Word: pius
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...Pope Pius XII cautiously approved the use of atomic, bacteriological
...chemical weapons, but forbade these methods if they "entirely escape from the control of man" or cause the "annihilation of all human life within the radius of action." Pius, who denounced saturation bombing even before the inferno of Hiroshima, declared that wars of righteous aggression, in order to punish an offense or to recover territory, could no longer be justified because modern weaponry had become so devastating. Wars of national self-defense, however, were still permitted...
...Vatican's assets began to grow, Francis Spellman, an American bishop then living in Rome, urged Eugenic Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State and later Pope Pius XII, to set up a modern stock portfolio to manage the funds better. After Pacelli became Pope, he decided to set up a bank. The IOR, established in 1942, served to shield some Vatican money from war-torn Europe...
...Vatican helped persuade the papacy at one point to outlaw even contacts with non-Catholics as undermining the concept of the One True Church. But in 1958 Angelo Giuseppe Cardinal Roncalli, the Patriarch of Venice, was elected Pope John XXIII after the death of the doctrinally stern Pius XII, and a new mood about Christian unity took hold. Two years later, John established the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity to further ecumenism among all Christian groups. And the Second Vatican Council, called into session by Pope John XXIII in 1962, began to issue decrees that moved the Catholic Church...
...concluded its business. These dogmas, admits a liberal in John Paul's Vatican, "have made our job immensely more difficult than it should have been." The power of speaking infallibly has made even the Popes wary, and it has been used explicitly only once since Vatican I, when Pius XII decreed in 1950 that the Virgin Mary, when she had finished her life on earth, was transported bodily into heaven. This proclamation created yet another difficulty for non-Catholic Christians. Despite the Second Vatican Council's emphasis on the "collegiality" of bishops in sharing authority with the Pope...