Catholic World News News Feature

See Pius XII as precursor of Vatican II, Pope Benedict suggests November 10, 2008

Pope Benedict XVI has offered an unusual perspective on the teaching of Pope Pius XII, accentuating the influence of that Pontiff on the Second Vatican Council.

Speaking on November 8 to participants in a symposium on the teaching of Pope Pius XII, the Holy Father said: "The heritage of Pius XII's Magisterium was taken up by Vatican Council II and has been re-presented to succeeding Christian generations." That observation underlined a message that Pope Benedict has made a major theme of his pontificate: the insistence that Vatican II must be understood as not a disruption but a development of prior Church teachings.

The Pontifical Lateran and Gregorian universities had collaborated on a weekend conference at which scholars explored the teachings of Pius XII, to mark the 50th anniversary of that Pope's death. Benedict XVI remarked that his predecessor's teaching-- incorporated in more than 40 encyclicals and hundreds of addresses-- provide "a valuable heritage to which the Church has always given, and continues to give, great importance."

Pius XII anticipated the teaching of Vatican II by placing great emphasis on the role of the laity, particularly in communicating the message of the Gospel to the secular world, the Pope said. He called attention, too, to messages in which Pius XII praised modern science but warned against "the risks that research could bring if inattentive to moral values."

Pope Pius is known particularly for his Marian teaching, and especially for defining the dogma of the Assumption. Pope Benedict said that with that solemn definition in 1950 the Pope "intended to highlight the eschatological dimension of our lives, and to exalt the dignity of women."