Pius XII, 1876-1958

Miserere mei, Deus, secundum miseri-cordiam tuam.

These words [Have pity on me, God, according to thy mercy.'), which I pronounced at the moment in which with trepidation I accepted election as Supreme Pontiff, I now repeat at a time in which knowledge of the deficiencies, of the failures, of the sins committed during so long a pontificate and in so grave an epoch has made more clear to my mind my insufficiency and unworthiness . . . I pray those whose affair it is not to bother to erect any monuments to my memory: sufficient it is that my poor mortal remains should be laid simply in a sacred place . .

Thus wrote Pope Pius XII in his last will and testament, found after his death last week in a safe in his study. But the remains of Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, were not "laid simply" away. Before the great altar in St. Peter's, where only the Pope may say Mass, the body of Pius XII lay in state for three days. Then, after final absolution, it was placed in a triple coffin (oak, lead and cypress) and interred in the most sacred spot in Christendom--below the Bernini altar near St. Peter's supposed grave, whose discovery the Pope himself announced in 1950. Buried with the Pope was a red bag containing a sample of every Vatican coin minted during his reign, a parchment copy of the eulogy read at the final funeral Mass and the pieces of his broken Fisherman's Ring.

Despite the grandeur of the funeral, the mourners 'who thronged the Vatican this week--the foreign statesmen as well as the crowds of Romans who had cheered him for years as he rode through his city --knew the simplicity and the intelligent humanity that had been present beneath the papal pomp. And they would scarcely agree with his humble self-assessment of "failures" and "insufficiency." Men of all faiths agreed that Pius XII had been a great Pope.

State of the Church. Other Popes have risen to the challenge of the 20th century, notably Leo XIII, who gave the church and the world his great encyclical on labor. But in the 19 years of Eugenio Pacelli's reign, the nature of the papacy has changed dramatically, partly because few men who have worn the triple crown have been so keenly and so tirelessly aware of the agonies of their age.

When Pacelli was born in 1876, in Rome, the papacy seemed doomed to a decline. Six years before, it had been stripped of temporal power beyond the tiny (108.7 acres) Vatican enclave. Only 22 years before that, Pope Pius IX had fled when Mazzini and his revolutionists seized control of Rome. In Pacelli's childhood the world outside the Vatican seethed with anticlericalism and glowed with humanist confidence in the ever onwardness and upwardness of history. Today the papacy and the Catholic Church are immensely stronger. Part of the story is told in numbers: during Pius XII's reign, Catholics throughout the world grew from 388,402,610 to 496,512,000 despite attrition in Iron Curtain countries. The church's strengthened spiritual posture was marked by the fact that under Pius 33 saints were canonized,*more than under any other Pope in this century. Its political success can be judged from the fact that, during Pius' reign, Christian Democratic parties and Catholie statesmen (De Gasperi, Adenauer, Schuman, Fanfani et al.) rose to power in Western European countries where only a few years ago anticlericalism was a major prerequisite for political success.

The change was caused partly by the very disasters that struck the world during Pacelli's lifetime, for they branded into men of all faiths a new need for direction and values beyond materialist optimism. Partly it was caused by the death of the old European order, which forced the Vatican to deal not with monarchs or heads of state but with the people, and to find new ways of reaching them. Above all, it was caused by Pius XII's insistence that the papacy had a mission to assert Christian truths about all phases of human life. The Pope delivered thousands of addresses to delegations from every imaginable trade, profession or calling--each address painstakingly composed by himself (see box).

The Innovator. Pius XII was often described as an innovator, impelled to innovate not so much by temperament (for he was gentle, cautious and diolomatic) as by the force of the times. He was the first Pope to use a telephone regularly, the first to use a typewriter (a white portable). He strongly suggested that nuns' garb be modernized, liberalized many church rules. But he was an innovator also in far more significant works, which he performed in defense of Christianity against ideological dangers. In a long career (one of his first assignments as a young diplomat was to help represent the Vatican at Queen Victoria's funeral) he saw these dangers of the soul veer from Edwardian complacency to existentialist despair. Perhaps his most important efforts were in these areas: P: COMMUNISM. When Pius XII was born, the Communists had nowhere won political power; at the time of his death, 52,552,000 Catholics were living in Communist-ruled countries. Again and again, he ringingly condemned Communism as an atheistic and materialistic evil, arch enemy of God and of human rights. In the Communist-ruled countries, Pius XII had to find a harrowing way between the extremes of a tough anti-Communist line that might have destroyed the church through reprisals and a collaborationist line that might have destroyed the church just as surely through spiritual surrender. Poland's Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski and his precarious stand-off with the Red regime has shown that toughness can be combined with shrewd compromise. In the Western countries, the Pope took a bold political step in 1949 when he excommunicated all Catholics who "knowingly and freely . . . defend and spread Communism."

P: LAW. The very concept of the law, Pius felt, was breaking down. In his encyclicals and addresses he related natural law to the whole field of ethics, politics and the principles of society. Beneath the imperatives of the state or the vote, he reminded statesmen and voters, lies the will of God reflected in the social order.

P: DOGMA. Pius XII spectacularly stiffened the fabric of faith by promulgating the ancient dogma of the Virgin Mary's bodily assumption into Heaven (in doing so he was the first Pope in history to make such public exercise of the 1870 dogma of papal infallibility). In 1950 in the encyclical Humani Generis he cracked down hard on Catholic teachers, priests and philosophers whose speculations might carry them away from the dogmas of -the church and the formal system of thought laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas. P: NATIONALISM. Pope Pius laid claim once more to the church's status as the supranational community, nourishing the shallow roots of secular internationalism ("The Church is a mother -- Sancta Mater Ecclesia--a true mother, mother of all nations and all peoples"). As he saw the colonial peoples rise, he laid increasing stress on substituting native priests for missionaries--and promoting them to bishops wherever possible.

