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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 his election as pope, Pacelli served as a priest, papal nuncio, cardinal, and Cardinal Secretary of State, in which role he worked to conclude treaties with other nations, most notably the Reichskonkordat with Germany.

Pius is one of few Popes in recent history to exercise his papal infallibility by issuing an apostolic constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, which defines ex cathedra the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He also promulgated forty-six encyclicals, including Humani Generis, which retains continued relevance to the Church's position of evolution. He also decisively eliminated the Italian majority in the College of Cardinals with the Great Consistory.

Most sedevacantists regard Pope Pius XII as the last true Pope. His ongoing cause for sainthood progressed to the venerable stage under Pope John Paul II.

Papal styles of Pope Pius XII
Reference style	His Holiness
Spoken style	Your Holiness
Religious style	Holy Father
Posthumous style	Venerable

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. His grandfather, Marcantonio Pacelli, founded of the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano; his uncle, Ernesto Pacelli, was a key financial advisor to Pope Leo XII; his father, Filippo Pacelli, was the dean of the Vatican lawyers; and his brother, Francesco Pacelli, became a highly-regarded lay canon lawyer who 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 biography by Sister Margherita Marchione which is quite comprehensive and filled with flattering anecdotes.

Church career

Priesthood

In 1894, at the age of eighteen, he entered the Almo Capranica Seminary to begin study for the priesthood and enrolled at the Gregorian University. He was ordained a priest on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1899 by Bishop Francesco Paolo Cassetta and received his first assignment as a curate at Chiesa Nuova, where he had served as an altar boy.

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, a suboffice of the Vatican Secretarian of State. He was also chosen by Pope Leo XIII to deliver condolences on behalf of the Vatican to Edward VII of England 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. In 1914, Pacelli succeeded Gasparri as the secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affiars when Gasparri 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.

Papal nuncio

Pope Benedict XV appointed Pacelli as papal nuncio to Bavaria effective April 1917, consecrating him as a bishop in the Sistine Chapel and immediately elevating him to archbishop on May 13, 1917, before he left for Bavaria, meeting 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 1920 and 1925 respectively.

When Eugen Levine and Kurt Eisner established a short-lived Soviet Republic in Bavaria on November 7, 1918, Pacelli was one of the few foreign diplomats to remain in Munich. In 1919, Pius faced down a small group of Communist 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 dissipated 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 German cabinet not present at the Bürgerbräu Keller, was having dinner with Pacelli and Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Cardinal Pacelli succeeded in negotiating concordats with Bavaria (1925) 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, Cardinal Secretary of State, and Camerlengo

Pacelli was appointed 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 as the Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church. During the 1930s, Cardinal Pacelli negotiated concordats with Baden, Austria and Germany. 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.

As Cardinal Secretary of State, Pius signed concordats with many non-Communist states in an attempt to gain recognition for the four-year-old Vatican State, including concordats with 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).

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, which would become the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, promulgated on Palm Sunday 1937, condemning racism and statism.

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 on 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. Most historians consider the Reichskonkordat an important step toward the international acceptance of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime,. Guenter Lewy, political scientist and author of The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, wrote:

"There is general agreement that the Concordat increased substantially the prestige of Hitler's regime around the world. As Cardinal Faulhaber put it in a sermon delivered in 1937: "At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with cool reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat expressed its confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the new government abroad."

A national concordat with Germany was one of Pacelli's main objectives as Secretary of State — historian Klaus Scholder called it his "great goal". 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.

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."

After the Nazis gained even more seats in the July 1932 elections—with 230 of 608 seats they were the largest party in the Reichstag—Pacelli again advised the Centre Party to work with the Nazis in a coalition, despite the official condemnation of Nazism by the German bishops at the time. He told Bavarian envoy Ritter: "it is to be hoped and desired that, like the Centre Party and the Bavarian Peoples' Party, so too the other parties which stand on Christian principles and which now also include the National Socialist party, now the strongest party in the Reichstag, will use every means to hold off the cultural Bolshevizing of Germany, which is on the march behind the Communist Party."

