title: Pope Pius XII

text: 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". To date this is the last time full papal infallibility has been used. The dogma was preceded by the 1946 encyclical "Deiparae Virginis Mariae", which requested all Catholic bishops to express their opinion on a possible dogmatization. On 8 September 1953, the encyclical "Fulgens corona" announced a Marian year for 1954, the centennial of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. In the encyclical Ad caeli reginam he promulgated the Queenship of Mary feast. "Mystici corporis" summarizes his mariology. On 15 August 1954, the Feast of the Assumption, he initiated the practice of leading the Angelus every Sunday before address to the crowd assembled at Castel Gandolfo.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius XII delivered numerous speeches to medical professionals and researchers. He addressed doctors, nurses, midwives, to detail all aspects of rights and dignity of patients, medical responsibilities, moral implications of psychological illnesses and the uses of psycho pharmaca. He also took on issues like the uses of medicine in terminally ill persons, medical lies in face of grave illness, and the rights of family members to make decisions against expert medical advice. Pope Pius XII often reconsidered previously accepted truth, thus he was first to determine that the use of pain medicine in terminally ill patients is justified, even if this may shorten the life of the patient, as long as life shortening is not the objective itself.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pope Pius XII developed an extensive theology of the family, taking issue with family roles, sharing of household duties, education of children, conflict resolution, financial dilemmas, psychological problems, illness, taking care of older generations, unemployment, marital holiness and virtue, common prayer, religious discussions and more. He accepted the rhythm method as a moral form of family planning, although only in limited circumstances, within the context of family.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: To Pius XII, science and religion were heavenly sisters, different manifestations of divine exactness, who could not possibly contradict each other over the long term. Regarding their relation, his advisor Professor Robert Leiber wrote: "Pius XII was very careful not to close any doors prematurely. He was energetic on this point and regretted that in the case of Galileo".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In 1950, Pius XII promulgated "Humani generis", which acknowledged that evolution might accurately describe the biological origins of the human form, but at the same time criticized those who "imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution ... explains the origin of all things". Catholics must believe that the human soul was created immediately by God. Since the soul is a spiritual substance, it is not brought into being through transformation of matter, but directly by God, whence the special uniqueness of each person. Fifty years later, Pope John Paul II, stating that scientific evidence now seemed to favour the evolutionary theory, upheld the distinction of Pius XII regarding the human soul. "Even if the human body originates from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is spontaneously created by God."


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In an address given on 14 September 1952, Pope Pius XII said that the church does not regard the execution of criminals as a violation by the State of the universal right to life:


title: Pope Pius XII

text: When it is a question of the execution of a condemned man, the State does not dispose of the individual's right to life. In this case it is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned person of the enjoyment of life in expiation of his crime when, by his crime, he has already disposed himself of his right to live.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: The church regards criminal penalties as both "medicinal", preventing the criminal from re-offending, and "vindictive", providing retribution for the offense committed. Pius defended the authority of the State to carry out punishment, up to and including the death penalty.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius XII taught that the masses were a threat to true democracy. In such a democracy, liberty is the individual's moral duty and equality is the right of all people to honorably live in the place and station that God has assigned them.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On 1 June 1946, one day before the 1946 Italian referendum on whether to abolish or keep the Italian monarchy, Pius XII delivered a sermon on St. Peter's Square. While he did not directly mention monarchy or republicanism, given the context, his speech was nonetheless widely seen as endorsing Umberto II in the referendum, with it being difficult to misunderstand his plea.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: "The problem is whether one or the other of those nations, of those two Latin sisters [elections were taking place in France on the same day] with several thousands of years of civilization will continue to learn against the solid rock of Christianity...or on the contrary do they want to hand over the fate of their future to the impossible omnipotence of a material state without extraterrestrial ideals, without religion, and without God. One of these two alternatives shall occur according to whether the names of the champions or the destroyers of Christian civilization emerge victorious from the urns".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: After the referendum was successful and the Italian monarchy was abolished, Pius privately agreed with his envoy Myron Charles Taylor "...that it would have been far preferable for Italy to remain a monarchy, but he also noted that what was done was done".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius XII issued 41 encyclicals during his pontificate—more than all his successors in the past 50 years taken together—along with many other writings and speeches. The pontificate of Pius XII was the first in Vatican history that published papal speeches and addresses in vernacular language on a systematic basis. Until then, papal documents were issued mainly in Latin in "Acta Apostolicae Sedis" since 1909. Because of the novelty of it all, and a feared occupation of the Vatican by the German Wehrmacht, not all documents exist today. In 1944, a number of papal documents were burned or "walled in".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Several encyclicals addressed the Eastern Catholic Churches. "Orientalis Ecclesiae" was issued in 1944 on the 15th centenary of the death of Cyril of Alexandria, a saint common to Eastern Christianity and Latin Churches. Pius XII asks for prayer for better understanding and unification of the churches. "Orientales omnes Ecclesias", issued in 1945 on the 350th anniversary of the reunion, is a call to continued unity of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church, threatened in its very existence by the authorities of the Soviet Union. "Sempiternus Rex" was issued in 1951 on the 1500th anniversary of the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon. It included a call to oriental communities adhering to Miaphysite theology to return to the Catholic Church. "Orientales Ecclesias" was issued in 1952 and addressed to the Eastern Churches, protesting the continued Stalinist persecution of the church. Several Apostolic Letters were sent to the bishops in the East. On 13 May 1956, Pope Pius addressed all bishops of the Eastern Rite. Mary, the mother of God, was the subject of encyclical letters to the people of Russia in "Fulgens corona", as well as a papal letter to the people of Russia.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius XII made two substantial interventions on the media. His 1955 discourse "The Ideal Movie", originally given in two parts to members of the Italian cinema industry, offered a "sophisticated analysis of the film industry and the role of cinema in modern society". Compared to his predecessor's teaching, the encyclical "Miranda Prorsus" (1957) shows a "high regard for the importance of cinema, television, and radio".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In 1958, Pope Pius XII declared the Feast of the Holy Face of Jesus as Shrove Tuesday (the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday) for all Catholics. The first medal of the Holy Face, produced by Sister Maria Pierina De Micheli, based on the image on the Shroud of Turin had been offered to Pius XII who approved the medal and the devotion based on it. The general devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus had been approved by Pope Leo XIII in 1885 before the image on the Turin Shroud had been photographed.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pope Pius XII canonized numerous people, including Pope Pius X—"both were determined to stamp out, as far as possible, all traces of dangerous heterodoxy"—and Maria Goretti. He beatified Pope Innocent XI. The first canonizations were two women, the founder of a female order, Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, and a young laywoman, Gemma Galgani. Pelletier had a reputation for opening new ways for Catholic charities, helping people in difficulties with the law, who had been neglected by the system and the church. Galgani was a virtuous woman in her twenties, said to have the stigmata.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius XII also named Anthony of Padua as a Doctor of the Church on 16 January 1946 while conferring upon him the title "Doctor evangelius".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: During World War II Pius saw his primary obligation as being to ensure the continuation of the "Church visible" and its divine mission. Pius XII lobbied world leaders to prevent the outbreak of World War II and then expressed his dismay that war had come in his October 1939 "Summi Pontificatus" encyclical. He followed a strict public policy of Vatican neutrality for the duration of the conflict mirroring that of Pope Benedict XV.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In 1939, Pius XII turned the Vatican into a centre of aid which he organized from various parts of the world. At the request of the Pope, an information office for prisoners of war and refugees operated in the Vatican under Giovanni Battista Montini, which in the years of its existence from 1939 until 1947 received almost 10 million (9,891,497) information requests and produced over 11 million (11,293,511) answers about missing persons.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius XII had genuine affection for Germany, though not the criminal element into whose hands it had fallen; he feared Bolshevism, an ideology dedicated to the annihilation of the church of which he was head, but his sympathies lay with the Allies and the democracies, especially the United States, into whose war economy he had transferred and invested the Vatican's considerable assets.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: "Summi Pontificatus" was the first papal encyclical issued by Pope Pius XII, in October 1939 and established some of the themes of his pontificate. During the drafting of the letter, the Second World War commenced with the German/Soviet invasion of Catholic Poland—the "dread tempest of war is already raging despite all Our efforts to avert it". The papal letter denounced antisemitism, war, totalitarianism, the attack on Poland and the Nazi persecution of the church.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius XII reiterated church teaching on the "principle of equality"—with specific reference to Jews: "there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision". The forgetting of solidarity "imposed by our common origin and by the equality of rational nature in all men" was called "pernicious error". Catholics everywhere were called upon to offer "compassion and help" to the victims of the war. The Pope declared determination to work to hasten the return of peace and trust in prayers for justice, love and mercy, to prevail against the scourge of war. The letter also decried the deaths of noncombatants.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Following themes addressed in Non abbiamo bisogno (1931); Mit brennender Sorge (1937) and Divini redemptoris (1937), Pius wrote against "anti-Christian movements" and needing to bring back to the church those who were following "a false standard ... misled by error, passion, temptation and prejudice, [who] have strayed away from faith in the true God". Pius wrote of "Christians unfortunately more in name than in fact" having shown "cowardice" in the face of persecution by these creeds, and endorsed resistance:


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius wrote of a persecuted church and a time requiring "charity" for victims who had a "right" to compassion. Against the invasion of Poland and killing of civilians he wrote:


title: Pope Pius XII

text: With Italy not yet an ally of Hitler in the war, Italians were called upon to remain faithful to the Catholic Church. Pius avoided explicit denunciations of Hitlerism or Stalinism, establishing the "impartial" public tone which would become controversial in later assessment of his pontificate: "A full statement of the doctrinal stand to be taken in face of the errors of today, if necessary, can be put off to another time unless there is disturbance by calamitous external events; for the moment We limit Ourselves to some fundamental observations."


