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After his ordination to the priesthood in 1920, Montini was sent by the Bishop of Brescia to do advanced studies at the Gregorian Institute and the University of Rome. A year later, he took up canon law at Rome's Ecclesiastical Academy, where he was under the talent-scouting eye of Monsignor Giuseppe Pizzardo, the Vatican's Pro-Secretary of State (and now prefect of the Congregation of Seminaries). In 1922, Pizzardo gave Father Montini his first and only permanent diplomatic assignment abroad. Named secretary to the Apostolic Nuncio in Warsaw, Father Montini lasted only a few months of the Polish winter before his health again collapsed. He was reassigned in the Secretariat of State as a minutante (document writer), and settled down to a career of diplomatic drudgery.
Watched & Nourished. Until the press of Vatican duties forced him to give up the assignment in 1933, Montini also served for ten years as spiritual adviser to the federation of Italian Catholic university students. It was a decade in which Fascism was making inroads into Catholic youth groups. Montini urged his students to stand firm but to avoid street battles with Blackshirt youth, and instead follow a course of nonviolence and noncooperation. After the threat of Fascist thuggery forced the federation to postpone one meeting, he tried to rally the downcast students: "If today we cannot go forward with flags unfurled, we will work in silence."
One day in 1930, the Vatican Secretary of State, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pius XII, pointed Montini out to a friend and remarked: "I like that tense young man." Pacelli watched and nourished Montini's career, and in 1937 appointed him Substitute Secretary of State for Ordinary Affairs. Montini admired his lean, ascetic superior and worked endless, selfless hours for him. Yet, says one layman who knows Montini well, "he suffered strongly under Pius XII's authority. It was a sort of father-son relationship, and it created complexes in the son. He was never liberated by the father. I saw him cry once out of frustration at something Pius was doing."
In 1952, the Pope elevated Montini to the rank of Pro-Secretary of State for Ordinary Affairs. His opposite number was the older, more experienced Monsignor Domenico Tardini, who functioned as the Pro-Secretary for Extraordinary Affairs. In the division of Secretariat work, Montini handled the internal affairs of the church, Tardini the negotiations with diplomats accredited to the Holy See. In Rome, however, it soon became known that Montini was really the man to see on papal business. During Pius' bouts with illness, Montini passed along the Pope's orders to the Curia—a situation that did the young priest no good in the eyes of certain veteran cardinals.
Marked for Destiny. Eventually, the warm relationship between Pius XII and Montini became somewhat strained. One reason, apparently, was their differing views of Italian politics: Montini at the time favored a Christian Democratic opening to the left; Pius did not. Certainly Pius did hear Vatican whispers, spread by Montini's Curial enemies, that the Pro-Secretary was "disloyal" to the Pope—and perhaps Pius believed them.