According to Klaus Scholder, a Reichskonkordat was impossible prior to the rise of the Nazis because the Catholic parties in the Weimar Republic could not overcome Protestant and socialist opposition.

According to Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, the new German cabinet began to talk about a concordat "immediately after 30 January, 1933," the day that Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the coalition government.. Centre Party chairman Ludwig Kaas (a priest and associate of Pacelli) agreed to support the Enabling Act, which required a constitutional amendment and gave Hitler dictatorial powers, in exchange for a Reich concordat with the Vatican. One of Hitler's key conditions for agreeing the concordat had been the dissolution of the Centre Party, which occurred on 6th July.

Shortly before signing the Reichskonkordat, Germany signed similar agreements with the major Protestant churches in Germany.

Papacy

Election and Coronation

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. 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.

After the election, Nazi media complained about the "prejudiced hostility and incurable lack of comprehension" shown by the Holy See. The morning after Pius XII's election, the Berlin Morgenpost reported: "The election of Cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor." Das Schwarze Korps, the official publication of the elite Nazi Schutzstaffel (better known by the initials 'SS"), said: "As nuncio and secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli had little understanding of us; little hope is placed in him. We do not believe that as Pius XII he will follow a different path."

Great Consistory

Only twice in his pontificate did Pius XII hold a consistory to create new cardinals, a decided contrast to Pius XI, who had done so seventeen times in seventeen years on the papal throne. The first occasion has been known as the "Great Consistory", of February 1946; it was the largest in the history of the Church up to that time, and brought an end to over five hundred years of Italians constituting a majority of the College. By his appointments then and in 1953 he substantially reduced the proportion of cardinals who belonged to the Roman Curia.

Canonizations and Beatifications

During his reign, Pius XII canonized eight saints, including Pope Pius X, Saint Casimir, Mother Cabrini, Catherine Labouré, Saint Louis de Montfort, Maria Goretti, Dominic Savio, and Andrzej Bobola, and beatified five people.

Apostolic Constitutions

Pius is one of few Popes in recent history to exercise his Papal Infallibility by issuing an apostolic constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, which defines ex cathedra the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven, on November 1 1950. 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 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."

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 , 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."

Divino Afflante Spiritu, published in 1953, encouraged Christian theologans to revisit original versions of the Bible in Greek and Latin. Noting improvements in archeology, 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.

World War II

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

On 18 January, 1940, after over 15,000 Polish civilians had been killed, the Pius 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 the Nazis invaded the small nations of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium 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 the Italian Fascist dictator 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 April 1941 Pius XII granted a private audience to Croatian fascist poglavnik (Führer) and war criminal Ante Pavelic. The Vatican did not officially recognise Pavelic's so-called Independent State of Croatia, in fact a Nazi puppet state, but neither did it condemn the genocide and forced conversions to Catholicism perpetrated by the Croat Ustase. Pius XII was criticised for his reception of Pavelic: a British Foreign Office memo on the subject described Pius as "the greatest moral coward of our age".

In 1941, Pius XII reinterpreted Divini Redemptoris, an encyclical of Pope Pius XI, which forbade Catholics to help Communists, to not apply to military assistance to the Soviet Union. This reinterpretation 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 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 distinction."

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

The Holocaust

In March 1939, Pius obtained 3,000 visas for European Jews who had been baptized and converted to Catholicism to go to Brazil, although two-thirds of these were later revoked for "improper conduct" (i.e. continuing to practice Judaism). In April 1939, Pius lifted the ban on Action Française in France, a virulently anti-semitic and anti-communist organization.

In the spring of 1940, Pius declined to act when Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, asked Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione to intercede on behalf of Spanish and Lithuanian Jews facing deporation to Germany.

