Description

Backed by a wealth of new research, John Cornwell tells for the first time the story of the career of Eugenio Pacelli, the man who was Pius XII, during World War II and arguably the most dangerous churchman in modern history. In the first decade of the century, as a brilliant young Vatican lawyer, Pacelli helped shape a new ideology of unprecedented papal power in Germany. In 1933 Hitler became his perfect negotiating partner and a Concordat granted religious and financial payments to the Catholic Church in exchange for Catholic withdrawal from social and political action, thus ensuring the rise of Nazism.