Word: pius
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, who today is one of the world's most hardheaded statesmen, was born in 1876 -five years after Bismarck founded the Second Reich; six years after Italy achieved unification by Vittorio Emanuele II's seizing Rome from the Papacy, and Pope Pius IX immured himself in his last possession as "the prisoner of the Vatican"; five years after the Paris proletariat bloodily introduced Europe to a new form of the state-the commune or soviet. The consequences of these events were to mark the highlights of the career of Eugenio Pacelli...
...Pacelli was ordained a priest. Almost at once Monsignor Gasparri, later papal Secretary of State and Pius XI's grey eminence, invited Pacelli to stop teaching law at the Roman Seminary of Apollinare and to help him make history in the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs (the Vatican's foreign relations office). Pacelli continued there and in the Secretariat of State until he became Pope in 1939. Nevertheless, he saw more of the Church Universal than any other prelate in papal history...
...Pacelli did not neglect Vatican City. About the time that Pius XI appointed Pacelli Prefect of the Reverend Fabric of St. Peter's (guardian of Vatican buildings), Mussolini banned the Catholic Boy Scouts and started to wipe out Catholic Action in Italy. The Pope wrote an encyclical (Non abbiamo bisogno) attacking the Fascist action, but since the Fascists controlled all the telegraph lines and cables to the outside world, Mussolini was in a position to read and reply to the encyclical before the world read...
...Cardinal Pacelli came face to face with the event which was to climax his ecclesiastical career. Pope Pius XI died. From all points of the compass Cardinals rushed to Rome to elect his successor. Cardinal Pacelli personally wired the Italian Line to ask that the Neptunia make an extra fast trip so that the Latin American Cardinals would arrive for the voting. In his haste one Cardinal was compelled to fly from Portugal over the battle lines of the Spanish Civil War. For the first time in history U.S. Cardinals also were present at the conclave to elect a Pope...
...Work of Justice. As a power for peace, Pius XII is less a man than the continuation .of a policy. But what the Catholic peace policy is, non-Catholics sometimes find it difficult to discover. And even Catholics find it hard to put the Church's peace program in a nut shell...