Pius XII

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. He met with King Ludwig III on 29 May, and later with Kaiser Wilhelm II 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 efforts, especially among prisoners of war in German custody. 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.

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 antisemitism 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." Pacelli also described Munich to Gasparri as "suffering under a harsh Jewish-Russian revolutionary tyranny."

According to his housekeeper Pascalina Lehnert, Pacelli was repeatedly threatened by emissaries of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, who at one point tried to confiscate the nunciature car at gunpoint. Despite all this, Pacelli refused to leave his post. Some of Pacelli's Munich staff stayed with him the rest of his life, including his advisor Robert Leiber and Lehnert, who became a confidante.

Pacelli was appointed nuncio to Germany in 1920, and – after the completion of a Bavarian Concordat (1924) – his nunciature was moved to Berlin, where he lived in the Tiergarten and threw parties for the official and diplomatic elite. Paul von Hindenburg, Gustav Stresemann and other members of the Cabinet were regular guests. He developed a close working relationship with the German priest Ludwig Kaas, who was known for his expertise in Church-state relations and was a full-time politician, active in the Catholic Centre Party, which he'd led since 1928. Pacelli travelled widely within Germany, attended Katholikentag gatherings, and delivered some 50 sermons and speeches.

In the absence of a nuncio in Moscow, Pacelli worked on diplomatic arrangements between the Vatican and the Soviet Union, where the Catholic Church was persecuted. He negotiated food shipments for Russia and met with Soviet representatives including Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin, who rejected any kind of religious education, the ordination of priests and bishops, and offered agreements without the points vital to the Vatican. Despite Vatican pessimism and a lack of visible progress, Pacelli continued secret negotiations until Pius XI ordered them discontinued in 1927.

Pacelli supported German diplomatic activity aimed at rejection of punitive measures by the victorious Allies. He blocked French attempts at an ecclesiastical separation of the Saar region, supported the appointment of a papal administrator for Danzig and aided the reintegration of German priests expelled from Poland. A Prussian Concordat was signed in June 1929. Following the Wall Street crash of 1929, a world economic slump began and the days of the Weimar Republic were numbered. Pacelli was summoned back to Rome at this time and left Berlin in December 1929. David G. Dalin, in The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII (a book with an "Annotated Bibliography" but no inline citations or endnotes), wrote, "Of the forty-four speeches Pacelli gave in Germany as papal nuncio between 1917 and 1929, forty denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology". In 1935 Pius wrote a letter to Karl Joseph Schulte, the archbishop of Cologne, describing the Nazis as "false prophets with the pride of Lucifer" and "bearers of a new faith and a new Evangile" who were attempting to create "a mendacious antimony between faithfulness to the Church and the Fatherland".

Cardinal Secretary of State and Camerlengo

Pacelli was named Cardinal-Priest of Santi Giovanni e Paolo al Celio in December 1929, and in February 1930, was promoted to Cardinal Secretary of State, responsible for foreign policy and state relations. In 1935, he was named Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church.

As Secretary of State, Pacelli signed a number of concordats (treaties between the Vatican and sovereign states), which authorized the Church to organize youth groups, make ecclesiastical appointments, run schools, hospitals and charities, and 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. Immediately on Pacelli's becoming Secretary of State, he and Kaas took up negotiations on a Baden Concordat. Papal fiat appointed Conrad Gröber, a supporter of Pacelli and his concordat policy, the new Archbishop of Freiburg, and the treaty was signed in August 1932. Others followed: Austria (1933), Germany (1933), Yugoslavia (1935) and Portugal (1940). As part of the Lateran treaties with Italy (concluded in 1929, before Pacelli became Secretary of State), Catholicism had become the sole recognized religion in Italy; the powerful democratic Italian Catholic Popular Party, in many ways similar to the Centre Party in Germany, had been disbanded; and in place of political Catholicism the Holy See encouraged Catholic Action, a movement which was permitted only so long as it developed "its activity outside every political party and in direct dependence upon the Church hierarchy for the dissemination and implementation of Catholic principles".

As the decade began Pacelli wanted the Centre Party in Germany to turn away from the socialists. In 1931, he clashed with Catholic chancellor Heinrich Brüning, who frankly told Pacelli he believed that he "misunderstood the political situation in Germany and the real character of the Nazis". Following Brüning's resignation in May 1932, Pacelli, like the new Catholic chancellor Franz von Papen, wondered if the Centre Party should look to the Right for a coalition "that would correspond to their principles". He made diplomatic visits throughout Europe and the Americas, including a two-week trip to the United States in 1936 where he met President 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 in 1870 when popes lost temporal power.

Pacelli presided as Papal Legate over the International Eucharistic Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina in October 1934, and in Budapest in May 1938. At this time, while antisemitic laws were in the process of being formulated in Hungary, Pacelli made reference to the Jews "whose lips curse [Christ] and whose hearts reject him even today". According to Joseph Bottum, Pacelli in 1937 "warned A. W. Klieforth, that Hitler was 'an untrustworthy scoundrel and fundamentally wicked person', to quote Klieforth, who also wrote that Pacelli 'did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, and... fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand'. This was matched with the discovery of Pacelli's anti-Nazi report, written the following year for President Roosevelt and filed with Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., which declared that the church regarded compromise with the Third Reich as 'out of the question'."

