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Eugenio Pacelli, who was to see a time when Christian martyrdom was once more a practical issue, soon learned that the existence of his Church was not without nails. Six years before Eugenie's birth, the newly formed Italian state deprived Pope Pius IX of the Church's last temporal domains (which the Popes had ruled for 1,114 years). In school, Eugenio felt the anticlerical storm. He scandalized his classmates and teachers by refusing to write an essay defending the seizure of the papal states, instead denounced the action with the scorn worthy of a papal bull.
He decided to become a priest. Too sickly for the rigors of seminary life, he was allowed to prepare for the priesthood while living at home. He was a brilliant student, took doctorates in theology, philosophy and canon law. Promising young Don Eugenio was soon tapped by the Vatican Secretariat of State.
The Diplomat. He went to work as an apprendista (trainee), then as a minutante (confidential secretary). He also taught canon law and "diplomatic style" at a papal academy for young Vatican diplomats. Mostly, Pacelli drafted diplomatic notes, looked up quotations, dates, legal references. He called himself a "library mouse," but he did not stay in the library long.
In 1911 he went to London with the papal delegation to King George V's coronation. Entrusted to his care was a parchment bearing Pope Pius X's personal greetings to the new King. On the journey, an iodine bottle in Pacelli's valise broke and stained part of the document. The papal academy had taught no solution for such an emergency, but Pacelli thought fast. He spilled the iodine over the rest of the document, turning a soiled paper into a dignified-looking parchment apparently yellowed with age. The King was delighted.
In 1917, Pacelli was sent to Munich as papal nuncio with the rank of archbishop. His assignment: to interest the Kaiser in a negotiated peace. He failed in that task (when he received the stubborn Kaiser's final no, Nuncio Pacelli wept), but he stayed on in Germany. He moved to Berlin, and after nine years of hard bargaining concluded a concordat between the Vatican and the Prussian government. Germans liked the gentle but courageous archbishop. Some still remember the occasion when, in Munich, a Red mob sprayed his nunciature with machine-gun fire, later broke into the building. Archbishop Pacelli faced them calmly. "It is never wise to kill a diplomat," he said. The rioters left, later apologized.
Transatlantic Cardinal. In 1930, Pius XI made his friend Pacelli, 53, Cardinal Secretary of State, the No. 2 office at the Vatican. Pacelli became the most traveled prelate in history. The Pope sent him all over Europe, to Latin America, to the U.S. In 1936, for one month, Pacelli traveled 8,000 miles up & down the U.S., and airline passengers often saw the slim, intense cardinal whip out his portable and begin typing in midflight. The U.S., "so young, so sturdy, so glorious," impressed him deeply.
In Rome, Pius XI jovially called him "Our transatlantic, Pan-American Cardinal."
Increasingly, Pacelli became the aging Pope's alter ego. In February 1939, Pius XI died, and Eugenio Pacelli faced the most fateful event of his life.