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In "Summi Pontificatus", Pius expressed dismay at the killing of non-combatants in the Nazi/Soviet invasion of Poland and expressed hope for the "resurrection" of that country. The Nazis and Soviets commenced a persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland. In April 1940, the Vatican advised the US government that its efforts to provide humanitarian aid had been blocked by the Germans and that the Holy See had been forced to seek indirect channels through which to direct its aid. Michael Phayer, a critic of Pius XII, assesses his policy as having been to "refuse to censure" the "German" invasion and annexation of Poland. This, Phayer wrote, was regarded as a "betrayal" by many Polish Catholics and clergy, who saw his appointment of Hilarius Breitinger as the apostolic administrator for the Wartheland in May 1942, an "implicit recognition" of the breakup of Poland; the opinions of the "Volksdeutsche", mostly German Catholic minorities living in occupied Poland, were more mixed. Phayer argues that Pius XII—both before and during his papacy—consistently "deferred to Germany at the expense of Poland", and saw Germany—not Poland—as critical to "rebuilding a large Catholic presence in Central Europe". In May 1942, Kazimierz Papée, Polish ambassador to the Vatican, complained that Pius had failed to condemn the recent wave of atrocities in Poland; when Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione replied that the Vatican could not document individual atrocities, Papée declared, "when something becomes notorious, proof is not required". 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 Hlond had banned German liturgical services in Poland.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: There was a well-known case of Jewish Rabbis who, seeking support against the Nazi persecution of Polish Jews in the General Government (Nazi-occupied Polish zone), complained to the representatives of the Catholic Church. The church's attempted intervention caused the Nazis to retaliate by arresting rabbis and deporting them to the death camp. Subsequently, the Catholic Church in Poland abandoned direct intervention, instead focusing on organizing underground aid, with huge international support orchestrated by Pope Pius XII and his Holy See. The Pope was informed about Nazi atrocities committed in Poland by both officials of the Polish Church and the Polish Underground. 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 after others.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: With Poland overrun, but France and the Low Countries yet to be attacked, Pius continued to hope for a negotiated peace to prevent the spread of the conflict. The similarly-minded US President Franklin D. Roosevelt re-established American diplomatic relations with the Vatican after a seventy-year hiatus and dispatched Myron C. Taylor as his personal representative. 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". American correspondence spoke of "parallel endeavours for peace and the alleviation of suffering". Despite the early collapse of peace hopes, the Taylor mission continued at the Vatican.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: According to Hitler biographer John Toland, following the November 1939 assassination attempt by Johann Georg Elser, Hitler said Pius would have wanted the plot to succeed: "he's no friend of mine". In the spring of 1940, a group of German generals seeking to overthrow Hitler and make peace with the British approached Pope Pius XII, who acted as an interlocutor between the British and the abortive plot. According to Toland, Munich lawyer, Joseph Muller, made a clandestine trip to Rome in October 1939, met with Pius XII and found him willing to act as intermediary. 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.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius warned the Allies of the planned German invasion of the Low Countries in 1940. In Rome in 1942, US envoy Myron C. Taylor, thanked the Holy See for the "forthright and heroic expressions of indignation made by Pope Pius XII when Germany invaded the Low countries". After Germany invaded the Low Countries during 1940, Pius XII sent expressions of sympathy to the Queen of the Netherlands, the King of Belgium, and the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. When Mussolini learned of the warnings and the telegrams of sympathy, he took them as a personal affront and had his ambassador to the Vatican file an official protest, charging that Pius XII had taken sides against Italy's ally Germany. Mussolini's foreign minister claimed that Pius XII was "ready to let himself be deported to a concentration camp, rather than do anything against his conscience".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: When in 1940, the Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop led the only senior Nazi delegation permitted an audience with Pius XII and asked why the Pope had sided with the Allies, Pius replied with a list of recent Nazi atrocities and religious persecutions committed against Christians and Jews, in Germany, and in Poland, leading the New York Times to headline its report "Jews Rights Defended" and write of "burning words he spoke to Herr Ribbentrop about religious persecution". During the meeting, Ribbentrop suggested an overall settlement between the Vatican and the Reich government in exchange for Pius XII instructing the German bishops to refrain from political criticism of the German government, but no agreement was reached.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: 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. May justice and charity on one side and on the other be in perfect balance, so that all injustice be repaired, the reign of right restored". Later he appealed to the Allies to spare Rome from aerial bombing, and visited wounded victims of the Allied bombing of 19 July 1943.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius attempted, unsuccessfully, to dissuade the Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini from joining Hitler in the war. In April 1941, Pius XII granted a private audience to Ante Pavelić, the leader of the newly proclaimed Croatian state (rather than the diplomatic audience Pavelić had wanted). Pius was criticised for his reception of Pavelić: an unattributed British Foreign Office memo on the subject described Pius as "the greatest moral coward of our age". The Vatican did not officially recognise Pavelić's regime. Pius XII did not publicly condemn the expulsions and forced conversions to Catholicism perpetrated on Serbs by Pavelić; however, the Holy See did expressly repudiate the forced conversions in a memorandum dated 25 January 1942, from the Vatican Secretariat of State to the Yugoslavian Legation. The pope was well-informed of Catholic clergy involvement with the Ustaše regime, even possessing a list of clergymembers who had "joined in the slaughter", but decided against condemning the regime or taking action against the clergy involved, fearing that it would lead to schism in the Croatian church or undermine the formation of a future Croatian state. Pius XII would elevate Aloysius Stepinac—a Croatian archbishop convicted of collaborating with the Ustaše by the newly established Yugoslav Communist regime—to the cardinalate in 1953. Phayer agrees that Stepinac's was a "show trial", but states "the charge that he [Pius XII] supported the Ustaša regime was, of course, true, as everyone knew", and that "if Stepinac had responded to the charges against him, his defense would have inevitably unraveled, exposing the Vatican's support of the genocidal Pavelić". Throughout 1942, the Yugoslav government in exile sent letters of protest to Pius XII asking him to use all possible means to stop the massacres against the Serbs in the NDH, however Pius XII did nothing.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In 1941, Pius XII interpreted "Divini Redemptoris", an encyclical of Pope Pius XI, which forbade Catholics to help communists, as not applying to military assistance to the Soviet Union. This interpretation assuaged American Catholics who had previously opposed Lend-Lease arrangements with the Soviet Union.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In March 1942, Pius XII established diplomatic relations with the Japanese Empire and received ambassador Ken Harada, who remained in that position until the end of the war.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In June 1942, diplomatic relations were established with the Nationalist government of China. This step was envisaged earlier, but delayed due to Japanese pressure to establish relations with the pro-Japanese Wang Jingwei government. The first Chinese Minister to the Vatican, Hsieh Shou-kang, was only able to arrive at the Vatican in January 1943, due to difficulties of travel resulting from the war. He remained in that position until late 1946.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: The Pope employed the new technology of radio and a series of Christmas messages to preach against selfish nationalism and the evils of modern warfare and offer sympathy to the victims of the war. Pius XII's 1942 Christmas address via Vatican Radio voiced concern at human rights abuses and the murder of innocents based on race. The majority of the speech spoke generally about human rights and civil society; at the very end of the speech, Pius XII mentioned "the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline". According to Rittner, the speech remains a "lightning rod" in debates about Pius XII. The Nazis themselves responded to the speech by stating that it was "one long attack on everything we stand for. ... He is clearly speaking on behalf of the Jews. ... He is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals." The New York Times wrote that "The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas. ... In calling for a 'real new order' based on 'liberty, justice and love', ... the pope put himself squarely against Hitlerism." Historian Michael Phayer claims, however, that "it is still not clear "whose" genocide or "which" genocide he was referring to". Speaking on the 50th anniversary of Pius's death in 2008, the German Pope Benedict XVI recalled that the Pope's voice had been "broken by emotion" as he "deplored the situation" with a "clear reference to the deportation and extermination of the Jews".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Several authors have alleged a plot to kidnap Pius XII by the Nazis during their occupation of Rome in 1943 (Vatican City itself was not occupied); British historian Owen Chadwick and the Jesuit ADSS editor Rev. Robert Graham each concluded such claims were an intentional creation of the British Political Warfare Executive. However, in 2007, subsequent to those accounts, Dan Kurzman published a work which he maintains establishes that the plot was a fact.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In 1944, Pius XII issued a Christmas message in which he warned against rule by the masses and against secular conceptions of liberty and equality.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: As the war was approaching its end in 1945, Pius advocated a lenient policy by the Allied leaders in an effort to prevent what he perceived to be the mistakes made at the end of World War I. On 23 August 1944, he met British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was visiting Rome. At their meeting, the Pope acknowledged the justice of punishing war criminals, but expressed a hope that the people of Italy would not be punished, preferring that they be made "full allies" in the remaining war effort.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: During the Second World War, after Nazi Germany commenced its mass-murder of Jews in occupied Soviet territory, Pius XII employed diplomacy to aid victims of the Holocaust and directed the church to provide discreet aid to Jews. Upon his death in 1958, among many Jewish tributes, the Chief Rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff, said: "Jews will always remember what the Catholic Church did for them by order of the Pope during the Second World War. When the war was raging, Pius spoke out very often to condemn the false race theory." This is disputed by commentator John Cornwell, who in his book, "Hitler's Pope", argues that the pope was weak and vacillating in his approach to Nazism. Cornwell asserts that the pope did little to challenge the progressing holocaust of the Jews out of fear of provoking the Nazis into invading Vatican City.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In his 1939 "Summi Pontificatus" first papal encyclical, Pius reiterated Catholic teaching against racial persecution and antisemitism and affirmed the ethical principles of the "Revelation on Sinai". At Christmas 1942, once evidence of the mass-murder of Jews had emerged, Pius XII voiced concern at the murder of "hundreds of thousands" of "faultless" people because of their "nationality or race" and intervened to attempt to block Nazi deportations of Jews in various countries. Upon his death in 1958, Pius was praised emphatically by the Israeli Foreign Minister, and other world leaders. But his insistence on Vatican neutrality and avoidance of naming the Nazis as the evildoers of the conflict became the foundation for contemporary and later criticisms from some quarters. His strongest public condemnation of genocide was considered inadequate by the Allied Powers, while the Nazis viewed him as an Allied sympathizer who had dishonored his policy of Vatican neutrality. Hitler biographer John Toland, while scathing of Pius's cautious public comments in relation to the mistreatment of Jews, concluded that the Allies' own record of action against the Holocaust was "shameful", while "The Church, under the Pope's guidance, had already saved the lives of more Jews than all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations combined".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: 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. In 1939, the Pope employed a Jewish cartographer, Roberto Almagia, to work on old maps in the Vatican library. Almagia had been at the University of Rome since 1915 but was dismissed after Benito Mussolini's antisemitic legislation of 1938. The Pope's appointment of two Jews to the Vatican Academy of Science as well as the hiring of Almagia were reported by "The New York Times" in the editions of 11 November 1939 and 10 January 1940.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius later engineered an agreement—formally approved on 23 June 1939—with Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas to issue 3,000 visas to "non-Aryan Catholics". 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. The program was cancelled 14 months later, after fewer than 1,000 visas had been issued, amid suspicions of "improper conduct" (i.e., continuing to practice Judaism) among those who had received visas.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In April 1939, after the submission of Charles Maurras and the intervention of the Carmel of Lisieux, Pius XII ended his predecessor's ban on Action Française, a virulently antisemitic organization.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Following the German/Soviet invasion of Poland, the Pope's first encyclical, "Summi Pontificatus" reiterated Catholic teaching against racial persecution and rejected antisemitism, quoting scripture singling out the "principle of equality"—with specific reference to Jews: "there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision" and direct affirmation of the Jewish "Revelation on Sinai". The forgetting of solidarity "imposed by our common origin and by the equality of rational nature in all men" was called "pernicious error". Catholics everywhere were called upon to offer "compassion and help" to the victims of the war. The Pope declared determination to work to hasten the return of peace and trust in prayers for justice, love and mercy, to prevail against the scourge of war. The letter also decried the deaths of noncombatants.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione received a request from Chief Rabbi of Palestine Isaac Herzog in the spring of 1940 to intercede on behalf of Lithuanian Jews about to be deported to Germany. Pius called Ribbentrop on 11 March, repeatedly protesting against the treatment of Jews. In 1940, Pius asked members of the clergy, on Vatican letterhead, to do whatever they could on behalf of interned Jews.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In 1941, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna informed Pius of Jewish deportations in Vienna. Later that year, when asked by French Marshal Philippe Pétain if the Vatican objected to antisemitic laws, Pius responded that the church condemned antisemitism, but would not comment on specific rules. Similarly, when Philippe Pétain's regime adopted the "Jewish statutes", the Vichy ambassador to the Vatican, Léon Bérard (a French politician), was told that the legislation did not conflict with Catholic teachings. Valerio Valeri, the nuncio to France, was "embarrassed" when he learned of this publicly from Pétain and personally checked the information with Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione who confirmed the Vatican's position. In June 1942, Pius XII personally protested against the mass deportations of Jews from France, ordering the papal nuncio to protest to Pétain against "the inhuman arrests and deportations of Jews". In September 1941, Pius XII objected to a Slovak Jewish Code, which, unlike the earlier Vichy codes, prohibited intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews. In October 1941, Harold Tittmann, a US delegate to the Vatican, asked the pope to condemn the atrocities against Jews; Pius replied that the Vatican wished to remain "neutral", reiterating the neutrality policy which Pius invoked as early as September 1940.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In 1942, the Slovak chargé d'affaires told Pius that Slovak Jews were being sent to concentration camps. On 11 March 1942, several days before the first transport was due to leave, the chargé d'affaires in Bratislava reported to the Vatican: "I have been assured that this atrocious plan is the handwork of ... Prime Minister (Tuka), who confirmed the plan ... he dared to tell me—he who makes such a show of his Catholicism—that he saw nothing inhuman or un-Christian in it ... the deportation of 80,000 persons to Poland, is equivalent to condemning a great number of them to certain death." The Vatican protested to the Slovak government that it "deplore(s) these... measures which gravely hurt the natural human rights of persons, merely because of their race."