In 1941 Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna informed Pius of Jewish deportations in Vienna. Later that year, when asked by French Marshal Henri Philippe Petain if the Vatican objected to anti-Jewish laws, Pius responded that the church condemned racism, but would not comment on specific rules. Similarly, when Petain's puppet government adopted the "Jewish statutes," the Vichy ambassador to the Vatican, Leon Berard, 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 Petain 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, prohibitted 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 death camps. In August 1942, by which time it has been estimated than 200,000 Ukrainian Jews had been killed, 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 Holocaust would hurt the Vatican's "moral prestigue"—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 crimes committed against Jews could not be verified. In December 1942, when Tittman Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione if the Pius would issue a proclamation simialar 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, when it became clear that an allied victory over the Nazis was inevitable, Pius XII advised German and Hungarian bishops that speaking out against the massacre of the Jews would be politically advantageous. On April 7, 1943, Cardinal 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 Nazi invasion of 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 October 28, 1943, Weizsacker, the German Ambassador to the Vatican, telegrammed Berlin that the pope "has not allowed himself to be carried away 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 honor the documents.

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

Post-World War II

After the war, Israel Zolli, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, converted to Catholicism, taking the baptismal name Eugenio, in honor of Pius.

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 excommunited. In 1949, he decreed that any Catholic who joined the Communist Party would be excommunicated. 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 Nazi war criminals. He also applied pressure through his U.S. nuncio to commute the sentences of Germans convicted by the occupational authorities. The Vatican also asked for a blanket pardon for all those who had received death sentences.

In 2005, Corriere della Sera published a document dated 20 November, 1946, ordering Jewish children in France, who had been baptized by Catholics during the war, should be kept in the custody of the Church; the document stated that the decision "has been approved by the Holy Father." At least Angelo Roncalli (who would become Pope John XXIII) ignored this directive. Two Italian scholars, Matteo Luigi Napolitano and Andrea Tornielli, confirmed that the memorandum was genuine although the initial reporting by the Coriere della Sera was misleading, as the document had originated in the French Catholic Church archives rather than the Vatican archives. Abe Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), called for an immediate freeze on Pius's beatification process until the relevant Vatican Secret Archives and baptismal records were opened. Foxman, a holocaust survivor who was baptized by his Polish nanny during the war, had undergone a similar experience when his parents had to fight a protracted custody battle after the war.

Later life, death, and legacy

Pius was dogged with ill health later in life, largely due to a charlatan, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, who posed as a medical doctor and won Pius's trust. Pius even made him 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 the Holy Father chronic hiccups and rotting teeth.

Pius died 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 sold to magazines, forcing him to resign as head of the Vatican medical services 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, with the nose falling 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.

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" During and after the war, many Jews publicly thanked the Pope for his help.

Pinchas Lapide, the Israeli counsel in 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." Historians have questioned these figures, and other praise from prominent Jewish leaders, including Golda Meir, at the time, as 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.

The Deputy

In 1963, Pius XII's role during World War II became a source of controversy with the publication of Rolf Hochhuth's controversial drama Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian tragedy), which 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 was "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."

Actes

In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding The Deputy, in 1964 Pope Paul VI authorized four Jesuit scholars to access the Vatican's historican 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 C. Hudal, and virtually everything appertaining to Eastern Europe.

Saul Friedlander's Pope Pius and the Third Reich: A Documentation, published in 1964 without access to the Actes, 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 to speak out 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 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 testimonies from Pius's beatification process as well as 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 admission that he was a practicizing Catholic who had attempted to absolve Pius with his work. He also has a number of critics. For example, Kenneth L. Woodward stated in his review in Newsweek that "errors of fact and ignorance of context appear on almost every page."

ICJHC

In 1999, in an attempt to address some of this controversy, the Vatican appointed the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission (ICJHC), a group comprised 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 Pope 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." (Questions 7 and 12 of the ICJHC report)

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. 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."

