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CHAPTER 1
The Pacelli Family
A COUNTER-RISORGIMENTO CLAN IN A NATIONAL AGE
In the order of nature, among social institutions there is none higher than the family. Christ elevated marriage, which is, as it were, its root, to the dignity of a sacrament. The family has found and will always find in the Church defense, protection, and support, in all that concerns its inviolable rights, its freedom, the exercise of its lofty function.
OVER THE CENTURIES church and society have often disagreed on various issues and the importance of particular institutions, but have almost always concurred on the crucial role of family in the physical, psychological, social, and religious formation of individuals. "We are not born as the partridge in the wood ... to be scattered everywhere," wrote the American clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, adding that human beings should be grouped together and "reared day by day in that first of churches, the family." He like others recognized that character and personality are largely shaped by the interaction of genetic and environmental considerations, and the family plays a key role in the emergence of both. Despite its profound influence in character development, this crucial aspect has been largely ignored by those examining the life and pontificate of Eugenio Pacelli, who in early March 1939, on his sixty-third birthday, became Pope Pius XII.
In fact, most of the writers embroiled in the "Pius War," from the appearance of Hochhuth's play in 1963 to the present, have neglected the impact of both Eugenio's family and his formative childhood years on his life and career. Paul O' Shea, author of A Cross Too Heavy, and John Cornwell, who wrote Hitler's Pope, both of whom have devoted a chapter to the Pacelli family in their volumes, are more of an exception than the rule. For the most part "combatants" in the Pius controversy not only overlook his family but tend to ignore his educational background, initial diplomatic activity, his decade of service as nuncio in Germany, and his years as the secretary of state of Pope Pius XI — all vital for an understanding of the man who became pope and the policies he would pursue once he donned the tiara. Both man and pope were long in the making.
Nonetheless, much of the literature and historiography on Pacelli dwells primarily on his papacy. Indeed, a number of writers have narrowed their scope even further. Saul Friedländer, for example, begins his study with the election of Pacelli as pope in March 1939 and ends his work in September 1944. Others bypass even more aspects of Pius XII's papal tenure (1939–1958) to focus on his "silence" during the Holocaust, not realizing that this and other aspects of his pontificate cannot be fully understood in isolation, outside the broader context of his life and times. Small wonder that these narrow and restricted accounts have been compared to a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces, rendering difficult, if not impossible, an objective and coherent biography of Pius XII.
Some blame the introspective, private, and taciturn Eugenio for the shortcomings in much of the historiography of his life and career, citing his failure to say or write much about himself and for revealing precious little about his personal feelings, inner convictions, and intellectual and religious development. It is true that over the years the inner-directed Eugenio, who from an early age was a loner, did not provide much information on his childhood, which he regarded as a personal matter. Indeed, even when on the verge of death Pius XII ordered his staff to burn those papers he had not reexamined. He was equally protective of his public and private lives, clearly reflected in the notes he took during his meetings with Pius XI. Whether one judges his family's influence as positive or negative, or most influential religiously, politically, culturally, economically, or socially, his numerous relatives clearly played a crucial role in Eugenio's formation, career, and future actions. His traditional and strict Catholic family therefore warrants greater study than it has hitherto received.
Although the Pacelli family's political, religious, and legal roles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been explored, some things are not known about the early origins of the family. Its presence is first recorded in Onano, a little town — some would say a village — of some three thousand in the northern province of Lazio, near Viterbo, on the border with Tuscany. Today its population is even smaller, numbering just over one thousand. While the family lived there, some fifty miles north of Rome, the paternal family surname already had been changed from Pacella to Pacelli in the seventeenth century — but it is not precisely known when and why this had occurred. We do know that the earliest accounts of the family relate their political traditionalism, deep religious devotion, staunch loyalty and service to the papacy, and their support for both its political and religious rights.
We also know that the standing of the family was enhanced in January 1774 when Maria Domenica Pacelli married Francesco Caterini, son of another prominent Catholic family from the Onano area. Six children resulted from this marriage, the youngest of whom was Prospero Caterini (1795–1881), who would have an important impact on the life and career of Marcantonio Parcelli, who in turn influenced his son Filippo and his grandson Eugenio. The intermarriage and "alliance" between these two families, devoted to the papacy and the papal state, continued. At the turn of the eighteenth century Maria Domenica's brother Gaetano Pacelli married Maria Antonia Caterini, sister of Francesco. Six children also resulted from their marriage.
