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Pope Pius XII |
Pope Pius XII
Pope Pius XII (born March 2, 1876; died October 9, 1958) was pope from 1939 until 1958. He was born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli. He was ordained in 1899. He worked in the Vatican Secretariat of State, became a cardinal in 1929 and Pope Pius XI's secretary of state in 1930. On March 2, 1939, he was elected to succeed Pius XI as pope.Controversy surrounds Pius XII's silence during World War II concerning the extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany. Wishing to preserve Vatican neutrality, fearing reprisals, and realizing his impotence to stop the Holocaust, Pius nonetheless acted on an individual basis to save many Jews and others with church ransoms, documents, and asylum. He feared that, after the defeat of the Third Reich, Eastern Europe would fall to communism. When his fears materialized, the Vatican worked to aid refugee relocation and the establishment of anticommunist regimes in Western Europe, especially in Italy.
In 1950, Pius issued an ex cathedra proclamation defining the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. The encyclical Humani generis, of the same year, reasserted Catholic tradition and rejected modern theories like existentialism. Condemnation of the French worker-priest experiment (1953) and the canonization of Pius X (1954) reflected a similar conservatism. At the same time, however, Pius gave the College of Cardinals a non-Italian majority, including several East Europeans. He replaced colonial bishops with native hierarchies, approved the "Dialogue Mass," and relaxed communion fast rules. Naturally ascetic, Pius became an isolated figure before his death on Oct. 9, 1958, at Castel Gandolfo.