Let us say they held the same vision and that the vision was that of a new kind of Catholic Church. They were not the only men of their time who held such a vision, however, because of the power each one of them would wield, they were to become its executors. One after the other in close succession they would come to see, slowly at first, their vision taking shape. Its accelerating development would sustain them for half a century and more, right up to the last years of the last of the five when statistics began to show that the dream was turning into a nightmare and Pope Montini, ill-suited for carrying such a burden, broke down in tears. On Montini, weakest of the five, and on Pacelli, the strongest, the pressure was heaviest.
Biographical material indicates an astonishing parallel in the early lives of the two men.
Each was chosen, educated and promoted by his parents and powerful inside-Vatican friends of his parents to become a pope as surely as a crown prince is groomed to become a king. Both the Pacelli and the Montini families had long been bound up in Vatican affairs. Ernesto stayed on to set up the first offices of the Banco di Roma while Marcantonio became the trusted legal advisor of both Gregory and his successor, Pius IX, finally accompanying the latter into exile in the coastal town of Gaeta when political unrest in Rome became threatening. The instigation of unrest in the Papal States, justifiable or not, must be attributed to the leaders of Italian Freemasonry. In the Catholic countries, particulary in Italy and France, the lines were not always clearly drawn.