Their second son Marcantonio (1800–1902), a name in the papal state generally borne by the nobility, and some believe reflective of the family's high aims and great ambitions, was the future pope's grandfather. Born during the Napoleonic Age, his career was advanced by a number of ecclesiastics, establishing a precedent that would be followed by most of his descendants, down to Eugenio and his nephews. Marcantonio's first cousin Monsignor Prospero Caterini, who became Cardinal Caterini in 1853, acted as the entire family's protector and patron. Almost all the biographers of Pius XII mistakenly refer to Prospero as Marcantonio's uncle. He was not. Since Prospero was the son of a Caterini male who married a Pacelli female, while Marcantonio was the son of a Pacelli, who was brother to the female who married the Caterini male that produced Prospero, the two were first cousins.
Prospero found personal fulfillment and a religious vocation in Rome. However, he missed his extended family which remained in Onano and sought to persuade its more adventurous and ambitious members to join him in the capital. To persuade them to venture to Rome, he pointed out the many educational and employment opportunities available there. He noted that to govern and minister to the millions of his subjects and faithful, the pope required a host of collaborators and assistants — both lay and clerical. This need, together with the vast array of schools and institutes that provided training for potential candidates to serve Church and state, offered prospects simply not available in the small and largely rural Onano.
Prospero's invitation was all the more attractive because it was accompanied by an offer of assistance and guidance both in education and employment to those family members who joined him in Rome. In 1819, Marcantonio and his older brother Giuseppe Pacelli, excited and enticed by the promises and prospects dangled before them, accepted Prospero's suggestion that they transfer to the capital. Together the ambitious duo ventured to Rome for educational, economic, and occupational reasons as well as religious ones, above all nourishing the hope of securing positions in the schools and services of the Eternal City. Advised and assisted by their cousin Prospero, they settled in the Rione di Parione district, across the Tiber from St. Peter's, the source of religious inspiration and economic opportunity. While the older Giuseppe, following the example of his sponsor Prospero Caterini, decided to pursue an ecclesiastical career, the younger Marcantonio determined to study canon and civil law. After receiving his doctorate in 1824 he began practicing in the papal court. With the support and assistance of his cousin, in 1834 Marcantonio was made an advocate of the tribunal of the Sacred Roman Rota — charged with dispensing marriage annulments among other things.
Extremely ambitious, Marcantonio quickly displayed an interest and aptitude in financial and legal matters and later served as undersecretary in the Ministry of Finance during the pontificate of Gregory XVI (1831–1846). During his residence in Rome he married and had ten children — some say twelve! Filippo, Eugenio's father, was his second son. In Rome Marcantonio, following the family tradition, showed himself devoted to the papacy and proved a staunch supporter of its temporal power, both of which had been shaken by the French Revolution, the turmoil of the Napoleonic period, and the revolutionary decades that followed. While Marcantonio remained in Rome, the city experienced unparalleled turbulence. He proved sympathetic to, and supportive of, Pius IX (1846–1878), who began his career as a liberal but in the wake of the revolutionary events of 1848–1849 shifted to the conservative camp. Without hesitation Marcantonio followed him there. Sympathetic to the plight of Pio Nono, he unquestionably adhered to his antinationalist, intransigent, and ultramontist views which prevailed in the papal court, rejecting both the republican notions of Giuseppe Mazzini's "Giovane Italia" (Young Italy) and the obvious territorial ambitions of the Savoyard monarchy. By this time he and his family considered themselves as "Romani di Roma" (Romans of Rome), totally loyal to the papal regime for fiscal as well as religious reasons. Consequently they initially rejected all offers to defect to the national cause championed by the Risorgimento, which called for the unification of the peninsula and a united Italy's absorption of the Papal State.
Marcantonio's dedication to the papacy was reciprocated and rewarded by the papal administration, which appointed him an advocate of the tribunal of the Sacred Rota. He, in turn, revealed the depth of his loyalty following the renewed revolutionary upheaval in Rome at the end of 1848 and the flight of Pope Pius IX and his chief minister Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli to Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples. Refusing to recognize the Republic over which Giuseppe Mazzini presided, and his disciple Giuseppe Garibaldi defended, Marcantonio joined the pope and his acting secretary of state in exile, serving as Pio Nono's legal and political advisor during this time of trouble and turmoil. Shrewdly and wisely, Marcantonio chose not to compete but to complement the efforts of Antonelli, who arranged for foreign assistance to implement the pope's restoration and the reestablishment of the Papal State. The grandfather of the future Pope Pius XII focused on internal issues, leaving international affairs in the capable hands of Antonelli.
It was the diplomatic maneuvering of the cardinal that led to the military intervention of the Catholic powers (France, Austria, Spain, and Naples), who orchestrated the collapse of the Roman Republic and brought about the papal restoration of 1849. The Piedmontese, distrusted both by Pio Nono and his chief minister, were not invited to participate in either the military intervention or the political restoration. The Turin government they correctly concluded sought territorial expansion in the peninsula and had national ambitions that threatened the temporal power of the papacy.
