Remembering Pope Pius XII

One of my blind spot's as a Catholic is the popes. Not so much the legitimacy of the papacy, you understand. Of that much, I've long been persuaded.

No, I mean the papacy as an historical subject. My ignorance here is easy for a non-Catholic to justify. It's hard to be invested in a subject which has no bearing on you. But as a Catholic, I'm coming to believe you owe it to yourself to know at least a little bit about the popes. So I've been trying to check through all that lately.

Still, one Pope who's always captivated my attention is Pope Pius XII. Yes, sure, Pope Pius X is probably the most famous of the Pius Popes, especially in recent decades. But somehow, Pope Pius XII is the one who always draws my interest.

For starters, he seemed to have a very intellectual faith. It's not like I knew him personally or anything; that's just my reading of the guy. He seems like a man who wanted to plumb the depths of the Church's rich history and tradition.

My journey to the Church is not a completely intellectual proposition. There's a lot of heart-felt conviction about it. But at the same time, I won't lie and tell you that it's not partly (or even that it's not mostly) based on my rational faculties. The Catholic Church has so much to offer in terms of theology, history and other things that it feels like I've finally found a place to park the car for the rest of my scholarly life.

For seconders though, no analysis of Pope Pius XII's reign is complete if you don't mention World War II. He inherited a world in crisis, possibly an existential one. He knew as well as anybody and perhaps better than most what the future might bring if mankind slid back into barbarism. And as much as he could, he acted to preserve peace and justice... which, during those dark years, were practically mutually exclusive concepts.

That's not a burden I'd wish upon anybody.

He led his sheep through the darkness as well as he could and comported himself during a time of major international upheaval in ways that many of his predecessors couldn't hope to equal even when facing relatively smaller conflicts.

My view of Pope Pius XII was that he was an extraordinarily intelligent man of God doing all in his power and with relatively few resources to be a light in the darkness.

What an example to aspire to!

Top Five Things You Must Believe In Order To Be Catholic

Top Five Things You Must Believe In Order To Be Catholic
Qualifiers- You can't not believe these things and call yourself Catholic;
Sequence- unranked;

* Real Presence- This one's kind of a slam dunk. It's been on the books for millennia. The denial of this doctrine is a pretty recent development in the big scheme of things.

* Immaculate Conception of Our Lady- This one's better attested than its official definition might suggest. The tradition of these goes back to antiquity. It only became official dogma in 1854 but this was borderline consensus for all or most of the Church's history. Not bad for a "latecomer"...

* Magisterium- Again, history speaks so clearly to this that it scarcely needs defending except to people who refuse to read what the Church Father's believed and taught. Apart from that, vast swaths of the New Testament make no sense unless the Church has authority over her members.

* Papacy- This one should be obvious but here it is anyway. Still, I distinguish the value of the papacy quite apart from the Magisterium because the Magisterium by itself isn't exclusively Catholic. At least not anymore. The Eastern Orthodox, for example, won't hesitate to proclaim the legitimacy of obeying [insert bishop here]'s authority.

But the papacy as an office exists apart from that. One of the Church's central dogmas is that the Holy Father is the Vicar of Christ. You either believe that or you don't. And if you don't, you're not Catholic.

* Sacraments- This almost didn't make the list but I decided that even though the Protestants believe in the value of marriage, baptism, communion and other things, their understanding of those things is so flawed and incomplete that they arguably have missed the entire point.

To tie it back to the Real Presence, if it is not the Body and Blood we consume in the Eucharist, how then is John 6 to be interpreted? Our Lord appears to be speaking in quite literal terms there. But the "literalists" seem only too eager to allegorize this and many other passages from sacred Scripture.

I truly don't understand the value of a strictly commemorative observance of communion. I didn't understand it even when I was a Southern Baptist and I understand it even less now.

As I say, you can believe these things and NOT call yourself Catholic. That'd put you in the company of a lot of Anglicans, actually. More than you might think. But you can't NOT believe these things and call yourself Catholic.

And yes, yes, yes, there are several other doctrines I could've included. But I didn't. Because this is MY list. If those items being excluded bothers you that much, make your own list.

Oh, something else. I thought about posting something similar for evangelicals but their lack of unity about anything and everything makes that pretty tricky. You can find evangelicals who disagree on fundamentals as obvious as the divine inspiration of the Bible so attempting to unravel the "evangelical position" on any number of doctrines considered the amount of diversity of belief tolerated in the evangelical world is an exercise in impossibility. So I shall not bother.