Pius XI

Roman Catholic pope (1922-1939)

• Born: May 31, 1857
• Birthplace: Desio, Italy
• Died: February 10, 1939
• Place of death: Vatican City, Italy

Pius XI was forced to deal with the problems emerging from World War I, especially the rise of communism and the various forms of right-wing totalitarianism (including fascism and Nazism), along with the economic dislocation that affected Europe throughout the interwar period. His efforts not only allowed the Roman Catholic Church to regain respect but also restarted the Church’s public involvement in social and political issues.

Early Life

Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, the future Pope Pius XI, was the son of a well-to-do manufacturer in northern Italy. His scholastic brilliance and encyclopedic mind were recognized early and, probably partially through the influence of his uncle, an important priest in his home diocese, Ratti was admitted to the famous Roman seminary of Lombard College and was ordained in December, 1879. While he continued his studies in Rome, taking graduate degrees in canon law, theology, and philosophy, Ratti was also pursuing his hobby of mountain climbing, tackling several technically difficult peaks and later producing a small book of memoirs on the subject.

In 1882, Ratti became an instructor at the seminary in Milan. Seven years later, he transferred to the famous Milanese library, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, starting the field of work that would occupy him for most of the rest of his life. He reached the pinnacle of his field within the Catholic Church in 1914, when Pope Pius X appointed him to serve as the prefect of the Vatican Library.

For reasons known only to himself, the next pope, Benedict XV, chose his librarian to head a diplomatic mission to Warsaw in the spring of 1918, anticipating the formation of a united Poland out of the chaos of war-torn Eastern Europe. The Catholic Church would become one of the forces that helped the Poles create a unified nation after having been split by Russia, Austria, and Prussia in the 1790’s.

The three years in Poland when Ratti was the apostolic envoy and then nuncio were filled with problems. Besides the great economic problems, Poland also launched an attack on the areas immediately to the east and southeast. Unfortunately, the new Soviet Union was also interested in regaining its lost provinces, and so the two states were quickly fighting each other. Poland lost the war, but Ratti gained some fame for being one of the few diplomats who refused to flee Warsaw when the Soviet troops nearly surrounded the city. This episode also led to Ratti’s personal dislike for the Soviet Union, in addition to the religious objections all Church leaders had for the officially atheistic state.

In recognition of his service, Benedict recalled Ratti late in 1921, made him a cardinal, and posted him to the Diocese of Milan, one of the most important posts within the Church. Ratti had little time to do anything as archbishop of Milan, however, because of Benedict’s death on January 22, 1922. On February 6, Ratti was elected pope, taking the name Pius XI.

Life’s Work

Pius started his reign with an important gesture. Ever since the new Italian nation had taken over Rome and the Papal States more than fifty years before, the popes had acted as “prisoners of the Vatican,” meaning that they refused to accept the loss of the papal territory, recognize the Italian state, or leave the area of the Vatican. Pius made his first appearance as pope on an outside balcony, as a symbolic opening of the Vatican. Pius was determined to bury the feud with the Italian state, which would enable the Papacy to move on to some of the other problems that it faced in the twentieth century.

Pius was sincere in his desire to reestablish the Vatican as a force in the modern world, and he made more concordats (church-state agreements) in his reign than had ever been made before, a total of twenty-five. He also opened numerous diplomatic missions to countries with small, almost forgotten, Catholic minorities, especially in the Balkan region. Other signs of Pius’s desire to bring the Church into the modern world include his establishment of Vatican Radio (a worldwide shortwave service) in the 1930’s, the establishment of new orders within the Church whose primary service goals were to publicize the faith, and his many encyclicals on the state of the world, beginning with Ubi Arcano Dei (On the Peace of Christ in His Kingdom) in 1923, which discussed the state of post-World War I Europe, and ending with his trio of antidictatorial statements in 1937.

Unfortunately, Pius is best known for two of his concordats: the 1929 concordat with Benito Mussolini’s Italy and the 1933 agreement with Nazi Germany . The Italian concordat established Vatican City, and some other Church property, as an independent state, while the one with Nazi Germany (which was more of a culmination of a decade-long process than a quick agreement with the new German regime) promised noninterference with the internal workings of the Church; neither concordat, however, would prevent the two fascist states from persecuting the Catholic Church during the 1930’s.

Pius’s 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris , refuting the claims of historical inevitability that the Soviets were then making, is still probably his best-known work. Because it is so well known and so often quoted and reprinted, Divini Redemptoris overshadows Pius’s other social and political commentaries, at times to the point at which he has been accused of ignoring the threats of fascism in general and Nazism in particular and concentrating only on the threat from the far Left.

