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The Innovator. Pius XII was often described as an innovator, impelled to innovate not so much by temperament (for he was gentle, cautious and diolomatic) as by the force of the times. He was the first Pope to use a telephone regularly, the first to use a typewriter (a white portable). He strongly suggested that nuns' garb be modernized, liberalized many church rules. But he was an innovator also in far more significant works, which he performed in defense of Christianity against ideological dangers. In a long career (one of his first assignments as a young diplomat was to help represent the Vatican at Queen Victoria's funeral) he saw these dangers of the soul veer from Edwardian complacency to existentialist despair. Perhaps his most important efforts were in these areas: ¶ COMMUNISM. When Pius XII was born, the Communists had nowhere won political power; at the time of his death, 52,552,000 Catholics were living in Communist-ruled countries. Again and again, he ringingly condemned Communism as an atheistic and materialistic evil, arch enemy of God and of human rights. In the Communist-ruled countries, Pius XII had to find a harrowing way between the extremes of a tough anti-Communist line that might have destroyed the church through reprisals and a collaborationist line that might have destroyed the church just as surely through spiritual surrender. Poland's Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski and his precarious stand-off with the Red regime has shown that toughness can be combined with shrewd compromise. In the Western countries, the Pope took a bold political step in 1949 when he excommunicated all Catholics who "knowingly and freely . . . defend and spread Communism."
¶ LAW. The very concept of the law, Pius felt, was breaking down. In his encyclicals and addresses he related natural law to the whole field of ethics, politics and the principles of society. Beneath the imperatives of the state or the vote, he reminded statesmen and voters, lies the will of God reflected in the social order.
¶ DOGMA. Pius XII spectacularly stiffened the fabric of faith by promulgating the ancient dogma of the Virgin Mary's bodily assumption into Heaven (in doing so he was the first Pope in history to make such public exercise of the 1870 dogma of papal infallibility). In 1950 in the encyclical Humani Generis he cracked down hard on Catholic teachers, priests and philosophers whose speculations might carry them away from the dogmas of -the church and the formal system of thought laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas. ¶ NATIONALISM. Pope Pius laid claim once more to the church's status as the supranational community, nourishing the shallow roots of secular internationalism ("The Church is a mother — Sancta Mater Ecclesia—a true mother, mother of all nations and all peoples"). As he saw the colonial peoples rise, he laid increasing stress on substituting native priests for missionaries—and promoting them to bishops wherever possible.