Pius XII's conduct during the Holocaust remains one of the Vatican's great debates
Eugenio Pacelli became Pope Pius XII in March 1939 and reigned for 19 years spanning the Second World War, the Holocaust and the start of the Cold War. Defenders say his quiet diplomacy helped save thousands of Jews; critics say he never ordered widespread rescue and never named Jews in his public statements.
Pacelli was born in Rome on 2 March 1876 into a family of the Black Nobility with deep papal ties: his grandfather helped found L'Osservatore Romano, and his brother Francesco negotiated the 1929 Lateran Treaty with Mussolini. He dropped out of the Capranica seminary after a year, a departure his sister blamed on the food, and studied largely from home under special dispensation, earning a theology doctorate in 1899, the year of his ordination.
In 1901 he joined the Vatican's foreign-affairs office under Pietro Gasparri and was chosen that year to carry condolences to Edward VII after Queen Victoria died. His doctoral thesis on concordats foreshadowed his career: he helped Gasparri codify canon law from 1904 to 1916, served as nuncio to Germany and became Cardinal Secretary of State, negotiating treaties that included the Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany.
The Vatican was officially neutral in the war. Supporters argue Pius directed discreet aid to Jews and others, kept links to the German resistance and passed intelligence to the Allies, and that the Nazis regarded him as an Allied sympathiser. Detractors counter that rescue depended on the initiative of local clergy and nuncios, and that the Allies and the Polish government-in-exile found his general remarks about genocide inadequate.
His papacy also reshaped doctrine. He formally invoked papal infallibility to define the Assumption of Mary, issued forty-one encyclicals, one of which left room for the idea that our bodies developed through evolution, and in 1946 ended the Italian majority in the College of Cardinals. The Church's Decree against Communism, issued under him, declared Catholics who embraced communism to be apostates. He died on 9 October 1958, and Benedict XVI declared him venerable in 2009.
Source: Pope Pius XII
