From "The Defamation of Pius XII" (St. Augustine Press, 2000).
Eugenio Pacelli was elected pope in 1939, took the name of Pius XII, and reigned for almost 20 years until his death in 1958. As the Vicar of Christ on earth and the successor of St. Peter, a Pope's principal job is to evangelize the world. God so loved the world that he sent his Only Begotten Son to save it from its sins: That is the good news the Church was formed to spread. The Holy Father is primarily a spiritual leader, but just as God became incarnate in Jesus, the Church is in the world, though not of it. Thus it is no small matter that the papacy of Pius XII took place during World War II and continued into the Cold War that grew up between the awkward Allies who had defeated Hitler and the Axis powers.
It is a simple fact that no political or religious leader emerged from World War II with a nobler and more heroic record than Pius XII. Vatican City is located in a country which had a fascist dictator, Mussolini, who eventually allied himself with Hitler. Mussolini's regime may have looked less menacing than Hitler's but it was totalitarian. When Mussolini was forced to resign in 1943, German troops rushed in to fill the vacuum, occupying Rome and surrounding the Vatican. These were the hostile circumstances in which Pius XII reigned until the liberation of Rome by Allied forces in 1944. Bombs actually dropped on Vatican City; whether they were German or American bombs was never clear.
The moral problems posed by an unlimited war, predicated on the unconditional surrender of Hitler, were huge--the bombing of cities, the blurring of any distinction between combatant and civilian, the violation of the most elementary precepts of natural law. Added to this were the dreadful racial policies of the Third Reich. Hitler was a satanic figure motivated by seething resentment of Germany's defeat in World War I, a dream of an Aryan people occupying the land mass of Europe for a thousand years. Standing athwart this goal--apart from the military might of the Allies--were two things: Christianity and the Jewish people.