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On 18 September 1942, Pius XII received a letter from Monsignor Montini (future Pope Paul VI), saying "the massacres of the Jews reach frightening proportions and forms". Later that month, Myron Taylor, U.S. representative to the Vatican, warned Pius that the Vatican's "moral prestige" was being injured by silence on European atrocities, a warning which was echoed simultaneously by representatives from the United Kingdom, Brazil, Uruguay, Belgium, and Poland. Myron C. Taylor passed a US Government memorandum to Pius on 26 September 1942, outlining intelligence received from the Jewish Agency for Palestine which said that Jews from across the Nazi Empire were being systematically "butchered". Taylor asked if the Vatican might have any information which might "tend to confirm the reports", and if so, what the Pope might be able to do to influence public opinion against the "barbarities". Cardinal Maglione handed Harold Tittmann a response to the letter on 10 October. The note thanked Washington for passing on the intelligence, and confirmed that reports of severe measures against the Jews had reached the Vatican from other sources, though it had not been possible to "verify their accuracy". Nevertheless, "every opportunity is being taken by the Holy See, however, to mitigate the suffering of these unfortunate people". In December 1942, when Tittmann asked Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione if Pius would issue a proclamation similar to the Allied declaration "German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race", Maglione replied that the Vatican was "unable to denounce publicly particular atrocities". Pius XII directly explained to Tittman that he could not name the Nazis without at the same time mentioning the Bolsheviks.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Following the Nazi/Soviet invasion of Poland, Pius XII's "Summi Pontificatus" called for the sympathy of the whole world towards Poland, where "the blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants" was being spilled. Pius never publicly condemned the Nazi massacre of 1,800,000–1,900,000 Poles, overwhelmingly Catholic (including 2,935 members of the Catholic clergy). In late 1942, Pius XII advised German and Hungarian bishops to speak out against the massacres on the Eastern Front. In his 1942 Christmas Eve message, he expressed concern for "those hundreds of thousands, who ... sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or progressive extinction. On 7 April 1943, Msgr. Tardini, one of Pius XII's closest advisors, advised Pius XII that it would be politically advantageous after the war to take steps to help Slovak Jews.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: 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. According to Toland, in June 1943, Pius XII addressed the issue of mistreatment of Jews at a conference of the Sacred College of Cardinals and said: "Every word We address to the competent authority on this subject, and all Our public utterances have to be carefully weighed and measured by Us in the interests of the victims themselves, lest, contrary to Our intentions, We make their situation worse and harder to bear".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On 26 September 1943, following the German occupation of northern Italy, Nazi officials gave Jewish leaders in Rome 36 hours to produce of gold (or the equivalent) threatening to take 300 hostages. Then Chief Rabbi of Rome Israel Zolli recounts in his memoir that he was selected to go to the Vatican and seek help. The Vatican offered to loan 15 kilos, but the offer proved unnecessary when the Jews received an extension. Soon afterward, when deportations from Italy were imminent, 477 Jews were hidden in the Vatican itself and another 4,238 were protected in Roman monasteries and convents. Eighty percent of Roman Jews were saved from deportation. Phayer argues that the German diplomats in Rome were the "initiators of the effort to save the city's Jews", but holds that Pius XII "cooperated in this attempt at rescue", while agreeing with Zuccotti that the pope "did not give orders" for any Catholic institution to hide Jews.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On 30 April 1943, Pius XII wrote to Bishop Graf 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. Here lies one of the reasons, why We impose self-restraint on Ourselves in our speeches; the experience, that we made in 1942 with papal addresses, which We authorized to be forwarded to the Believers, justifies our opinion, as far as We see. ... The Holy See has done whatever was in its power, with charitable, financial and moral assistance. To say nothing of the substantial sums which we spent in American money for the fares of immigrants."