Pius did condemn the far Left and not only in Divini Redemptoris. He also condemned the left-wing Mexican Revolution in 1937 and the left-wing government in Spain during the mid-1930’s. On the other hand, he also restated Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 condemnation of the exploitation of the working classes by capital in his 1931 encyclical Quaragesimo Anno , condemned Mussolini’s fascism in his 1931 encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno , and condemned the Nazi movement with the first of his 1937 encyclicals, Mit brennender Sorge . Both of these last two encyclicals had to be smuggled out of Italy to be published. Taking all twenty-nine of the pope’s encyclicals together (the most written by one pope until that time and dealing with problems and developments from politics to the film industry), it can be seen that, while he was most concerned about the dangers from the far Left, Pius was also concerned about the other problems facing interwar Europe, including the dangers posed by the Right.

Besides the many social and political problems that Pius saw emerging during his time as pope, he also dealt with a number of other issues. One, as befitting the former head of the Vatican Library, was the sponsoring of a number of new intellectual agencies, including the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (which recognizes the achievements of non-Catholic as well as Catholic scientists), the reform of some older institutes, and an increased support by the Church to regional literary, religious, and scientific conferences and congresses. Pius also enlarged the Vatican Library and encouraged Catholic seminaries to update their curricula to include more science and social science.

Pius also was interested in opening dialogues with other religious leaders, especially those within the Orthodox churches. While a little progress was made with some of the Eastern Orthodox churches, the effort did not go very far during this period, since neither side was willing to make concessions to the other, nor was the Russian Orthodox Church, perhaps the largest of the Orthodox churches and completely under the authority of the Soviet government, interested in making any contacts at all. These attempts mark the start of the dialogue that has lasted until today between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches.

Late in 1936, the seventy-nine-year-old pope became very sick, and the press of the world set up a sort of death watch to cover the expected funeral and subsequent papal election. Pius recovered from that illness by the Easter of 1937 and returned to working full-time. Rumors started circulating in late 1938 and early 1939 that Pius was going to issue a new, stronger, condemnation of either fascism or Nazism, perhaps both. These rumors increased when the entire Italian episcopate was ordered to come to Rome to hear a major papal address on February 11, and Pius was known to be working hard on the texts of two speeches. What those speeches might have been are unknown. Pius fell ill with a cold on February 7 and died of complications on February 10.

Significance

Pius XI faced many issues and concerns during his reign, most of them having to do with the political and social problems that Europe faced during the period between the world wars. He was, perhaps, hampered with a determination to maintain, if not increase, the traditional powers of the pope while having to face the fact that the Papacy no longer had any secular power base. Pius condemned the evils of his time, but, like all the other leaders of the period, secular and religious alike, his reputation has suffered since because he was unable to stop the coming of World War II and the Holocaust that accompanied it.

Autocratic, brilliant, and determined, Pius never stopped working to improve the social and political climate around him until his death. In the short run, Pius can be said to have failed, because World War II and its attendant horrors started six months after his death. The failure, however, was not so much Pius’s, because he did more than most leaders of the period to point out the evils that were growing, as it was that of Europe as a whole. Unable to recover from the political and economic ruin of World War I, most European societies opted during the interwar period for solutions that would lead to World War II.

Bibliography

Browne-Olf, Lillian. Pius XI: Apostle of Peace. New York: Macmillan, 1938. A very sympathetic, well-researched biography of Pius, written just before his death. Writing from the viewpoint of the 1930’s, Browne-Olf’s judgment of Pius is all the more favorable because of the lack of hindsight that has tarnished the reputations of most of the world leaders from the interwar period.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Their Name Is Pius. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. A study of five of the seven popes who chose the name Pius since 1775. Omits Pius VIII, who was pope for only eight months, and Pius XII, who had just started his pontificate when the book was written.

Coppa, Frank J. “Between Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism, Pius XI’s Response to the Nazi Persecution of the Jews: Precursor to Pius XII’s ’Silence?’” Journal of Church and State 47, no. 1 (Winter, 2005): 63-89. Examines Pius XI’s response to Nazi persecution of the Jews from 1939 until 1945 and compares the policies of Pius XI and Pius XII toward Nazi racism.

Daughters of St. Paul. Popes of the Twentieth Century. Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1983. A short work that serves as a favorable introduction to the twentieth century popes, laying out the salient facts of each one’s biography and life’s work.

Kent, Peter C. The Pope and the Duce. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. This is a monograph on the relationship between the foreign policies of the Vatican and fascist Italy during the period 1922-1935. The author’s thesis is that these foreign policies at times came together and worked in concert, especially when most of Europe was fearing possible rising support for Communism during the early years of the Depression, although the Vatican ultimately took a strong stand against both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, as well as the Soviet Union.

Murphy, Francis X. The Papacy Today. New York: Macmillan, 1981. A concise history of the internal and external political evolution of the Papacy during the first eighty years of the twentieth century.

Teeling, William. Pope Pius XI and World Affairs. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1937. Although this is a very biased work, based on a fundamental anti-Catholic worldview, this work remains valuable because it shows how the theory of Pius’s alleged pro-fascist and pro-Nazi views became widespread.