Pius XI

When Italian troops entered Rome in 1870 and absorbed the last of the Papal States, Pius IX refused to recognize the new kingdom, declined its offers of compensation, and did not leave the Vatican again. His successors kept the same position for nearly sixty years: no pope appeared publicly in Rome, Catholics were discouraged from voting in Italian national elections, and the pope's status in international law was undefined. This standoff was known as the Roman Question, and it made the papacy a resident of a state it did not acknowledge.

Pius XI settled it. Negotiations begun in 1926 produced the Lateran agreements, signed in February 1929: a treaty recognizing the full sovereignty of the Holy See over the 44 hectares of Vatican City, a financial convention compensating for the lost territories, and a concordat regulating the church's position in Italy, including religious instruction in schools and the civil recognition of church marriages. The pope emerged onto the balcony and the loggia of Saint John Lateran for the first time in the modern era.

The settlement was made with Mussolini's government, and that is the standing criticism of it. It gave the fascist regime international prestige at a moment when it was consolidating power, and Pius XI in one remark called Mussolini a man sent by providence, a phrase quoted against him ever since. His own conduct afterwards complicates the picture: within two years he issued Non Abbiamo Bisogno, written in Italian rather than Latin so it could be read directly by Italians, attacking the regime for suppressing Catholic Action and for claiming the total allegiance of the young.

In March 1937 Pius XI published two encyclicals five days apart. Mit brennender Sorge, with burning concern, was written in German rather than Latin, smuggled into Germany and read from Catholic pulpits on Palm Sunday before the authorities could stop it. It accused the German government of breaking the concordat of 1933 article by article, and condemned the exaltation of race, people or state above their proper worth as an idolatry that overturns the order made by God. Divini Redemptoris followed, condemning atheistic communism in equally absolute terms and defending the dignity of the person against the collectivity.

The same year he moved further. He commissioned three Jesuits to draft an encyclical on the unity of the human race, later known as Humani Generis Unitas, intended to address racism and antisemitism directly. A text was prepared and reached Rome, but Pius XI died on 10 February 1939 before issuing it, and it was not published by his successor. Historians disagree about the draft's adequacy, since parts of it repeat old theological hostility to Judaism even while rejecting racial theory, but its existence is documented and it is often called the hidden encyclical.

In September 1938, receiving Belgian pilgrims and speaking of the words of the Roman Canon that name Abraham as our patriarch, he broke off and said that antisemitism is a movement in which Christians can have no part, because spiritually we are all Semites. The remark was reported in the Belgian Catholic press but was left out of the Vatican's own newspaper, which is itself part of the historical record of how far the church went and how far it did not.