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On 28 October 1943, Ernst von Weizsäcker, the German Ambassador to the Vatican, telegraphed Berlin that "the Pope has not yet let himself be persuaded to make an official condemnation of the deportation of the Roman Jews. ... Since it is currently thought that the Germans will take no further steps against the Jews in Rome, the question of our relations with the Vatican may be considered closed."


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In March 1944, through the papal nuncio in Budapest, Angelo Rotta, the pope urged the Hungarian government to moderate its treatment of the Jews. The pope ordered Rotta and other papal legates to hide and shelter Jews. These protests, along with others from the King of Sweden, the International Red Cross, the United States, and Britain led to the cessation of deportations on 8 July 1944. Also in 1944, Pius appealed to 13 Latin American governments to accept "emergency passports", although it also took the intervention of the U.S. State Department for those countries to honor the documents. The Kaltenbrunner Report to Hitler, dated 29 November 1944, against the backdrop of the 20 July 1944 Plot to assassinate Hitler, states that the Pope was somehow a conspirator, specifically naming Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII), as being a party in the attempt.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In 2005, "Corriere della Sera" published a document dated 20 November 1946 on the subject of Jewish children baptized in war-time France. The document ordered that baptized children, if orphaned, should be kept in Catholic custody and stated that the decision "has been approved by the Holy Father". Nuncio Angelo Roncalli (who became Pope John XXIII, and was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations) ignored this directive. 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. Two Italian scholars, Matteo Luigi Napolitano and Andrea Tornielli, confirmed that the memorandum was genuine although the reporting by the "Corriere della Sera" was misleading, as the document had originated in the French Catholic Church archives rather than the Vatican archives and strictly concerned itself with children without living blood relatives who were supposed to be handed over to Jewish organizations.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Writings from released Vatican records revealed that Pius XII was personally but secretly involved in hiding the Finaly children from their Jewish family in an ultimately failed attempt to keep them Catholic after their secret baptism done against the wishes of their family. The French Catholic Church received very bad press from the affair, and several nuns and monks were jailed for the kidnapping before the children were discovered and spirited away to Israel. But it is only recently that the Pope's personal involvement was revealed.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: After World War II, Pope Pius XII focused on material aid to war-torn Europe, an internal internationalization of the Catholic Church, and the development of its worldwide diplomatic relations. His encyclicals, "Evangelii praecones" and "Fidei donum", issued on 2 June 1951 and 21 April 1957, respectively, increased the local decision-making of Catholic missions, many of which became independent dioceses. Pius XII demanded recognition of local cultures as fully equal to European culture. Though his language retained old conceptions – Africa, for example, merited special attention since the church there worked 'to forward her work among the heathen multitudes' – in 1956 he expressed solidarity with the 'non-Europeans who aspire to full political independence'.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In the immediate aftermath of the war, Pius XII elevated a number of high-profile resistors of Nazism to the College of Cardinals in 1946, among them the German Bishops Joseph Frings of Cologne, Clemens von Galen of Münster and Konrad von Preysing of Berlin. From elsewhere in the liberated Nazi Empire Pius selected other resistors: Dutch Archbishop Johannes de Jong; Hungarian Bishop József Mindszenty; Polish Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha; and French Archbishop Jules-Géraud Saliège. In 1946 and 1953, respectively, he named as cardinals Thomas Tien of China and Valerian Gracias of India – the first indigenous Catholics of their respective nations to sit in the College of Cardinals. Italian Papal diplomat Angelo Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII) and Polish Archbishop Stefan Wyszyński were others among those elevated in 1953.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: A German contingent dominated his inner circle at this period – the German Jesuits Robert Leiber, Wilhelm Hentrich and Ivo Zeiger. His personal confessor Augustin Bea was a German Jesuit and Mother Pascalina Lehnert and the other German speaking sisters of the papal household added to this element. The American bishop Aloisius Muench wrote in November 1948 that Pius XII was 'more interested in affairs of the Church in Germany than in any other part of the Church' and resolved to make the postwar German crisis a top priority – 'its refugee crisis, poverty, hunger and disease, the fate of prisoners-of-war and accused war criminals, the disruption to the internal organization and communal life of German Catholicism, and Germany's uncertain political future'.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: He was concerned too about the potential spread of Communism in Western Europe and the Americas. As he sought to secure resources from abroad to aid post-war recovery, believing deprivation fuelled political agitation, so he also sought to influence Italian politics. In January 1948, Luigi Gedda, of Italy's Catholic Action movement, was called to the Vatican as the campaign for the first parliament of Italy's post-fascist republic was underway.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius XII was rather distrustful of Alcide de Gasperi and Italy's Christian Democrats, considering the party indecisive and fractious – reformist currents within it particularly, which tended to the moderate Left – represented by the Sicilian priest Luigi Sturzo for example – he considered too accommodating to the Left. On the eve of the 1952 local elections in Rome, in which again the Communist and Socialist parties threatened to win out, he used informal connections to make his views known. Pius XII stated that the war against communism was a holy war and excommunicated members of the Communist Party. Having decided to encourage the Christian Democrats to consider a political alliance with the Rightist parties as part of an anti-left coalition, he asked the Jesuit, Father Riccardo Lombardi, to speak with de Gasperi to consider such an alliance – an electoral alliance with those even of monarchist and neo-fascist tendencies -including the Italian Social Movement. Adopting a domino theory he warned that, if "the Communists win in Rome, in Italy, it will cast a shadow on the entire world: France would become Communist, and then Spain and then all of Europe'.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: A long illness in late 1954 caused the Pope to consider abdication. Afterwards, changes in his work habit became noticeable. The Pope avoided long ceremonies, canonizations and consistories and displayed hesitancy in personnel matters. He found it increasingly difficult to chastise subordinates and appointees such as his physician, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, who after numerous indiscretions was excluded from Papal service for the last years, but, keeping his title, was able to enter the papal apartments to make photos of the dying Pope, which he sold to French magazines. Pius underwent three courses of cellular rejuvenation treatment administered by Paul Niehans, the most important in 1954 when Pius was gravely ill. Side-effects of the treatment included hallucinations, from which the Pope suffered in his last years. "These years were also plagued by horrific nightmares. Pacelli's blood-curdling screams could be heard throughout the papal apartments."


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius XII often elevated young priests as bishops, such as Julius Döpfner (35 years) and Karol Wojtyła (later Pope John Paul II, 38 years), one of his last appointees in 1958. He took a firm stand against pastoral experiments, such as "worker-priests", who worked full-time in factories and joined political parties and unions. He continued to defend the theological tradition of Thomism as worthy of continued reform, and as superior to modern trends such as phenomenology or existentialism.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: 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. The Pope still addressed lay people and groups about a wide range of topics. Sometimes he answered specific moral questions, which were addressed to him. To professional associations he explained specific occupational ethics in light of church teachings. Robert Leiber helped him occasionally with his speeches and publications. Cardinal Augustine Bea SJ was his personal confessor. Sister Pasqualina was for forty years his "housekeeper, muse and lifelong companion".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On Monday, 6 October 1958, at around 8:30 AM (07:30 GMT), he suffered a stroke, weakening him greatly in addition to his other maladies, after having taken ill the previous day after a series of meetings. He received the Last rites. However, his condition suitable improved until 8 October when he suffered a second stroke. By the mid-afternoon, his doctors had reported that Pius XII was suffering from a severe cardio-pulmonary collapse and by 3:00 PM (14:00 GMT) believed that his death was imminent. Just before sunset, Pius XII contracted pneumonia and doctors immediately moved to bring in oxygen and blood plasma. His last words were reportedly, "Pray. Pray that this regrettable situation for the church may end". When Pius XII was interred, the small crucifix and rosary that he held in his hands as he died were buried with him.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On the last full day of his life, his temperature rose steadily and his breathing became difficult. At 3:52 AM (02:52 GMT) on Thursday, 9 October, a Feast of Saint Denis of Paris, he gave a smile, lowered his head and died. The cause of death was recorded as acute heart failure. Domenico Tardini prayed the "Magnificat Anima mea dominum", the Virgin Mary's praise of the Lord, in Latin. His doctor Gaspanini said afterwards: "The Holy Father did not die because of any specific illness. He was completely exhausted. He was overworked beyond limit. His heart was healthy, his lungs were good. He could have lived another 20 years, had he spared himself." Spain declared ten days of mourning; Italy declared three days of mourning and the closure of offices and schools as a sign of respect; Cuba declared three days of mourning.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius XII's physician, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, reported that the pontiff's body was embalmed in the room where he died using a novel process invented by Oreste Nuzzi.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pope Pius XII did not want the vital organs removed from his body, demanding instead that it be kept in the same condition "in which God created it". According to Galeazzi-Lisi, this was the reason why he and Nuzzi, an embalmer from Naples, used an atypical approach with the embalming procedure. In a controversial press conference, Galeazzi-Lisi described in great detail the embalming of the body of the late pontiff. He claimed to have used the same system of oils and resins with which the body of Jesus Christ was preserved.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Galeazzi-Lisi asserted that the new process would "preserve the body indefinitely in its natural state". However, whatever chance the new embalming process had of efficaciously preserving the body was obliterated by intense heat in Castel Gandolfo during the embalming process. As a result, the body decomposed rapidly and the viewing of the faithful had to be terminated abruptly.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Galeazzi-Lisi reported that heat in the halls, where the body of the late Pope lay in state, caused chemical reactions which required it to be treated twice after the original preparation. Swiss Guards stationed around Pius XII's body were reported to have become ill during their vigil.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: His funeral procession into Rome was the largest congregation of Romans as of that date. Romans mourned "their" pope, who was born in their own city, especially as a hero in the time of war. 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.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: The late pope lay in state on a bier surrounded by four Swiss Guards, and was then placed in the coffin for burial. Pius XII was buried in the grottos beneath St. Peter's Basilica in a simple tomb in a small chapel.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: The Testament of Pope Pius XII was published immediately after his death. Pope Pius XII's cause of canonization was opened on 18 November 1965 by Pope Paul VI during the final session of the Second Vatican Council. In May 2007, the congregation recommended that Pius XII should be declared Venerable. Pope Benedict XVI did so on 19 December 2009, simultaneously making the same declaration in regard to Pope John Paul II.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: For Venerable status, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints certifies the "heroic virtues" of the candidate. Making Pius XII as Venerable met with various responses, most centered on the papal words and actions during World War II. Benedict's signature on the decree of heroic virtue was regarded by some as a public relations blunder, though acceptance of Pius XII as a saviour of Europe's Jews is regarded as 'proof of fidelity to the Church, the "pope" and the Tradition' by neoconservative Catholic groups. On the other hand, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center said "there would be a great distortion of history" if Pius XII were canonized. Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence, the head of Sydney's Great Synagogue, said: "How can one venerate a man who ... seemed to give his passive permission to the Nazis as the Jews were prised from his doorstep in Rome?"


