Pius XII

Pius XII dated the constitution Munificentissimus Deus on 1 November 1950, in the twelfth year of his pontificate (Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus 48). In it he defined as a divinely revealed dogma that the Virgin Mary was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory (Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus 44); see the Dogma of the Assumption of Mary. In 1954 he wrote to the church in China that those who held to the principles of the “Three Autonomies” could not be considered Catholics (Pius XII, Ad Sinarum gentem 21–22), and in 1958 that bishops consecrated without the mandate of the Apostolic See incurred excommunication (Pius XII, Ad Apostolorum principis 36–38, 47–48); see the Chinese Church under the People’s Republic.

Before his election he was Eugenio Pacelli. The concordat of 20 July 1933 names Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, Secretary of State, as the plenipotentiary of Pius XI, and he signed it in the Vatican with Franz von Papen (Reichskonkordat (1933), preamble and signatures). Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber noted in his diary that during his stay in Rome in January 1937 he was twice with the bishops at Pacelli’s (Faulhaber, Diaries, 14–28 January 1937). The editors of that diary record that Pacelli had been nuncio in Munich, where the two men became close, and that he was pope from 1939 to 1958 (Faulhaber, Diaries, editors’ biography); see Mit brennender Sorge: Pius XI on the Church in the German Reich.