Historian Walter Bussmann stated that in November 1938, Pacelli dissuaded Pius XI – who was nearing death at the time – from condemning the Kristallnacht.

The draft encyclical Humani generis unitas ("On the Unity of the Human Race") was ready in September 1938 but, according to those responsible for an edition of the document and other sources, it was not forwarded to the Holy See by the Jesuit General Wlodimir Ledóchowski. On 28 January 1939, eleven days before the death of Pius XI, a disappointed Gundlach informed LaFarge, the encyclical's author, "It cannot go on like this". The text had not been forwarded to the Vatican. He had talked to the American assistant to Father General, who promised to look into the matter in December 1938, but did not report back. The draft encyclical contained an open and clear condemnation of colonialism, racial persecution and antisemitism. Historians Passelecq and Suchecky have argued that Pacelli learned about the existence of the draft only after the death of Pius XI and chose not to promulgate it as Pope. He did use parts of it in his inaugural encyclical Summi Pontificatus, which he titled "On the Unity of Human Society".

Reichskonkordat and Mit brennender Sorge

The Reichskonkordat was one of four concordats Pacelli concluded on behalf of the Vatican with German States. The federalist Weimar constitution had given the German states authority in the areas of education and culture and thus diminished the authority of the churches in these areas; this diminution of church authority was a primary concern of the Vatican. As Bavarian nuncio, Pacelli had negotiated successfully with the Bavarian authorities in 1924, and he expected the concordat with Catholic Bavaria to be the model for the rest of Germany. Prussia showed interest in negotiations only after the Bavarian concordat. However, Pacelli obtained less favorable conditions for the church in the Prussian Concordat of 1929, which excluded educational issues. A concordat with the German state of Baden was completed by Pacelli in 1932, after he had moved to Rome. A total of 16 concordats and treaties with European states were concluded between 1922 and 1932.

The Reichskonkordat between Germany and the Holy See was controversial from its beginning. It remains the most important of Pacelli's concordats. One of his main objectives as Secretary of State was a national concordat with Germany, where he hoped to strengthen the legal position of the Church and the Vatican. Pacelli, who knew Germany well, emphasized in particular protection for Catholic associations (§31), freedom for education and Catholic schools, and freedom for publications.

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 him. 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.

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, to Rome for negotiations about a Reichskonkordat. On behalf of Pacelli, Kaas negotiated first drafts of the terms with Papen. The concordat was signed, by Pacelli for the Vatican and Papen for Germany, on 20 July and ratified on 10 September 1933. Hitler commented, "The concordat gives Germany an opportunity and creates an area of trust that is particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry."

In a 1935 entry in his celebrated diary, German diplomat Harry Kessler, after extended discussion with Brüning, wrote about the Reichskonkordat:The arrangement with Hitler should not be ascribed to the Pope [i.e., Pius XI], but to the Vatican bureaucracy and its policy-maker, Pacelli. What he has in mind is a perpetual alliance between an authoritarian secular state and an authoritarian Church ruled by the Vatican bureaucracy. This is why Catholic parliamentary parties, like the Centre Party in Germany, are a source of inconvenience to Pacelli and his friends and will be dropped by them without regret.

The Pope does not share these views....Bishop Konrad von Preysing had cautioned against compromise with the Nazi regime, against viewing any persecution of the church as an aberration Hitler would correct, and as it turned out, Pacelli issued 55 protests of violations of the Reichskonkordat between 1933 and 1939. Early in 1937, he asked several German cardinals, including Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, to help him write a protest of Nazi violations of the concordat; this was to become Pius XI's 1937 encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge (in English "With deep [lit. 'burning'] anxiety"). The encyclical was written in German and not the usual Latin of official Catholic Church documents. Secretly distributed by an army of motorcyclists and read from every German Catholic Church pulpit on Palm Sunday, it condemned the paganism of the Nazi ideology. Pius XI credited its creation and writing to Pacelli. It resulted in persecution of the church by the infuriated Nazis who closed all the participating presses and "took numerous vindictive measures against the Church, including staging a long series of immorality trials of the Catholic clergy". On 10 June 1941, Pacelli (now pope) commented on the problems of the Reichskonkordat in a letter to the Bishop of Passau: "The history of the Reichskonkordat shows, that the other side lacked the most basic prerequisites to accept minimal freedoms and rights of the Church, without which the Church simply cannot live and operate, formal agreements notwithstanding".

Family and sexuality

Pius developed an extensive theology of the family, addressing family roles, sharing of household duties, education of children, conflict resolution, financial dilemmas, psychological problems, illness, taking care of older generations, unemployment, marital holiness and virtue, common prayer, religious discussions and more. He accepted the rhythm method as a moral form of family planning, though only in limited circumstances, within the context of family.