Word: pius
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...Papacy to its high-water mark); Leo X (a worldly, cultivated gentleman who excommunicated Martin Luther and proved incapable of dealing with the problems of the Reformation); Alexander VI (a Borgia, who practiced simony and nepotism and failed in his master plan to conquer and unify Italy); Pius VII (whose Concordat with Napoleon restored Catholicism to France); Leo XIII (whose encyclical, Rerum Novarum, first diagnosed for Catholics the sickness of contemporary society and called upon them authoritatively to cure...
...symbol Pius XII is a spiritual autocrat of incalculable power...
...same reason, Popes' lives are written chiefly after their deaths. The biography of a living Pope is officially meager. Pius XII is no exception. But his biographical skeleton is important for the context of history it reveals...
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...