End of a Pilgrimage

Before sunrise one morning last week, the telephone tinkled in the Vatican apartment of Pope Pius XII. The Pope, who was about to step into his chapel for Mass, answered the call himself. It was his private secretary, Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, with a message of tragic urgency: an airliner carrying Canadian Holy Year travelers home from Rome had crashed in the French Alps, killing all 58 aboard.

Pope Pius wept; his Mass was delayed until the 74-year-old Pontiff recovered from the shock.* He prayed for the dead, then told his secretary to send messages of condolence to the victims' families wherever possible.

Crowds in the Churches. In far-off Quebec, where news of the crash got around late at night, churches reopened their doors to receive crowds flocking in to pray. Street traffic in downtown Quebec City dropped off almost to a standstill. The crash of the chartered DC-4 plane, operated by Curtiss-Reid Airtours Ltd. of Montreal, was the worst in Canadian aviation history.

The plane carried 14 Roman Catholic clergymen, twelve from Quebec dioceses. Many of the laymen were leading Quebec Catholics, chosen by their parishes for the pilgrimage because of their zeal in church work or their piety. Others had won the trip to Rome in church-sponsored benefit and lotteries.

Among those on the plane was Antoine Dussault, $45-a-week manager of the Caisse Populaire (Credit Union) in Quebec's Saint-Sauveur parish. Dussault hesitated to accept because he has four small children and his wife is expecting a fifth. In the end, his wife persuaded him to go. She was baking apple pies for his homecoming when she learned of the crash. Arthur Pelletier, an officer of a Catholic labor union at St. Gregoire, was chosen for the Rome trip by the union members. He left a widow and seven young children behind him.

Audience in the Vatican. Farmer Alphonse Michaud and his wife, whose 19 children were the model family of Plessisville parish, also joined the pilgrimage. After the crash, 17 of the children (two daughters who are nuns were absent) knelt before their parents' pictures in the farmhouse parlor to recite the Rosary.

The pilgrims' plane, apparently off course in the fog and rain, had slammed into 8,500-ft. Mont Obiou, near the French city of Grenoble. It was only 85 miles from Mont Blanc, Europe's highest peak, where 48 persons had died in an Air India crash ten days before (TIME, Nov. 20).

French Alpinists who climbed the mountainside to bring the bodies down found the snowy slope littered with pictures of the Pope and cardinals. Several of the passengers had been writing in their diaries as they flew northward, describing the papal audience that morning which had caused a four-hour delay in their departure. "We are still entranced . . . We sang the Ave Maria," they wrote. "Now we are going through the unknown."

* Vatican historians likened the disaster to an occurrence during the Holy Year of 1450 when a team of horses ran away on Rome's Sant' Angelo bridge, setting off a panic and crush in which 176 pilgrims were killed.

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