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On 1 August 2013, an anonymous "source who works for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints" said Pope Francis is considering canonization without a miracle, "us[ing] the formula of "scientia certa"".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pope Francis also announced his intention in January 2014 to open the Vatican Secret Archives to scholars so that an evaluation of the late pontiff's role in the war can be determined before canonization. This has been met with praise by the Jewish community. However, it was said that it could take up to a year to gather all the documents and then analyze them.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On 26 May 2014 on his way back from the Holy Land to Vatican City, Pope Francis stated that the late pope would not be beatified because the cause has stalled. Pope Francis stated that he checked the progress of the cause for Pius XII and said that there were no miracles attributed to his intercession, which was the main reason that the cause had halted.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Father Peter Gumpel stated, on a 12 January 2016 documentary on the late pope, that there was consultation of the Vatican Secret Archives which were carried out in secret; in short it means that there are no controversies surrounding the late pontiff that could impede the potential beatification. 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. Lindeijer explained that this was the reason that the cause has stalled in the past as none have come forward to assist the postulation in their investigations.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Reports from 2014 indicate a potential miracle from the United States attributed to the intercession of the late pope that was reported to the postulation. The miracle pertains to a male plagued with severe influenza and pneumonia that could have proven to be fatal; the individual was said to have been healed in full after a novena to Pius XII.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: During the war, "Time" credited Pius XII and the Catholic Church for "fighting totalitarianism more knowingly, devoutly and authoritatively, and for a longer time, than any other organised power". During the war he was also praised editorially by "The New York Times" for opposing Nazi anti-Semitism and aggression. According to Paul O'Shea, "The Nazis demonised the Pope as the agent of international Jewry; the Americans and British were continually frustrated because he would not condemn Nazi aggression; and the Russians accused him of being an agent of Fascism and the Nazis."


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On 21 September 1945, the general secretary of the World Jewish Council, Leon Kubowitzky, 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." After the war, in the autumn of 1945, Harry Greenstein from Baltimore, a close friend of Chief Rabbi Herzog of Jerusalem, told Pius XII how grateful Jews were for all he had done for them. "My only regret", the pope replied, "is not to have been able to save a greater number of Jews".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pius XII was also criticised during his lifetime. Leon Poliakov wrote in 1950 that Pius XII had been a tacit supporter of Vichy France's anti-Semitic laws, calling him "less forthright" than Pope Pius XI either out of "Germanophilia" or the hope that Hitler would defeat communist Russia.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: After Pius XII's death on 9 October 1958 many Jewish organisations and newspapers around the world paid tribute to his legacy. At the United Nations, Golda Meir, Israel's Foreign Minister, said, "When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict." "The Jewish Chronicle" (London) stated on 10 October that "Adherents of all creeds and parties will recall how Pius XII faced the responsibilities of his exalted office with courage and devotion. Before, during, and after the Second World War, he constantly preached the message of peace. Confronted by the monstrous cruelties of Nazism, Fascism and Communism, he repeatedly proclaimed the virtues of humanity and compassion". In the Canadian Jewish Chronicle (17 October), Rabbi J. Stern stated that Pius XII "made it possible for thousands of Jewish victims of Nazism and Fascism to be hidden away..." In 6 November edition of the Jewish Post in Winnipeg, William Zukerman, the former American Hebrew columnist, wrote that no other leader "did more to help the Jews in their hour of greatest tragedy, during the Nazi occupation of Europe, than the late Pope". Other prominent Jewish figures, such as Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett and Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog expressed their public gratitude to Pius XII.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Some early works echoed the favourable sentiments of the war period, including Polish historian Oskar Halecki's "Pius XII: Eugenio Pacelli: Pope of peace" (1954) and Nazareno Padellaro's "Portrait of Pius XII" (1949).


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Pinchas Lapide, a Jewish theologian and Israeli diplomat to Milan in the 1960s, estimated controversially in "Three Popes and the Jews" that Pius "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000 but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands". Some historians have questioned this often cited number, which Lapide reached by "deducting all reasonable claims of rescue" by non-Catholics from the total number of European Jews surviving the Holocaust. A Catholic scholar, Kevin Madigan, has interpreted this and other praise from prominent Jewish leaders, including Golda Meir, as less than sincere, an attempt to secure Vatican recognition of the State of Israel.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In 1963, Rolf Hochhuth's controversial drama "Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel" ("The Deputy, a Christian tragedy", released in English in 1964) portrayed Pope Pius XII as a hypocrite who remained silent about the Holocaust. The depiction is described as lacking "credible substantiation" by the Encyclopædia Britannica. Books such as Joseph Lichten's "A Question of Judgment" (1963), written in response to "The Deputy", defended Pius XII's actions during the war. Lichten labelled any criticism of the pope's actions during World War II as "a stupefying paradox" and said, "no one who reads the record of Pius XII's actions on behalf of Jews can subscribe to Hochhuth's accusation". Critical scholarly works like Guenter Lewy's controversial "The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany" (1964) also followed the publication of "The Deputy". Lewy's conclusion was that "the Pope and his advisers—influenced by the long tradition of moderate anti-Semitism so widely accepted in Vatican circles—did not view the plight of the Jews with a real sense of urgency and moral outrage. For this assertion no documentation is possible, but it is a conclusion difficult to avoid". In 2002 the play was adapted into the film, "Amen.". An article on "La Civilità Cattolica" in March 2009 indicated that the accusations that Hochhuth's play made widely known originated not among Jews but in the Communist bloc. It was on Moscow Radio, on 2 June 1945, that the first accusation directly against Pius XII of refusing to speak out against the exterminations in Nazi concentration camps. It was also the first medium to call him "Hitler's Pope".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: 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 Marxist secret services disinformation campaign, named Seat 12, to discredit the moral authority of the church and Christianity in the west. Pacepa indicated that he was involved in contacting eastern bloc agents close the Vatican in order to fabricate the story to be used for the attack against the wartime pope.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding "The Deputy", in 1964, Pope Paul VI authorized Jesuit scholars to access the Vatican State Department Archives, which are normally not opened for seventy-five years. Original documents in French and Italian, "Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale", were published in eleven volumes between 1965 and 1981. The volumes were edited by Four Jesuits: Angelo Martini, Burkhart Schneider, Robert Graham and Pierre Blet. Blet also published a summary of the eleven volumes.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In 1999, British author John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope" criticised Pius XII for his actions and inactions during the Holocaust. Cornwell argued that Pius XII subordinated opposition to the Nazis to his goal of increasing and centralising the power of the Papacy. Further, Cornwell accused Pius XII of anti-Semitism. The "Encyclopædia Britannica" described Cornwell's depiction of Pius XII as anti-Semitic as lacking "credible substantiation". Kenneth L. Woodward stated in his review in "Newsweek" that "errors of fact and ignorance of context appear on almost every page". Paul O'Shea summarized the work by saying it was "disappointing because of its many inaccuracies, selective use of sources, and claims that do not bear any scrutiny. However, [Cornwell] has rendered a service by insisting Pacelli be re-examined thoroughly and placed firmly within the context of his times". Five years after the publication of "Hitler's Pope", Cornwell stated: "I would now argue, in the light of the debates and evidence following "Hitler's Pope", that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by Germany".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Cornwell's work was the first to have access to testimonies from Pius XII's beatification process as well as to many documents from Pacelli's nunciature which had just been opened under the 75-year rule by the Vatican State Secretary archives. Susan Zuccotti's "" (2000) and Michael Phayer's "The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965" (2000) and "Pius XII, The Holocaust, and the Cold War" (2008) provided further critical, though more scholarly analysis of Pius's legacy. Daniel Goldhagen's "A Moral Reckoning" and David Kertzer's "The Pope Against the Jews" denounced Pius, while Ralph McInery and José Sanchez wrote less critical assessments of Pius XII's pontificate.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In specific riposte to Cornwell's criticism, American Rabbi and historian David Dalin published "The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis" in 2005. He reaffirmed previous accounts of Pius having been a saviour of thousands of Europe's Jews. In a review of the book, another Jewish scholar—Churchill biographer, Martin Gilbert—wrote that Dalin's work was "an essential contribution to our understanding of the reality of Pope Pius XII's support for Jews at their time of greatest danger. Hopefully, his account will replace the divisively harmful version of papal neglect, and even collaboration, that has held the field for far too long". Dalin's book also argued that Cornwell and others were liberal Catholics and ex-Catholics who "exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today" and that Pius XII was responsible for saving the lives of many thousands of Jews.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: A number of other scholars replied with favourable accounts of Pius XII, including Margherita Marchione's "Yours Is a Precious Witness: Memoirs of Jews and Catholics in Wartime Italy" (1997), "Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace" (2000) and "Consensus and Controversy: Defending Pope Pius XII" (2002); Pierre Blet's "Pius XII and the Second World War, According to the Archives of the Vatican" (1999); and Ronald J. Rychlak's "Hitler, the War and the Pope" (2000). Ecclesiastical historian William Doino (author of "The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII"), concluded that Pius was "emphatically "not" silent". 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.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In his 2003 book "A Moral Reckoning", Daniel Goldhagen asserted that Pius XII "chose again and again not to mention the Jews publicly... [In] public statements by Pius XII ... any mention of the Jews is conspicuously absent." In a review of Goldhagen's book, Mark Riebling counters that Pius used the word "Jew" in his first encyclical, "Summi Pontificatus", published on 20 October 1939. "There Pius insisted that all human beings be treated charitably—for, as Paul had written to the Colossians, in God's eyes "there is neither Gentile nor Jew". In saying this, the Pope affirmed that Jews were full members of the human community—which is Goldhagen's own criterion for establishing 'dissent from the anti-Semitic creed'."