On the other hand, Marcantonio Pacelli, who enthusiastically supported the demise of the Roman Republic and championed the pope's restoration, was trusted and once again rewarded, this time by being named to the Council of Ten charged with the crucial task of punishing and purging the revolutionary enemies of the papal administration, and paving the way for the pope's return to Rome a year later. His ardor in resisting the demands of the nationalist-inspired liberals pleased Pius IX who in 1851 appointed him undersecretary of state in the Ministry of the Interior, a post he held for some two decades. For his loyal service and productive efforts, in 1858 Marcantonio was enrolled in the Nobile di Sant'Angelo in Vado which listed him and his family as notables, an honor that contributed to Pacelli's sense of importance and prestige, which in turn provided access to other opportunities and contributed to his increased loyalty to the papacy.
In the Eternal City the Pacellis eventually settled in an apartment, number 34, on the south side of the third floor of the five-story Palazzo Pediconi on the Via di Monte Giordano (today Via degli Orsini) in the heart of papal Rome. The owners of their rented residence, still called a palace, confronted by financial difficulties, had been constrained to convert it into an apartment building, housing not one but a number of families. It provided the Pacellis with a number of advantages: its rental was less expensive than the newer constructions, it was close to the Chiesa Nuova, built on the site of the sixth-century Chiesa di Santa Maria di Vallicella, where they regularly worshipped, and was less than a mile away from the Vatican — where they were employed. Their apartment was large — it had twelve rooms — and a certain decadent charm, but remained unheated, even during the coldest days of winter. To make matters worse, none of the stone floors of the drafty rooms was carpeted. In it religious signs and symbols prevailed over elegant décor and included a shrine to Mary which housed a picture of the Madonna painted by Eugenio's paternal uncle, Vincenzo Pacelli, reflecting the religious beliefs and traditional values of the apartment's inhabitants.
The future Pope Pius XII was born on March 2, 1876. His birth came during the last period of the long, troubled, and turbulent pontificate of Pope Pius IX, whose Counter-Risorgimento sought unsuccessfully to preserve the papacy's temporal power by resisting his state's absorption into a united Italy. Politically perceptive, Eugenio quickly understood that despite Pius IX's intransigent opposition to the Risorgimento, and his restoration following the revolutionary upheaval of 1848–1849, this pope proved unable to prevent the loss of most of his state during the unification of the peninsula (1860–1861). Nor was he able to retain even a remnant of the papal state or preserve his temporal power after Rome was seized by the Italians in 1870. As a result Pio Nono's long pontificate would have a profound influence on his grandfather Marcantonio, his father Filippo, and Eugenio and his brother Francesco. It appears that the failure of the papal policy of intransigence was one of the factors that played a part in moving the young, impressionable, and sensitive boy to shun intransigence for accommodation, which he found useful in childhood and beyond. It was a trait he acquired in his family long before he entered the religious life or the diplomatic service of the Vatican.
Eugenio was the third child and second son, of the lawyer Filippo Pacelli and grandson of Marcantonio, of the "black" or papal faction that opposed the Italian seizure and annexation of the Papal State. The family's distinction stemmed not from wealth or noble status, but from their long and loyal service to the Vatican. Both for religious and economic reasons the elders in the Pacelli family steadfastly refused to recognize the Italian Kingdom's incorporation of the papal state. The total loss of the Vatican's temporal power from 1860 to 1870 had fiscal as well as political and religious implications, so that those who served it could not be, and were not, highly paid. Consequently the Pacellis, like so many others in this group employed by the Vatican, while not poor, were far from prosperous.
They were deemed "blacks" because they sided with the papacy and the Church in opposition to the "whites," who supported the national state which had absorbed the pope's territory during the unification of the peninsula, and the opportunistic "grays," who straddled the fence. Marcantonio Pacelli abstained from any contact with the Italian authorities who seized Rome from papal control. Not so his son Filippo (1837–1916), Eugenio's father. Eventually he, and other members of the family, pragmatically abandoned Marcantonio's strict intransigence and came to terms with the new Italian state. Indeed, Francesco Pacelli, Eugenio's older brother, negotiated the Lateran Accords of 1929 which included a treaty, Concordat, and financial settlement with Mussolini's Italy. It led to the sovereignty of Vatican City and played a key role in the reconciliation between the Vatican and the Italian state. The Pacellis thus played a part in the reestablishment of the temporal power — albeit on a very reduced scale. Their devotion to the pope remained constant, although with the passing of time they were reconciled to the loss of much of the papal state. They did so without challenging Marcantonio who continued to hope for a second restoration.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Life and Pontificate of Pope Pius XII"
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