Gothic Figure. Above and beyond his diplomatic and intellectual role there was always the Pope's incandescent personality. In a prayer to Mary he once asked that all men be made to "feel the attraction of Christian goodness." That was what most men felt in the presence. It was in a sense ironic that this sophisticated diplomat, member of old Roman aristocracy, should become so popular a Pope. Before World War II, a papal audience for a layman was a prestigious and protocol-encrusted enterprise. Under Pius XII, however, a visit to the Pope was heartwarming and almost informal (he often studied the sports pages of newspapers as carefully as the political news, because at many audiences he was required to talk more about sports than politics).

Through the big Portone di Bronzo at the right of St. Peter's and up the broad staircase to the audience chambers on the second floor trooped bobby-soxers and Brahmins, camera-slung tourists, oilmen and stenographers and schoolteachers. One need be neither Catholic nor Christian to be received, and the white-robed Holy Father walked among them all, making brief small talk in six languages, handing out holy medals, even exchanging his white silk skull cap with some visitor who had brought one for the purpose. The New York Times's late Anne O'Hare McCormick described him thus: "He is straight, strong, taut as a watch spring, thin as a young tree, but tranquil and tranquilizing --a Gothic figure whose vestments fall about him in Gothic folds, whose long hands are raised in Gothic gestures, both stiff and graceful."

The Cunctator. Pius XII was the only Pope to have visited America (in 1936 when he was Vatican Secretary of State), and his pontificate was notable for its strengthened ties with the U.S. Five U.S. cardinals were named during his reign (James Cardinal Mclntyre, Edward Cardinal Mooney, Francis Cardinal Spellman, the late Samuel Cardinal Stritch, the late John Cardinal Glennon). Two close personal friends of Pius XII were Americans--Cardinal Spellman and Boston Tycoon Joseph P. Kennedy, onetime Ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

In his preoccupation with the world at large and with his diplomat's tendency to avoid sharp edges, Pope Pius often neglected the Vatican itself. He seemed to shrink from making much-needed appointments to the central machinery of the church. Result, at the time of his death: 15 vacancies in a superannuated College of Cardinals, no Secretary of State, no governor for Vatican City, no camerlengo (see The Succession). Said one of his closest advisers sadly last week: "He provided badly for his successor."

If he was slow to arrive at decisions, he partly made up for it by a relentless, austere capacity for hard work. Even at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, Pope Pius had a mania about wasting a second. Sitting under a red umbrella in the shade of a huge ilex tree (he could not bear strong sunlight), or walking briskly in his shaded garden, he kept his nose buried in documents he was studying. During his solitary, silent and frugal meals, Pius listened to the news broadcasts, but so chary was he of an unnecessary word that once when he sneezed and his normally silent barber instinctively exclaimed "Salute!" the Pope replied "Grazie," then quickly warned, "Basta, basta,"--enough, enough.

Last Illness. Though he had been sickly as a child, his constitution was remarkable, and he rallied amazingly from his serious illness four years ago (TIME, Dec. 13, 1954). He was in good health until the recurrence, a week ago, of the gastric pain and hiccups that had plagued him in 1954. He soon struggled back into his stringent schedule, but one day last week, as his doctor was examining him, he suddenly cried in alarm, "Dio mio, non ci vedo!--My God, I cannot see!" It was a stroke. The Pope fought back. His vision restored, he summoned his substitute Secretary of State, Angelo Dell'Acqua, and sharply demanded: "Why have the audiences been canceled?" He received Holy Communion and Extreme Unction from his German Jesuit secretary, Father Robert Leiber, but he peeked at the thermometer when his temperature was being taken and said "non e grave" when he saw it was only 99DEG. That night he drank a glass of red wine and called for a recording of Beethoven's First Symphony. At 7:30 the next morning, a second stroke left him unconscious. But it took his stubborn body nearly 20 hours to die.

The ancient, ponderous rituals began. Swiss Guards drew a heavy iron chain across the Gandolfo Palace entrance, and in Rome the great bronze doors of St. Peter's clanged shut. Attendants removed the flannel pajamas in which the Pope died and dressed the body in a white silk cassock and an ermine-trimmed crimson velvet cape. Sister Pasqualina, the German nun who had been the Pope's devoted housekeeper, had a small ritual of her own. She assembled the Pope's half-dozen pet birds and, carrying their cage and two suitcases, left for an unannounced destination. Her task was done.

Two members of the Noble Guard, with golden helmets and drawn swords, took up a vigil at the bedside. Later they guarded the body during its 15-mile-long trip to the Vatican, through the Roman streets that the first native Roman Pope in 200 years had loved well, passing a stone's throw from the house where he was born.

Among the crowds that watched the motor hearse go by, there was already talk that some day Pope Pius XII may be canonized a saint. Several instances have been reported of unusual healing at his touch or prayer. Weight will be added to the arguments for his canonization by his reported vision of Jesus Christ just before his serious illness four years ago and his reported visions of the sun revolving in the sky (as it did to announce the famed apparition of the Virgin to three shepherd children of Fatima, Portugal, in 1917). But whatever future learned tribunals may decide about his saintliness, millions who saw him or heard his words will require no visions, no miracles beyond the fact that Pius XII was able to make a tormented world feel "the attraction of Christian goodness."

*Among them, Pope Pius X (under whom the young Pacelli served), Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, first U.S. citizen to be raised to sainthood.

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