(2 of 6)
When Pacelli was born in 1876, in Rome, the papacy seemed doomed to a decline. Six years before, it had been stripped of temporal power beyond the tiny (108.7 acres) Vatican enclave. Only 22 years before that, Pope Pius IX had fled when Mazzini and his revolutionists seized control of Rome. In Pacelli's childhood the world outside the Vatican seethed with anticlericalism and glowed with humanist confidence in the ever onwardness and upwardness of history. Today the papacy and the Catholic Church are immensely stronger. Part of the story is told in numbers: during Pius XII's reign, Catholics throughout the world grew from 388,402,610 to 496,512,000 despite attrition in Iron Curtain countries. The church's strengthened spiritual posture was marked by the fact that under Pius 33 saints were canonized,*more than under any other Pope in this century. Its political success can be judged from the fact that, during Pius' reign, Christian Democratic parties and Catholie statesmen (De Gasperi, Adenauer, Schuman, Fanfani et al.) rose to power in Western European countries where only a few years ago anticlericalism was a major prerequisite for political success.
The change was caused partly by the very disasters that struck the world during Pacelli's lifetime, for they branded into men of all faiths a new need for direction and values beyond materialist optimism. Partly it was caused by the death of the old European order, which forced the Vatican to deal not with monarchs or heads of state but with the people, and to find new ways of reaching them. Above all, it was caused by Pius XII's insistence that the papacy had a mission to assert Christian truths about all phases of human life. The Pope delivered thousands of addresses to delegations from every imaginable trade, profession or calling—each address painstakingly composed by himself (see box).