Pius XII

Eugenio Pacelli was born in Rome to a family of papal lawyers, spent his entire career in the Vatican's diplomatic service, negotiated the concordats with Bavaria, Prussia, and Hitler's Germany as nuncio and then secretary of state, and was elected on his sixty-third birthday, 2 March 1939, on the third ballot, six months before the war everyone could see coming. Tall, ascetic, and remote, he was the first pope the world knew through radio, film, and television.

The war made him and haunts him. He kept the Holy See formally impartial, protested aggression in general terms, and in his Christmas broadcast of 1942 lamented the hundreds of thousands "doomed to death or slow extinction solely because of their nationality or race" without naming the Jews or the Germans. When the SS rounded up more than a thousand of Rome's Jews on 16 October 1943 under his windows, he did not protest publicly; Roman convents, monasteries, and the papal villa at Castel Gandolfo meanwhile hid thousands of Jews and other fugitives, with his knowledge.

After 1945 he became the Cold War's most prominent anticommunist, excommunicating Catholics who supported communist parties in 1949. He opened Catholic biblical scholarship in Divino afflante Spiritu (1943), rethought the liturgy in Mediator Dei (1947), checked the new theology in Humani generis (1950), and on 1 November 1950 defined the Assumption of Mary, the only exercise of papal infallibility since 1870. He died at Castel Gandolfo on 9 October 1958; his physician's bungled embalming turned the lying in state into a scandal. Benedict XVI declared him Venerable in 2009.