Word: pacelli
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...apple in Cornwell's tale of sin is papal power. Pius, born Eugenio Pacelli, hailed from a family of Vatican loyalists dedicated to tightening Rome's rein on its semi-independent European churches. As a diplomat in Germany, he pursued the long-term goal of a church-state pact granting Rome near total control over its Teutonic flock. No German leader would sign--until Hitler...
...Center Party and the defining of any Catholic criticism of Nazi political acts as "foreign interference." The 1933 concordat, claims Cornwell, "imposed a moral duty on Catholics to obey the Nazi rulers" and so neutered Germany's "last democratic focus." (Catholics made up one-third of the German population.) Pacelli, meanwhile, commenced his long silence on Jewish persecution...
...useful summary titled Pius XII and the Second World War. Blet maintains that the 1933 pact was "practically imposed by Hitler." And papal power was hardly its only carrot: "The Nazis offered such good conditions that it would have been crazy not to sign it." Cornwell's implication of Pacelli in the Center Party's demise, he notes, rests heavily on uncorroborated memoirs by a former party head...