References

1. Sr. Margherita Marchione, Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace (Paulist Press, 2000). ISBN 080913912X
2. Sanchez, 2000, p. 103-104.
3. Marchione, 2002.
4. Signed March 29, 1924; Ratified by Parliament on January 15, 1925
5. Ludwig Volk Das Reichskonkordat vom 20. Juli 1933 ISBN 3 7867 0383 3.
6. Phayer 2000, p. 16; Sanchez 2002, p. 16-17.
7. Phayer, 2000, p. 3.
8. Walter Bussmann, 1969, "Pius XII an die deutshen Bischofe", Hochland 61: p. 61-65
9. Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1136.
10. Berenbaum, Michael, The World Must Know, p. 40.
11. Ludwig Volk Das Reichskonkordat vom 20. Juli 1933 ISBN 3 7867 0383 3.
12. Klaus Scholder "The Churches and the Third Reich" volume 1: especially part 1 chap 10 'Concordat Policy and the Lateran Treaties (1930-33); part 2 chap 2 "The Capitulation of Catholicism" (February-March 1933)
13. Heinrich Brüning Memoiren, English translation as quoted in Scholder pp.152-3
14. report by von Ritter, Bavarian envoy to the Vatican, to the Bavarian Land government, as quoted in Scholder p.157
15. Scholder pp.160-1
16. letter from Papen to von Bergen, translation as quoted in Scholder p.245
17. Scholder p.241
18. letter from Kaas to von Bergen, German ambassador to the Vatican, translation as quoted in Scholder p.247
19. Toland & Atkin, or Volk (op. cit.)
20. Michael F. Feldkamp Pius XII. und Deutschland ISBN 3 525 34026 5.
21. Dalin, 2005, p. 69-70
22. Catholic Forum. Pope Pius XII.
23. Sister Margherita Marchione. 2002. Shepherd of Souls: A Pictorial Life of Pope Pius XII. Paulist Press/Urbi et Orbi.
24. Humani Generis. 1950.
25. Catholic Online
26. The Vatican's View of Evolution: The Story of Two Popes. Doug Linder. 2004
27. Divino Afflante Spiritu. 1953.
28. Gilbert, Martin, The Second World War, p. 40.
29. Dalin, David G. The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis. Regnery Publishing. Washington, 2005. ISBN 0-89526-034-4. p. 76.
30. Israel Gutman (ed.)Encyclopedia of the Holocaust vol 2 p.739
31. Mark Aarons and John Loftus Unholy Trinity pp.71-2
32. Mary Ball Martinez. 1993. "Pope Pius XII and the Second World War". Journal of Historical Review. v. 13.
33. Report by the Polish Ambassador to the Holy See on the Situation in German-occupied Poland, Memorandum No. 79, May 29, 1942, Myron Taylor Papers, NARA.
34. Rittner and Roth, 2002, p. 4.
35. Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1137.
36. Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1136.
37. Friedländer, Saul, 1997, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, New York: HarperCollins, p. 223.
38. Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1136.
39. Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1137.
40. Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1137.
41. Perl, William, The Holocaust Conspiracy, p. 200.
42. Phayer, 2000, p. 5.
43. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, 1981, Vichy France and the Jews, New York: Basic Books, p. 202.
44. Delpech, Les Eglises et la Persecution raciale, p. 267.
45. John F. Morley, 1980, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews during the Holocaust, 1939-1943, New York: KTAV, p. 75.
46. Phayer, 2000, p.5
47. Perl, William, The Holocaust Conspiracy, p. 206.
48. Perl, William, The Holocaust Conspiracy, p. 200.
49. Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1137.
50. Hilberg, Raul, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders, p. 267.
51. Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1137.
52. Phayer, 2000, p. 27-28.
53. Israel Pocket Library, Holocaust, p. 133; Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1137.
54. Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 315.
55. Israel Pocket Library, Holocaust, p. 136.
56. Template:De icon Actes et documents du Saint Sie`ge relatifs a` la Seconde Guerre mondiale / e´d. par Pierre Blet, Angelo Martini, Burkhart Schneider. 7th april 1943
57. Israel Pocket Library, Holocaust, p. 134.
58. Eugenio Zolli. Before the Dawn. Reissued in 1997 as Why I Became a Catholic.
59. Israel Pocket Library, Holocaust, p. 133.
60. Gilbert, Martin, The Holocaust, p. 623.
61. Berel Lang. "Not Enough" vs. "Plenty": Which did Pius XII do?. Judaism. Fall 2001.
62. Gutman, Israel, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1138.
63. Gilbert, Martin, The Holocaust, p. 701.
64. Perl, William, The Holocaust Conspiracy, p. 176.
65. Gutman, Israel. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1138.
66. Sanchez, 2000, p. 94-95.
67. CUA, 37/133 #112.
68. Jerusalem Report, (February 7, 2005).
69. Dimitri Cavalli. Pius's Children. The American. April 1, 2006.
70. Anti-Defamation League. ADL to Vatican: Open Baptismal Records and Put Pius Beatification on Hold. January 13, 2005.
71. Heirs of the Fisherman : Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession - ISBN 0195178343
72. Papal Preservation. Steven Palmer. YB News. June 2005.
73. Heirs of the Fisherman : Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession - ISBN 0195178343
74. Guide to Age. Alexander Chancellor. The Guardian. April 16 2005.
75. The Pope's Doctor. Alan McElwain. Annals Australia. July 1989.
76. Time. August 16, 1943.
77. Kevin Madigan. Judging Pius XII. Christian Century. March 14, 2001.
78. Leon Poliakov. November 1950. "The Vatican and the 'Jewish Quesiton': The Record of the Hitler Period—and After." Commentary 10: 439-449.
79. Michael Phayer. 2000. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965. Indiana University Press. p. xvii.
80. Sanchez, 2002, p. 34.
81. Jose M. Sanchez. 2002. Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy. Catholilc University of America Press: Washington, D.C.
82. Kenneth L. Woodward. Newsweek. September 27, 1999.
83. "The Vatican and the Holocaust: A Preliminary Report "International Catholic-Jewish Commission" (ICJHC)". Retrieved December 5. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help) Forms 47 questions.
84. Melissa Radler. "Vatican Blocks Panel's Access to Holocaust Archives." The Jerusalem Post. July 24, 2001.

