[9] Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli was born on the second day of Lent, 2 March 1876, in Rome into an upper-class family of intense Catholic piety with a history of ties to the papacy (the "Black Nobility").

[21] Pietro Gasparri, the recently appointed undersecretary at the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, had underscored his proposal to Pacelli to work in the "Vatican's equivalent of the Foreign office" by highlighting the "necessity of defending the Church from the onslaughts of secularism and liberalism throughout Europe".

[29] Pope Benedict XV appointed Pacelli as nuncio to Bavaria on 23 April 1917, consecrating him as titular Archbishop of Sardis in the Sistine Chapel on 13 May 1917, the same day as the first apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal.

[34] In the upheaval following the Armistice, a disconcerted Pacelli sought Benedict XV's permission to leave Munich, where Kurt Eisner had formed the Free State of Bavaria, and he left for a while to Rorschach, and a tranquil Swiss sanatorium run by nuns.

"[57] Historian Walter Bussmann argued that Pacelli, as Cardinal Secretary of State, dissuaded Pope Pius XI – who was nearing death at the time[58]—from condemning the Kristallnacht in November 1938,[59] when he was informed of it by the papal nuncio in Berlin.

On 1 November 1950, Pius XII invoked papal infallibility for the first time since 1854 by defining the dogma of the Assumption of Mary, namely that she "having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory".

The blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as Our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the Church, for its services in the defense of Christian civilization, written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace.With Italy not yet an ally of Hitler in the war, Italians were called upon to remain faithful to the Catholic Church.

[175] Although Pius XII received frequent reports about atrocities committed by and/or against Catholics, his knowledge was incomplete; for example, he wept after the war on learning that Cardinal August Hlond had banned German liturgical services in Poland.

Those intelligence materials were used by Pius XII on 11 March 1940 during a formal audience with Joachim von Ribbentrop (Hitler's foreign affairs adviser) when Pope was "listing the date, place, and precise details of each crime" as described by Joseph L. Lichten[177] after others.

[178] Pius warmly welcomed Roosevelt's envoy and peace initiative, calling it "an exemplary act of fraternal and hearty solidarity... in defence against the chilling breath of aggressive and deadly godless anti-Christian tendencies".

The Vatican agreed to send a letter outlining the bases for peace with England and the participation of the Pope was used to try to persuade senior German Generals Franz Halder and Walther von Brauchitsch to act against Hitler.

[188] At a special mass at St Peters for the victims of the war, held in November 1940, soon after the commencement of the London Blitz bombing by the Luftwaffe, Pius preached in his homily: "may the whirlwinds, that in the light of day or the dark of night, scatter terror, fire, destruction, and slaughter on helpless folk cease.

[183] In 1939, the newly elected Pope Pius XII appointed several prominent Jewish scholars to posts at the Vatican after they had been dismissed from Italian universities under Fascist leader Benito Mussolini's racial laws.

However, over the next 18 months, Brazil's Conselho de Imigração e Colonização (CIC) continued to tighten the restrictions on their issuance, including requiring a baptismal certificate dated before 1933, a substantial monetary transfer to the Banco do Brasil, and approval by the Brazilian Propaganda Office in Berlin.

[250] In January 1943, Pius XII declined to denounce publicly the Nazi discrimination against the Jews, following requests to do so from Władysław Raczkiewicz, president of the Polish government-in-exile, and Bishop Konrad von Preysing of Berlin.

[183] On 26 September 1943, following the German occupation of northern Italy, Nazi officials gave Jewish leaders in Rome 36 hours to produce 50 kilograms (110 lb) of gold (or the equivalent), threatening to take 300 hostages.

[256] On 30 April 1943, Pius XII wrote to Bishop Konrad von Preysing of Berlin to say: "We give to the pastors who are working on the local level the duty of determining if and to what degree the danger of reprisals and of various forms of oppression occasioned by episcopal declarations ... ad maiora mala vitanda (to avoid worse) ... seem to advise caution.

[267] Abe Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who had himself been baptized as a child and had undergone a custody battle afterwards, called for an immediate freeze on Pius's beatification process until the relevant Vatican Secret Archives and baptismal records were opened.

[280] With frequent absences from work, Pope Pius XII had come to depend heavily on a few close colleagues, especially his aide Domenico Tardini, his speechwriter Robert Leiber, and his long-serving housekeeper Sister Pascalina Lehnert.

[290] Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (later to be Pope John XXIII) wrote in his diary on Saturday, 11 October 1958 that probably no Roman emperor had enjoyed such a triumph, which he viewed as a reflection of the spiritual majesty and religious dignity of the late Pius XII.

[301] In that same documentary, the cause's vice-postulator Marc Lindeijer stated that several miracles attributed to the late pope are reported to the postulation every year but the individuals related to the healings do not come forward to enact diocesan proceedings of investigation.

"[307] On 21 September 1945, the general secretary of the World Jewish Congress, Aryeh Leon Kubowitzki, presented an amount of money to the Pope, "in recognition of the work of the Holy See in rescuing Jews from Fascist and Nazi persecutions.

[315] A Catholic scholar, Kevin J. Madigan, has interpreted this and other praise from prominent Jewish leaders, including that offered by Golda Meir, as less than sincere, an attempt to secure Vatican recognition of the State of Israel.

[320] The former high-ranking Securitate General Ion Mihai Pacepa alleged in 2007 that Hochhuth's play and numerous publications attacking Pius XII as a Nazi sympathizer were fabrications that were part of a KGB and Eastern Bloc secret services disinformation campaign, named Seat 12, to discredit the moral authority of the Church and Christianity in the West.

[336] Other important works challenging the negative characterization of Pius's legacy were written by Eamon Duffy, Clifford Longley, Cardinal Winning, Michael Burleigh, Paul Johnson, and Denis Mack Smith.

[338] Gerald Steinacher's Nazis on the Run accused Pius of turning a blind eye to the activities of Vatican priests assisting "denazification through conversion", which he said helped ex-Nazi anti-communists to escape justice.

These documents reveal new information about Pius XII's actions regarding the Ustaše regime, the genocides in Poland, the finances of the wartime church, the deportation of the Roman Jews, and the ratlines for Nazis and fascists fleeing Europe.

Shortly before and after the Mass, dialectics continued between the Jewish hierarchy and the Vatican as Rabbi She'ar Yashuv Cohen of Haifa addressed the Synod of Bishops and expressed his disappointment towards Pius XII's "silence" during the war.

Mark Riebling argued in his 2015 book Church of Spies that Pius XII was involved in plots to overthrow Hitler from mid-October 1939 and was prepared to mediate a peace between the Allies and the Axis in the event of a regime change in Germany.

[367] In January 2022, historian Michael F. Feldkamp announced that he had discovered in the Vatican archives evidence that Pius XII had personally saved at least 15,000 Jews from extermination, and that he had sent a report on the Holocaust to the American government shortly after the Wannsee Conference, although they did not believe the pope.