Luigi Maglione (2 March 1877 – 22 August 1944) was an Italian prelate of the Catholic Church who joined the diplomatic service of the Holy See in 1908, served as a papal nuncio from 1920 to 1935. After a few years working in the Roman Curia, he was Secretary of State from 1939 until his death in 1944. He became an archbishop in 1920 and a Cardinal in 1935.
His tenure as Secretary of State included most of World War II and the Holocaust, much of his work being documented in the eleven volumes of the Vatican's wartime documents, Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. After falling under Nazi occupation, Lithuania appealed to the Vatican to reintegrate its dioceses into the country and replace its bishops, to which Maglione responded, "The government of Kaunas should appreciate, that the Holy See cannot run behind armies and change bishops as combatant troops occupy new territories belonging to countries other than their own."[2]
Cardinal Maglione died a year before the war's end in his native Casoria from neuritis and circulatory ailments. Upon his death, Pius XII assumed the duties of the office himself, with assistance from Domenico Tardini and Giovanni Battista Montini (who later became Pope Paul VI).
He vigorously defended Pius XII's wartime diplomacy, once declaring, "If you ask why the documents sent by the Pontiff to the Polish bishops have not been made public, know that it seems better in the Vatican to follow the same norms, the Polish bishops themselves follow...Isn’t this what has to be done? Should the father of Christianity increase the misfortunes of Poles in their own country?"[3] The relationship between Maglione and the Pontiff was so close that Italians were known to joke that whenever Pius XII went out without his maglione (Italian for "sweater"), he caught cold.[4]
