Pope Pius XI

Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti (May 31, 1857 – February 10, 1939), reigned as Pope and sovereign of Vatican City from February 6, 1922 until February 10, 1939. He issued the encyclical Quas Primas establishing the feast of Christ the King. Its main idea is that the Catholic religion, beliefs, morality, and rule must spread itself to all areas of human living: the home, the city, politics, economics, art, etc.

Whereabouts of the anti-fascist speech

The whereabouts of his draft speech remains a mystery, though papal policy traditionally dictated that planned policies and proposed speeches not executed at the moment of a pope's death lapse automatically. It is possible that the speech was misfiled within the vast Vatican Archives after his death, that it became lost among the move of all his private papers from the Papal Apartments, or that some curial official, as has been done in past papacies, simply incinerated all draft speeches, undelivered speeches and uncompleted documents of the late pontiff.

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Such destruction had been carried out in the past for fear that a new pope could be pressured into following the policies of his predecessor, were some of the late pope's plans to be made public by late pope's supporters if they thought that the new pope "would not be true to the memory of the late Holy Father". Confusion over the private papers of dead popes is a regular occurrence. The whereabouts of the wills of Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul I, and the whereabouts of documents associated with Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II became a cause of controversy immediately after their death.

Related Topics:
Pope Paul VI - Pope John Paul I - Pope Pius XII - Pope John Paul II

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In all cases either the documents were later found, having been misfiled, were discovered to have destroyed quietly on the late pope's orders, or in the aftermath of a papal death an aide had kept the document as a memento of the late pope, not realising its importance. Amid the multitude of papal secretaries, papal aides, members of the papal court and family members who have the task of removing possessions of a late pope after his death, confusion over who took what is all too regular and does not in itself prove, in the case of the proposed papal speech on fascism, either that the speech was destroyed to hide its existence, or that there was necessarily something suspicious in the timing of the pope's death.

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