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In "Pius XII, the Hound of Hitler", Catholic journalist Gerard Noel dismissed accusations that Pius was "anti-semitic" or "pro-Nazi", but accused him of "silence" based on fear of retaliation and wrote that "Hitler played the Pope with consummate expertise". Ian Kershaw came to a similar conclusion about Pius's motives. He suggested that besides seeking to protect his own church and parishioners, Pius feared that speaking out would worsen the plight of the Jews, though he could have hardly made it worse after 1942. Kershaw called the 1942 Christmas message "a missed opportunity", adding: "Having decided to refer to the genocide, Pius ought to have followed this with a condemnation that was loud, plain and unequivocal." However, he doubted that condemnation from the Pope would have led to Nazi Germany changing course.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: 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.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: A Berlin Jewish couple, Mr. and Mrs. Wolfsson, argued in defense of the pope: "None of us wanted the Pope to take an open stand. We were all fugitives, and fugitives do not wish to be pointed at. The Gestapo would have become more excited and would have intensified its inquisitions. If the Pope had protested, Rome would have become the center of attention. It was better that the Pope said nothing. We all shared this opinion at the time, and this is still our conviction today." There were examples when the Catholic Church reaction to Nazi brutality only intensified SS persecutions of both Jews and the church.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In 1999, in an attempt to address some of this controversy, the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission (Historical Commission), a group of three Catholic and three Jewish scholars was appointed, respectively, by the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews (Holy See's Commission) and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC), to whom a preliminary report was issued in October 2000.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: The Commission did not discover any documents, but had the agreed-upon task to review the existing Vatican volumes, that make up the "Actes et Documents du Saint Siège (ADSS)" The commission was internally divided over the question of access to additional documents from the Holy See, access to the news media by individual commission members, and, questions to be raised in the preliminary report. It was agreed to include all 47 individual questions by the six members, and use them as Preliminary Report.<ref name="Gerard P Fogarty, Vatican/Holocaust">Fogarty, Gerard P., "The Vatican and the Holocaust, Presentation to the Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C.", 9 December 2000</ref> In addition to the 47 questions, the commission issued no findings of its own. It stated that it was not their task to sit in judgment of the Pope and his advisors but to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the papacy during the Holocaust.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: The 47 questions by the six scholars were grouped into three parts: (a) 27 specific questions on existing documents, mostly asking for background and additional information such as drafts of the encyclical "Mit brennender Sorge", which was largely written by Eugenio Pacelli. (b) Fourteen questions dealt with themes of individual volumes, such as the question how Pius viewed the role of the church during the war. (c) Six general questions, such as the absence of any anti-communist sentiments in the documents. The disagreement between members over additional documents locked up under the Holy See's 70-year rule resulted in a discontinuation of the commission in 2001 on friendly terms. Unsatisfied with the findings, Michael Marrus, one of the three Jewish members of the commission, said the commission "ran up against a brick wall ... It would have been really helpful to have had support from the Holy See on this issue."


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Peter Stanford, a Catholic journalist and writer, wrote, regarding "Fatal Silence: the pope, the resistance and the German occupation of Rome" (written by Robert Katz; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003):


title: Pope Pius XII

text: Katz's book also discusses how the Pope's view of the anti-Nazi resistance—as harbingers of Communism—meant he chose not to intervene in the Ardeatine Caves Massacre.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In "The Real Odessa. How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina" (2002), the Argentine journalist Uki Goñi described how the Argentinean government dealt with war criminals who entered Argentina. However, during his research Goñi accidentally stumbled on British Foreign Office documents relating to the involvement of Vatican personnel in the smuggling of war criminals, the so-called post-war "ratlines". Goñi found out that the British Envoy D'Arcy Osborne had intervened with Pope Pius XII to put an end to these illegal activities. Furthermore, he discovered "that the Pope secretly pleaded with Washington and London on behalf of notorious criminals and Nazi collaborators". Suzanne Brown-Fleming's "The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience. Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany" (2006) underlines Goñi's findings. Brown-Fleming stated how Pius XII allegedly intervened on behalf of German war criminals (e.g. Otto Ohlendorf). Brown-Fleming's main source was the archive of Pope Pius XII's representative in post-war Germany, Cardinal Aloisius Muench. Then, Phayer's "Pius XII, The Holocaust, and the Cold War" (2008) utilized documents that were released via Bill Clinton's 1997 executive order declassifying wartime and postwar documents, many of which are currently at the US National Archives and Holocaust Memorial Museum. These documents include diplomatic correspondence, American espionage, and decryptions of German communications. Relevant documents have also been released by the Argentine government and the British Foreign Office. Other information sources have become available, including the diary of Bishop Hurley. 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. According to Phayer, "the face of Pope Pius that we see in these documents is not the same face we see in the eleven volumes the Vatican published of World War II documents, a collection which, though valuable, is nonetheless critically flawed because of its many omissions".


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On 19 September 2008, Pope Benedict XVI held a reception for conference participants during which he praised Pius XII as a pope who made every effort to save Jews during the war. A second conference was held from 6–8 November 2008 by the Pontifical Academy of Life.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On 9 October 2008, the 50th anniversary of Pius XII's death, Benedict XVI celebrated pontifical Mass in his memory. Shortly before and after the Mass, dialectics continued between the Jewish hierarchy and the Vatican as Rabbi Shear Yeshuv Cohen of Haifa addressed the Synod of Bishops and expressed his disappointment towards Pius XII's "silence" during the war.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On 16 June 2009, the "Pave the Way Foundation" announced that it would release 2,300 pages of documents in Avellino, Italy, dating from 1940 to 1945, which the organisation claims show that Pius XII "worked diligently to save Jews from Nazi tyranny"; the organisation's founder, Krupp, has accused historians of harbouring "private agendas" and having "let down" the public. The foundation's research led to the publication of the book "Pope Pius XII and World War II: the documented truth", authored by Krupp; the book reproduces 225 pages of the new documents produced by the foundation's research.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: 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. The courier between the resistance group under Admiral Canaris and the Pope was the Bavarian lawyer and Catholic politician Joseph Müller.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the appointment of Pius XII as Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis announced during an audience for staff of the Vatican Secret Archives on 4 March 2019 that Vatican archival materials pertaining to Pius XII's pontificate will be accessible to scholars beginning on 2 March 2020. While this announcement was welcome by researchers, much of it has been clouded by the role of Pope Pius XII with regard to the Holocaust. However, archival research of this period should inform a much broader shift within global Christianity, from Europe to the global South.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: The Vatican archives have provided many millions of pages and it is expected to take many years to process the findings. As of May 2021, the study of the archive has been inconclusive.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In January 2022, historian Michael 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.


