before he came out from behind the curtain, as it were)...
Pope Pius XII March 2, 1876 - October 9, 1958
Pope Pius XII 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 and became a cardinal in 1929. He was the papal nuncio in Munich and Berlin during the 1920s, and was appointed as Pope Pius XI's secretary of state in 1930. He was the chief architect and negotiator of the Reich Concordat, the treaty between the Vatican and Hitler, signed in 1933 which helped the Nazis secure their hold on German government unopposed by the powerful Catholic community. This agreement was the primary reason that the Catholic Center Party was disbanded and the community lost all political leverage in the Reich. 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. In a recent book, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, author John Cornwell portrays Pius XII as an authoritarian who was primarily concerned with increasing papal power. His reticence during the Holocaust was typical of his antipathy towards Jews in general. Cornwell provides convincing evidence of the Pope’s reluctance to encourage opposition among the German Catholics against the National Socialists even when the Nazis repeatedly broke with the terms of the Reich Concordat. The lack of opposition through the 1930s and the Second World War has been credited to the fear of persecution of the Catholic minority by the Nazis. However, even as late as 1942, the Catholic community was successful in protesting the euthanasia programs of the Nazis and these had to be stopped, for the most part, or taken underground. Pius XII also failed to publish the encyclical of Pius XI, Humani generis unitas (The Unity of the Human Race), after the death of Pius XI. The encyclical was the result of Pius XI’s growing concern about the National Socialists and anti-Semitism.
http://hist.academic.claremontmckenna.edu/jpetropoulos/holocaust/piusxii.htmReich Concordat - July 20, 1933The Reich Concordat was an agreement signed between the Vatican and the National Socialist government of Germany. The person primarily responsible for the negotiation and signing of this document was the Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII with the agreement of Pius XI.
Pacelli was a firm believer in the unchallenged authority of the Pope as the head of the Catholic Church. For this reason, he had long aimed to establish a formal agreement between the Vatican and Germany, and impose upon the country’s Catholic population the pope’s authority. The German Catholics were one of the most powerful, influential and wealthy Catholic communities around the world. Pacelli wished to establish a power relationship with the local clergy that would heavily favor the Vatican. He aimed to do so through the imposition of the Canon Code of Law, a definition of Church laws that was published and brought into force in 1917; this interpretation of Church law encouraged the supremacy and absolutism of the pontiff over the local clergy.
The Concordat allowed the papacy to impose the new laws on the German clergy, and gained special privileges for Catholic schools and organizations. Pacelli also hoped that the agreement would safeguard against Nazi encroachments on and persecution of the German Catholic minority. In exchange, the Vatican would ‘encourage’ the local Catholic clergy and faithful to ‘voluntarily’ withdraw from politics, going as far as disbanding its powerful Catholic Center Party. This effectually destroyed any political opposition against the Nazis. This guarantee of nonintervention left Hitler and the Nazis free to pursue their anti-Semitic policies.
<snip>
Eventually, the reluctance of the Vatican to encourage Catholic opposition against the Nazis and their policies served as a silent endorsement of their policies. The moral base for protest for the Catholics was further compromised with the silence of Pius XII even when the terms of the Concordat were repeatedly violated by the Nazis. The reticence of the Pope in publicly denouncing Nazi anti-Semitism and his failure to publish "The Lost Encyclical" of Pius XI are seen by at least one historian as a violation of the moral obligations of his role.
http://hist.academic.claremontmckenna.edu/jpetropoulos/holocaust/reichconcordat.htm