' conduct in a 2004 interview
   where he states that "Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is
   impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war". Most
   recently, Rabbi David Dalin's The Myth of Hitler's Pope argues that
   critics of Pius are liberal Catholics who "exploit the tragedy of the
   Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda
   of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today" and that Pius XII was
   actually responsible for saving the lives of thousands of Jews.

ICJHC

   In 1999, in an attempt to address some of this controversy, the Vatican
   appointed the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission
   (ICJHC), a group composed of three Jewish and three Catholic scholars
   to investigate the role of the Church during the Holocaust. In 2001,
   the ICJHC issued its preliminary finding, raising a number of questions
   about the way the Vatican dealt with the Holocaust, titled " The
   Vatican and the Holocaust: A Preliminary Report."

   The Commission discovered documents making it clear that Pius was aware
   of widespread anti-Jewish persecution in 1941 and 1942, and they
   suspected that the Church may have been influenced in not helping
   Jewish immigration by the nuncio of Chile and the Papal representative
   to Bolivia, who complained about the "invasion of the Jews" to their
   countries, where they engaged in "dishonest dealings, violence,
   immorality, and even disrespect for religion."

   The ICJHC raised a list of 47 questions about the way the Church dealt
   with the Holocaust, requested documents that had not been publicly
   released in order to continue their work, and, not receiving
   permission, they disbanded in July of 2001, having never issued a final
   report. Unsatisfied with the findings, Dr. Michael Marrus, one of the
   three Jewish members of the Commission, said the commission "ran up
   against a brick wall.... It would have been really helpful to have had
   support from the Holy See on this issue."
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