Additional reading

• Cornwell, John, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (Viking, 1999) ISBN 0670876208
• Dalin, Rabbi David G., The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis (Regnery, 2005). ISBN 0895260344. (Online available here.)
• Marchione, Sr. Margherita. Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace (Paulist Press, 2000). ISBN 080913912X
• Phayer, Michael, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000). ISBN 0-253-33725-9.
• Ritner, Carol and Roth, John K., eds., 2002, Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, New York: Leicester University Press. ISBN 0-7185-0275-2.
• Rychlak, Ronald J. Hitler, the War, and the Pope (Our Sunday Visitor; 2000). ISBN 0879732172
• Scholder, Klaus. The Churches and the Third Reich (London, 1987)
• Zolli, Eugenio, Before the Dawn (Roman Catholic Books; Reprint edition, February 1997). ISBN 0912141468
• Zuccotti, Susan, Under his very Windows, The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). ISBN 0300084870

External links

General

• Official Vatican page on Pius XII
• New Oxford Review The Pius War by Joseph Bottum
• Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust - Jewish Virtual Library

Official documents

• October 2000 Report of the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, notice of Commission suspending work
• Complete Text of the Concordat between the Vatican and Germany

Pro-Pius

• The Holy See vs. the Third Reich
• Jewish Historian Praises Pius XII
• Did Pius XII Remain Silent?
• Cornwell's Cheap Shot at Pius XII
• Pius XII and the Jews: The War Years, as reported by the New York Times
• Righteous Gentile: Pope Pius XII and the Jews Rabbi David Dalin, Ph.D.
• Holy Cross' Pius XII and the Holocaust

Anti-Pius

• Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope" - excerpt published by Vanity Fair
• Judging Pius XII from Christian Century by Kevin Madigan
• Review of "Papal Sin" by Garry Willis in the New York Times Book Review

• 1876 births
• 1958 deaths
• Diplomats of the Holy See
• Italian popes
• Natives of Rome
• Pope Pius XII
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