The Holy See, also called the See of Rome, Petrine See or Apostolic See, is the central governing body of the Catholic Church and the Vatican City State. It encompasses the office of the pope as the bishop of the Apostolic episcopal see of Rome and serves as the spiritual and administrative authority of the worldwide Catholic Church and the city-state. Under international law, the Holy See holds the status of a sovereign juridical entity.
Vatican City, officially the Vatican City State, is a landlocked sovereign country, city-state, microstate, and enclave surrounded by, and historically a part of, Rome, Italy. It became independent from Italy in 1929 with the Lateran Treaty, and is a distinct territory under "full ownership, exclusive dominion, and sovereign authority and jurisdiction" of the Holy See, which is itself a sovereign entity under international law, maintaining the city-state's temporal power, governance, diplomatic, and spiritual independence. The Vatican is also a metonym for the pope, the Holy See, and the Roman Curia.
Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, was the Bishop of Rome and head of the Catholic Church from 6 February 1922 to 10 February 1939. He also became the first sovereign of the Vatican City State upon its creation as an independent state on 11 February 1929. He remained pope until his death in February 1939.
The Concordat of 1801 was an agreement between the First French Republic and the Holy See, signed by First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII on 15 July 1801 in Paris. It remained in effect until 1905, except in Alsace–Lorraine, where it remains in force. It sought national reconciliation between the French Revolution and Catholics and solidified the Roman Catholic Church as the majority church of France, with most of its civil status restored. This resolved the hostility of devout French Catholics against the revolutionary state. It did not restore the vast Church lands and endowments that had been seized during the Revolution and sold off. Catholic clergy returned from exile, or from hiding, and resumed their traditional positions in their traditional churches. Very few parishes continued to employ the priests who had accepted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of the revolutionary regime. While the Concordat restored much power to the papacy, the balance of church-state relations tilted firmly in Bonaparte's favour. He selected the bishops and supervised church finances.
A concordat is a convention between the Holy See and a sovereign state that defines the relationship between the Catholic Church and the state in matters that concern both, i.e. the recognition and privileges of the Catholic Church in a particular country and with secular matters that affect church interests.
The Reichskonkordat is a treaty negotiated between the Vatican and the emergent Nazi Germany. It was signed on 20 July 1933 by Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII, on behalf of Pope Pius XI and Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen on behalf of President Paul von Hindenburg and the German government. It was ratified 10 September 1933 and it remains in force to this day. The treaty guarantees the rights of the Catholic Church in Germany. When bishops take office, Article 16 states they are required to take an oath of loyalty to the Governor or President of the German Reich established according to the constitution. The treaty also requires all clergy to abstain from working in and for political parties. Nazi breaches of the agreement began almost as soon as it had been signed and intensified afterwards, leading to protest from the Church, including in the 1937 Mit brennender Sorge encyclical of Pope Pius XI. The Nazis planned to eliminate the Church's influence by restricting its organizations to purely religious activities.
A prisoner in the Vatican or prisoner of the Vatican described the situation of the pope with respect to the Kingdom of Italy during the period from the capture of Rome by the Royal Italian Army on 20 September 1870 until the Lateran Treaty of 11 February 1929. Part of the process of the unification of Italy, the city's capture ended the millennium-old temporal rule of the popes over Central Italy and allowed Rome to be designated the capital of the new nation. Although the Italians did not occupy the territories of Vatican Hill delimited by the Leonine walls and offered the creation of a city-state in the area, the popes from Pius IX to Pius XI refused the proposal and described themselves as prisoners of the new Italian state.
Lateran and Laterano are names for an area of Rome, and the shared names of several buildings in Rome. The properties were once owned by the Lateranus family of the Roman Empire. The Laterani lost their properties to Emperor Constantine who allegedly gave them to the Bishop of Rome though this traditional report has been most likely based on the document Donation of Constantine which has been proven to be a forgery.
Pietro Gasparri was a Roman Catholic cardinal, diplomat and politician in the Roman Curia and the signatory of the Lateran Pacts. He served also as Cardinal Secretary of State under Popes Benedict XV and Pope Pius XI.
The Roman question was a dispute regarding the temporal power of the popes as rulers of a civil territory in the context of the Italian Risorgimento. It ended with the Lateran Pacts between King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy and Pope Pius XI in 1929.
The Concordat of 1953 was the last classic concordat of the Catholic Church, signed on 27 August 1953 by Spain with the Vatican. Together with the Pact of Madrid, signed the same year, it was a significant effort to break Spain's international isolation after World War II.
The Capture of Rome occurred on 20 September 1870, as forces of the Kingdom of Italy took control of the city and of the Papal States. After a plebiscite held on 2 October 1870, Rome was officially made capital of Italy on 3 February 1871, completing the unification of Italy (Risorgimento).
Capital punishment in Vatican City was legal between 1929 and 1969, reserved for attempted assassination of the Pope, but has never been applied there. Executions were carried out elsewhere in the Papal States, which was the predecessor of the Vatican City, during their existence.
Holy See–Italy relations are the special relations between the Holy See, which is sovereign over the Vatican City, and the Italian Republic.
Francesco Pacelli, Noble of Acquapendente and Noble of Sant'Angelo in Vado, was an Italian lawyer and the elder brother of Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII. He became a lay canon lawyer and the legal advisor to Pope Pius XI, acted as a legal advisor to Pope Pius XI; in this capacity, he assisted Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri in the negotiation of the Lateran Treaty in 1929 with Benito Mussolini, which established the independence of Vatican City, bringing an end to the Roman Question.
General elections were held in Italy on 26 March 1934. At the time, the country was a single-party state with the National Fascist Party (PNF) as the only legally permitted party.
The legal status of the Holy See, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, both in state practice and according to the writing of modern legal scholars, is that of a full subject of public international law, with rights and duties analogous to those of states.
Pietro Tacchi Venturi was a gay antisemite Jesuit priest and historian who served as the unofficial liaison between Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader of Italy from 1922 to 1943, and Popes Pius XI and Pius XII. He was also one of the architects of the 1929 Lateran Treaty, which ended the "Roman Question", and recognized the sovereignty of Vatican City, which made it an actor of international relations. A claimed attempt to assassinate Venturi with a paper knife, one year before the treaty's completion, made headlines around the world. Venturi had begun the process of reconciliation by convincing Mussolini to donate the valuable library of the Palazzo Chigi to the Vatican.
The Law of Guarantees, sometimes also called the Law of Papal Guarantees, was the name given to the law passed by the senate and chamber of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy, 13 May 1871, concerning the prerogatives of the Holy See, and the relations between state and church in the Kingdom of Italy. It guaranteed sovereign prerogatives to the pope, who had been deprived of the territory of the Papal States. The popes refused to accept the law, as it was enacted by a foreign government and could therefore be revoked at will, leaving the popes without a full claim to sovereign status. In response, the popes declared themselves prisoners of the Vatican. The ensuing Roman Question was not resolved until the Lateran Pacts of 1929.
Events in the year 1929 in Vatican City.
Pietro Gasparri 
Benito Mussolini 
