Word: pius
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last Big Man up was Pius XII. Like some of the others, he had made private peace negotiations. Now, in the first encyclical of his reign, he grieved that "our advice, if heard with respect, was not, however, followed." Summi Pontificatus accepted War II as an inevitable finish fight, although its author pledged himself to try to "hasten the day when the dove of peace may find on this earth, submerged in a deluge of discord, somewhere to alight...
...Pope's first encyclical traditionally establishes the spiritual tone of his reign. Pius' was to be the restoration of the faith and the re-establishment of the family group. But to non-Catholics the chief interest in the Pontiff's 13,000 words was not spiritual but political, and politically, even though it despaired of peace now, the encyclical was extraordinary...
...Pius also made Nazis squirm on the subject of Poland: "The blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the church, for its services in the defense of Christian civilization, written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits . . . the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace...
Throughout the Encyclical, Pius expressed his horror of war in his strongest terms. It was "the baneful seed of violence and of hatred for which the sword today plows the blood-drenched furrow...
...tall, lean, sad-eyed man sat at his desk last week in his summer palace at Castel Gandolfo near Rome. Before him was the text of a 13,000-word document which he had written and re-written three times in longhand. Pope Pius XII made some final corrections, sent the document off to the Vatican printers. It was his first encyclical, long delayed by the seismic events of World War II. Non-Catholics as well as Catholics waited to hear it as the keynote of the Holy Father's reign. Two days later the encyclical, entitled, from...