‘Change the Heart, and the Work Will Be Changed’: Pius XII's Papal Blueprints for Europe

This article examines the role of emotions in papal discourse about European integration. Expanding on the ‘emotional turn’ in history, it develops an analytic framework to study emotional valence in constructing the past and future. Analysing Pope Pius XII's three major post-war encyclicals (Communium Interpretes Dolorum, Fulgens Radiatur and Summi Maeroris), this article shows how the emotional vocabulary of Pius XII bridges the gap between theology and politics. In particular, it illuminates how Pope Pius XII integrated emotional and religious vocabulary to (re)construct an image of a European past and future.

Die Kritische Online-Edition der Nuntiaturberichte Eugenio Pacellis (1917–1929)

Eugenio Pacelli, the later Pope Pius XII, was already considered a leading diplomat of the Holy See when he served as nuncio in Germany. Using the critical online edition of his nuncial reports, digital humanities methodologies will be used to explore which topics dominated his reports, the diplomatic style of his nunciature and whether Pacelli adapted the form and content of his reports to the various recipients. To this end, quantitative methods of textual analysis such as the frequency distribution of types in relation to tokens as well as recourse to key terms and multi-word units (N-grams) will be employed. Moreover, methods from the field of corpus linguistics, information retrieval (TF-IDF) and quantitative stylometry (contrastive analyses with Burrows’ Delta and Zeta) are applied to evaluate both stylistic and content-related issues.

Pope Pius XII, the Bishops of France and the Rescue of Jews, 1940–1944

France is one of the countries of occupied Western Europe where the Jewish community best survived the Holocaust. The bishops, religious congregations and the priests there contributed to this situation in great measure. Many bishops remained silent about the roundups of Jews, but they helped to save many Jews in their dioceses. Most of them had been nominated to the episcopacy in the 1920s and 1930s when Eugenio Pacelli was nuncio and influential in the appointment of bishops. These bishops followed the policies of the Vatican which enabled the Church in France to fight Nazism and racism. During World War II, the Vatican sent enormous sums of money to rscue Jews and other fugitives in France. The encyclical of Pope Pius XI Mit brennender Sorge (1937), widely distributed in France, encouraged Catholics to assist Jews and other fugitives. This article offers insights into Vatican policy for the years 1940 through 1945.

Miranda Prorsus: An Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XII on Motion Pictures, TV and Radio – its Impact on the Catholic Church Media in Zambia Today

This article refl ects on the sixty years marking the anniversary of the encyclical letter Miranda Prorsus by Pope Pius XII. Miranda Prorsus was the fi rst document written in 1957 by the Church to refl ect on the three important means of communication: Motion Pictures (Film), Television (TV) and Radio. It highlighted the importance of these “remarkable technical inventions” to aid humanity in as far as development and understanding the media was concerned. Each of these three instruments of communication is examined in both the strengths and weaknesses they carry, but much more, how they can play a role in advancing humanity in the area of morality and truth telling. The article tries to use some of the important highlights in the context of Zambia my country that has embraced these means of communication with radio stations set up by the respective Bishops and a Television soon to be launched by the Zambia Conference of Catholic Bishops (ZCCB). In retrospect the article tries to show how these means and technical inventions can become handy in as far as the evangelization is concerned.

guArDiAN OF tHe FAitH

The assistance for the repressed Church in the Soviet Union was a very important issue in the service of Primate of Poland Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. The activity of priest Primate’s in this field was conducted within several areas: covert holy orders and bishop consecrations, collecting and transferring information to the Holy See about the situation of the Church in the Soviet Union and permanent attempts with subsequent popes and their closest associates to request them so that this area would not stop functioning in the awareness of the Church and its highest shepherds. The confidential consecration of bishop Jan Cieński with the entitlements of an auxiliary bishop for archdiocese of Lviv, which took place in June 1967 was particularly significant. He was the only bishop of Latin rite in the Ukraine until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Priest Primate conducted his mission with the use of extraordinary entitlements granted to him in 1957 by the Pope Pius XII, and subsequently prolonged by next popes, until John Paul II. These entitlements mainly concerned the Ukraine and Belarus, and Lithuania, in special cases. Cardinal Wyszyński was actively participating in the debate on the issue of the eastern policy of the Holy See. He critically evaluated some advances in diplomacy of the Holy See, accusing them of insufficient demand for religious freedom for Christians in the East.

II. Beyond Dissent: Reflections on the Possibilities of a Pastoral Magisterium in Today's Church

Our roundtable wishes to explore the need for the church today to move beyond what we might call the orthodoxy/dissent binary, that is, the assumption of one narrowly construed orthodox position, over against which all other construals of the Christian faith are presented as heretical or at least dissenting positions. This binary presents, for many scholars today, insuperable difficulties. To begin with, it emphasizes doctrinal unity over theological diversity. It privileges office over charism, magisterium over the sense of the faithful, authoritative pronouncement over communal discovery. The dominance of the orthodoxy/dissent binary depends in turn on an account of doctrinal teaching authority still indebted to Pope Pius XII and his claim that when the ordinary papal magisterium has pronounced on a matter, it is no longer subject to open debate. The solution, in the minds of some, lies in dispelling dangerous notions of orthodoxy, heresy, and dissent as intrinsically hegemonic terms that mask politically oriented power regimes. I am not inclined to dismiss entirely, however, claims to doctrinal normativity, even as I acknowledge the real danger of abuse.

Black German

When I was born in Berlin, the year 1925 was just fifteen days old. Fourteen days earlier the Apostolic Nuntius Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, had delivered the congratulations of the diplomatic corps to Reich President Friedrich Ebert. Nobody expected that barely two months later Friedrich Ebert would be dead. After his death the aged Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, a living legend since his victory over the Russian army at Tannenberg, became President. Of course I knew nothing about all this; people told me later that I had enough trouble of my own getting into the world and staying alive. My mother was already seriously ill when I was born, and she died a year later....