title: Pope Pius XII

text: In June 2022, David Kertzer, one of the first historians to have analyzed the archives, published his book "The Pope at War". Kertzer, with the support of thousands of unpublished documents, uncovered the existence of secret negotiations between Hitler and Pius XII already a few weeks after the end of the conclave, promoted by Hitler himself with the intention of improving his relations with the Vatican. Pius XII, for his part, concentrated his efforts on protecting and improving the situation of the Church in Germany in the face of the anti-Catholic policies of the Nazis, although both sides could not reach any agreement.


title: Iron lung

text: An iron lung is a type of negative pressure ventilator (NPV), a mechanical respirator which encloses most of a person's body, and varies the air pressure in the enclosed space, to stimulate breathing. It assists breathing when muscle control is lost, or the work of breathing exceeds the person's ability. Need for this treatment may result from diseases including polio and botulism and certain poisons (for example, barbiturates, tubocurarine).


title: Iron lung

text: The use of iron lungs is largely obsolete in modern medicine, as more modern breathing therapies have been developed, and due to the eradication of polio in most of the world. However, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic revived some interest in the device as a cheap, readily-producible substitute for positive-pressure ventilators, which were feared to be outnumbered by patients potentially needing temporary artificially assisted respiration.


title: Iron lung

text: The iron lung is typically a large horizontal cylinder, in which a person is laid, with their head protruding from a hole in the end of the cylinder, so that their full head (down to their voice box) is outside the cylinder, exposed to ambient air, and the rest of their body sealed inside the cylinder, where air pressure is continuously cycled up and down, to stimulate breathing.


title: Iron lung

text: To cause the patient to inhale, air is pumped out of the cylinder, causing a slight vacuum, which causes the patient's chest and abdomen to expand (drawing air from outside the cylinder, through the patient's exposed nose or mouth, into their lungs). Then, for the patient to exhale, the air inside the cylinder is compressed slightly (or allowed to equalize to ambient room pressure), causing the patient's chest and abdomen to partially collapse, forcing air out of the lungs, as the patient exhales the breath through their exposed mouth and nose, outside the cylinder.


title: Iron lung

text: Examples of the device include the Drinker respirator, the Emerson respirator, and the Both respirator. Iron lungs can be either manually or mechanically powered but normally are powered by an electric motor linked to a flexible pumping diaphragm (commonly opposite the end of the cylinder from the patient's head). Larger "room-sized" iron lungs were also developed, allowing for simultaneous ventilation of several patients (each with their heads protruding from sealed openings in the outer wall), with sufficient space inside for a nurse or a respiratory therapist to be inside the sealed room, attending the patients.


title: Iron lung

text: Smaller, single-patient versions of the iron lung include the so-called "cuirass ventilator" (named for the cuirass, a torso-covering body armor). The cuirass ventilator encloses only the patient's torso, or chest and abdomen, but otherwise operates essentially the same as the original, full-sized iron lung. A lightweight variation on the cuirass ventilator is the "jacket ventilator" or "poncho" or "raincoat" ventilator, which uses a flexible, impermeable material (such as plastic or rubber) stretched over a metal or plastic frame over the patient's torso.


title: Iron lung

text: Humans, like most mammals, breathe by "negative pressure" breathing: the rib cage expands and the diaphragm contracts, expanding the chest cavity. This causes the pressure in the chest cavity to decrease, and the lungs expand to fill the space. This, in turn, causes the pressure of the air inside the lungs to decrease (it becomes negative, relative to the atmosphere), and air flows into the lungs from the atmosphere: inhalation. When the diaphragm relaxes, the reverse happens and the person exhales. If a person loses part or all of the ability to control the muscles involved, breathing becomes difficult or impossible.


title: Iron lung

text: In 1670, English scientist John Mayow came up with the idea of external negative pressure ventilation. Mayow built a model consisting of bellows and a bladder to pull in and expel air.


title: Iron lung

text: The first negative pressure ventilator was described by British physician John Dalziel in 1832. Successful use of similar devices was described a few years later. Early prototypes included a hand-operated bellows-driven "Spirophore" designed by Dr Woillez of Paris (1876), and an airtight wooden box designed specifically for the treatment of polio by Dr Stueart of South Africa (1918). Stueart's box was sealed at the waist and shoulders with clay and powered by motor-driven bellows.


title: Iron lung

text: The first of these devices to be widely used however was developed in 1928 by Drinker and Shaw of the United States. The iron lung, often referred to in the early days as the "Drinker respirator", was invented by Philip Drinker (1894–1972) and Louis Agassiz Shaw Jr., professors of industrial hygiene at the Harvard School of Public Health. The machine was powered by an electric motor with air pumps from two vacuum cleaners. The air pumps changed the pressure inside a rectangular, airtight metal box, pulling air in and out of the lungs.


title: Iron lung

text: The first clinical use of the Drinker respirator on a human was on October 12, 1928, at the Boston Children's Hospital in the US. The subject was an eight-year-old girl who was nearly dead as a result of respiratory failure due to polio. Her dramatic recovery, within less than a minute of being placed in the chamber, helped popularize the new device.


title: Iron lung

text: Boston manufacturer Warren E. Collins began production of the iron lung that year. Although it was initially developed for the treatment of victims of coal gas poisoning, it was most famously used in the mid-20th century for the treatment of respiratory failure caused by poliomyelitis.


title: Iron lung

text: Danish physiologist August Krogh, upon returning to Copenhagen in 1931 from a visit to New York where he saw the Drinker machine in use, constructed the first Danish respirator designed for clinical purposes. Krogh's device differed from Drinker's in that its motor was powered by water from the city pipelines. Krogh also made an infant respirator version.


title: Iron lung

text: In 1931, John Haven Emerson (1906–1997) introduced an improved and less expensive iron lung. The Emerson iron lung had a bed that could slide in and out of the cylinder as needed, and the tank had portal windows which allowed attendants to reach in and adjust limbs, sheets, or hot packs. Drinker and Harvard University sued Emerson, claiming he had infringed on patent rights. Emerson defended himself by making the case that such lifesaving devices should be freely available to all. Emerson also demonstrated that every aspect of Drinker's patents had been published or used by others at earlier times. Since an invention must be novel to be patentable, prior publication/use of the invention meant it was not novel and therefore unpatentable. Emerson won the case, and Drinker's patents were declared invalid.


title: Iron lung

text: The United Kingdom's first iron lung was designed in 1934 by Robert Henderson, an Aberdeen doctor. Henderson had seen a demonstration of the Drinker respirator in the early 1930s and built a device of his own upon his return to Scotland. Four weeks after its construction, the Henderson respirator was used to save the life of a 10-year-old boy from New Deer, Aberdeenshire, who had poliomyelitis. Despite this success, Henderson was reprimanded for secretly using hospital facilities to build the machine.


title: Iron lung

text: The Both respirator, a negative pressure ventilator, was invented in 1937 when Australia's epidemic of poliomyelitis created an immediate need for more ventilating machines to compensate for respiratory paralysis. Although the Drinker model was effective and saved lives, its widespread use was hindered by the fact that the machines were very large, heavy (about 750 lbs or 340 kg), bulky, and expensive. In the US, an adult machine cost about $2000 in 1930, and £2000 delivered to Melbourne in 1936. The cost in Europe in the mid-1950s was around £1500. Consequently, there were few of the Drinker devices in Australia and Europe.


title: Iron lung

text: The South Australia Health Department asked Adelaide brothers Edward and Don Both to create an inexpensive "iron lung". Biomedical engineer Edward Both designed and developed a cabinet respirator made of plywood that worked similarly to the Drinker device, with the addition of a bi-valved design which allowed temporary access to the patient's body. Far cheaper to make (only £100) than the Drinker machine, the Both Respirator also weighed less and could be constructed and transported more quickly. Such was the demand for the machines that they were often used by patients within an hour of production.


title: Iron lung

text: Visiting London in 1938 during another polio epidemic, Both produced additional respirators there which attracted the attention of William Morris (Lord Nuffield), a British motor manufacturer and philanthropist. Nuffield, intrigued by the design, financed the production of approximately 1700 machines at his car factory in Cowley, and donated them to hospitals throughout all parts of Britain and the British Empire. Soon, the Both-Nuffield respirators were able to be produced by the thousand at about one-thirteenth the cost of the American design. By the early 1950s, there were over 700 Both-Nuffield iron lungs in the United Kingdom, but only 50 Drinker devices.


title: Iron lung

text: Rows of iron lungs filled hospital wards at the height of the polio outbreaks of the 1940s and 1950s, helping children, and some adults, with bulbar polio and bulbospinal polio. A polio patient with a paralyzed diaphragm would typically spend two weeks inside an iron lung while recovering.


title: Iron lung

text: Polio vaccination programs have virtually eradicated new cases of poliomyelitis in the developed world. Because of this, and the development of modern ventilators, and widespread use of tracheal intubation and tracheotomy, the iron lung has mostly disappeared from modern medicine. In 1959, 1,200 people were using tank respirators in the United States, but by 2004 that number had decreased to just 39.


title: Iron lung

text: Positive pressure ventilation systems are now more common than negative pressure systems. Positive pressure ventilators work by blowing air into the patient's lungs via intubation through the airway; they were used for the first time in Blegdams Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark, during a polio outbreak in 1952. It proved a success and soon superseded the iron lung throughout Europe.


title: Iron lung

text: The iron lung now has a marginal place in modern respiratory therapy. Most patients with paralysis of the breathing muscles use modern mechanical ventilators that push air into the airway with positive pressure. These are generally efficacious and have the advantage of not restricting patients' movements or caregivers' ability to examine the patients as significantly as an iron lung does.


title: Iron lung

text: Despite the advantages of positive ventilation systems, negative pressure ventilation is a truer approximation of normal physiological breathing and results in a more normal distribution of air in the lungs. It may also be preferable in certain rare conditions, such as central hypoventilation syndrome, in which failure of the medullary respiratory centers at the base of the brain results in patients having no autonomic control of breathing. At least one reported polio patient, Dianne Odell, had a spinal deformity that caused the use of mechanical ventilators to be contraindicated.


title: Iron lung

text: At least a few patients today still use the older machines, often in their homes, despite the occasional difficulty of finding replacement parts.


title: Iron lung

text: Joan Headley of Post-Polio Health International said that as of May 28, 2008, about 30 patients in the U.S. were still using an iron lung. That figure may be inaccurately low; Houston alone had 19 iron lung patients living at home in 2008.


title: Iron lung

text: Martha Mason of Lattimore, North Carolina died on May 4, 2009, after spending 60 of her 72 years in an iron lung.


title: Iron lung

text: On October 30, 2009, June Middleton of Melbourne, Australia, who had been entered in the "Guinness Book of Records" as the person who spent the longest time in an iron lung, died aged 83, having spent more than 60 years in her iron lung.


title: Iron lung

text: In 2013, the Post-Polio Health International (PHI) organizations estimated that only six to eight iron lung users were in the United States; as of 2017 its executive director knew of none. Press reports then emerged, however, of at least three (perhaps the last three) users of such devices, sparking interest amongst those in the makerspace community such as Naomi Wu in the manufacture of the obsolete components, particularly the gaskets. Another is retired lawyer Paul Alexander, 74, of Dallas.


title: Iron lung

text: In 2021, the National Public Radio programs "Radio Diaries" and "All Things Considered" gave a report on Martha Lillard, one of the last two Americans depending on the daily use of an iron lung, which she had been using since 1953. In her audio interview, she reported that she was having problems obtaining replacement parts to keep her machine working properly.


title: Iron lung

text: In early 2020, reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic, to address the urgent global shortage of modern ventilators (needed for patients with advanced, severe COVID-19 disease), some enterprises developed prototypes of new, readily-producible versions of the iron lung. These developments included:


title: Boltzmann brain

text: The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more likely for a single brain to spontaneously form in a void (complete with a memory of having existed in our universe) rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did. Physicists use the Boltzmann brain thought experiment as a "reductio ad absurdum" argument for evaluating competing scientific theories.


title: Boltzmann brain

text: In contrast to brain in a vat thought experiments which are about perception and thought, Boltzmann brains are used in cosmology to test our assumptions about thermodynamics and the development of the universe. Over a sufficiently long time, random fluctuations could cause particles to spontaneously form literally any structure of any degree of complexity, including a functioning human brain. In this thought experiment, a Boltzmann brain is a fully formed brain, complete with memories of a full human life, that arises out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The scenario initially involved only a single brain with false memories, but physicist Sean Carroll pointed out that entire bodies, even entire worlds and solar systems are more likely to be Boltzmann entities in a randomly fluctuating universe.


title: Boltzmann brain

text: The idea is named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who, in 1896, published a theory that tried to account for the fact that the universe is not as chaotic as the budding field of thermodynamics seemed to predict. He offered several explanations, one of them being that the universe, even after it had progressed to its most likely spread-out and featureless state (or at thermal equilibrium), would spontaneously fluctuate to a more ordered (or low-entropy) state such as the universe in which we find ourselves. Boltzmann brains were first proposed as a "reductio ad absurdum" response to this explanation by Boltzmann for the low-entropy state of our universe.


title: Boltzmann brain

text: The Boltzmann brain gained new relevance around 2002, when some cosmologists started to become concerned that, in many theories about the Universe, human brains are vastly more likely to arise from random fluctuations; this leads to the conclusion that, statistically, humans are likely to be wrong about their memories of the past and in fact be Boltzmann brains. When applied to more recent theories about the multiverse, Boltzmann brain arguments are part of the unsolved measure problem of cosmology.


title: Boltzmann brain

text: In 1896, the mathematician Ernst Zermelo advanced a theory that the second law of thermodynamics was absolute rather than statistical. Zermelo bolstered his theory by pointing out that the Poincaré recurrence theorem shows statistical entropy in a closed system must eventually be a periodic function; therefore, the Second Law, which is always observed to increase entropy, is unlikely to be statistical. To counter Zermelo's argument, Boltzmann advanced two theories. The first theory, now believed to be the correct one, is that the Universe started for some unknown reason in a low-entropy state. The second and alternative theory, published in 1896 but attributed in 1895 to Boltzmann's assistant Ignaz Schütz, is the "Boltzmann universe" scenario. In this scenario, the Universe spends the vast majority of eternity in a featureless state of heat death; however, over enough eons, eventually a very rare thermal fluctuation will occur where atoms bounce off each other in exactly such a way as to form a substructure equivalent to our entire observable universe. Boltzmann argues that, while most of the universe is featureless, humans do not see those regions because they are devoid of intelligent life; to Boltzmann, it is unremarkable that humanity views solely the interior of its Boltzmann universe, as that is the only place where intelligent life lives. (This may be the first use in modern science of the anthropic principle).


title: Boltzmann brain

text: In 1931, astronomer Arthur Eddington pointed out that, because a large fluctuation is exponentially less probable than a small fluctuation, observers in Boltzmann universes will be vastly outnumbered by observers in smaller fluctuations. Physicist Richard Feynman published a similar counterargument within his widely read "Feynman Lectures on Physics". By 2004, physicists had pushed Eddington's observation to its logical conclusion: the most numerous observers in an eternity of thermal fluctuations would be minimal "Boltzmann brains" popping up in an otherwise featureless universe.


title: Boltzmann brain

text: According to one hypothesis, in the universe's eventual state of ergodic "heat death", given enough time, every possible structure (including every possible brain) will presumably get formed via random fluctuation, the timescale of which is related to the Poincaré recurrence time. Boltzmann-style thought experiments focus on structures like human brains that are presumably self-aware observers. Given any arbitrary criteria for what constitutes a Boltzmann brain (or planet, or universe), smaller structures that minimally and barely meet the criteria are vastly and exponentially more common than larger structures; a rough analogy is how the odds of a single real English word showing up when one shakes a box of "Scrabble" letters are greater than the odds that a whole English sentence or paragraph will form. The average timescale required for the formation of a Boltzmann brain is vastly greater than the current age of the Universe. In modern physics, Boltzmann brains can be formed either by quantum fluctuation, or by a thermal fluctuation generally involving nucleation.


title: Boltzmann brain

text: By one calculation, a Boltzmann brain would appear as a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum after a time interval of formula_1 years. This fluctuation can occur even in a true Minkowski vacuum (a flat spacetime vacuum lacking vacuum energy). Quantum mechanics heavily favors smaller fluctuations that "borrow" the least amount of energy from the vacuum. Typically, a quantum Boltzmann brain would suddenly appear from the vacuum (alongside an equivalent amount of virtual antimatter), remain only long enough to have a single coherent thought or observation, and then disappear into the vacuum as suddenly as it appeared. Such a brain is completely self-contained, and can never radiate energy out to infinity.


title: Boltzmann brain

text: Current evidence suggests that the vacuum permeating the observable Universe is not a Minkowski space, but rather a de Sitter space with a positive cosmological constant. In a de Sitter vacuum (but not in a Minkowski vacuum), a Boltzmann brain can form via nucleation of non-virtual particles gradually assembled by chance from the Hawking radiation emitted from the de Sitter space's bounded cosmological horizon. One estimate for the average time required until nucleation is around formula_2 years. A typical nucleated Boltzmann brain will, after it finishes its activity, cool off to absolute zero and eventually completely decay, as any isolated object would in the vacuum of space. Unlike the quantum fluctuation case, the Boltzmann brain will radiate energy out to infinity. In nucleation, the most common fluctuations are as close to thermal equilibrium overall as possible given whatever arbitrary criteria are provided for labeling a fluctuation a "Boltzmann brain".


title: Boltzmann brain

text: Theoretically a Boltzmann brain can also form, albeit again with a tiny probability, at any time during the matter-dominated early universe.


title: Boltzmann brain

text: The consensus amongst cosmologists is that some yet to be revealed error is hinted at by the surprising calculation that Boltzmann brains should vastly outnumber normal human brains. Sean Carroll states "We're not arguing that Boltzmann Brains exist—we're trying to avoid them." Carroll has stated that the hypothesis of being a Boltzmann brain results in "cognitive instability". Because, he argues, it would take longer than the current age of the universe for a brain to form, and yet it thinks that it observes that it exists in a younger universe, this shows that memories and reasoning processes would be untrustworthy if it were indeed a Boltzmann brain. Seth Lloyd has stated, "They fail the Monty Python test: Stop that! That's too silly!" A "New Scientist" journalist summarizes that "The starting point for our understanding of the universe and its behavior is that humans, not disembodied brains, are typical observers."