Pope, Press & Archiater

Pope Pius XII was a gracious man who met the 20th century publicity attending his office with tolerance and sophistication. At his investiture in 1939, the flashbulbs of news photographers flared for the first time inside St. Peter's Basilica. During his reign, he must surely have learned of the longstanding system under which the Vatican press corps hired--and even bribed--tipsters (usually laymen) on the papal staff. When, a few years ago, the papal physician peddled pictures of his patient down on the floor doing pushups, the Pope--with a grace few men could have mustered--forgave even this assault on the papal privacy.* But even the patient Pius would have been tried by some of the press relations that attended his death.

Prepaid Signal. While Pius XII lay dying inside the cream-colored stone walls of Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence 15 miles southeast of Rome, 200 newsmen gathered for the courtyard deathwatch. United Press International rented a room on the square and dickered with a nun for the use of her telephone; the Associated Press signed up a village butcher's phone; reporters lounged in their cars or on cots and sleeping bags, drinking Cokes, shaving in the fountain. Rome's Italia news agency, mistaking a fluttering Gandolfo curtain for a prearranged, prepaid signal of the Pope's passing, flashed the news--16 hours premature--that the Pope was dead, and four Rome papers rushed out with erroneous extras.

To restore order, the Vatican radio, broadcasting from an antechamber off the Pope's bedroom, stepped up its reports. In a calm voice, the Rev. Francesco Pellegrino, S.J., projected such a sense of immediacy ("I have just come from the bedside of the Holy Father") that one listener was moved to observe:"You could almost hear the Pope breathe." After the Pope's death,/- the mills ground out rumor (e.g., that the Pope's secret diaries had been stolen) and worked up enough "dope" stories discussing the "papabili" of the church's 53 cardinals to bring a public remonstrance from the Vatican.

With a Price List. All of this could be classified as oldfashioned, aggressive journalism until the Pope's physician, Professor Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi--the same who offered the photos of papal calisthenics--entered the story. A mild-mannered oculist, Dr. Galeazzi-Lisi first met the Pope when he was still Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican's 54-year-old Secretary of State, suffering from eye-strain headaches, which Galeazzi-Lisi relieved. When Pacelli was made Pope, he appointed his friend Galeazzi-Lisi as archiater,* or papal physician.

Galeazzi-Lisi stood the deathwatch for four years. During the papal illness of 1954, he tried to peddle personal accounts of the Pope's life and illness. At his price --$12,000--and while the Pope lived, he found no takers. But his chance came when his patient died.

The eye doctor had seen to it that Pius XII's final agonies were photographed, and he himself took copious clinical notes on the papal pulse, temperature, elimination, and death throes. Within a week after the Pope's death, Galeazzi-Lisi solicited bids on his photographs and deathbed journal. The price list: $13,320 for an anecdotal article on his life with the Pope, to include clinical details; $8,000--later reduced to $3,200--for an hour-by-hour account of the papal agony; $3,200 for photographs of the death throes; $1,600 for a story on the embalming process. (Il Giorno Editorialist Gaetano Baldacci charged that Galeazzi-Lisi, employing an "aromatic spirits" technique which he claimed had been used on the body of Christ, wretchedly botched the job.) Two Italian dailies, Rome's Il Tempo and Turin's La Stampa, bought Galeazzi-Lisi's second entree for a joint bid of $3,200. Conservative, pro-Catholic Il Tempo printed it, after deleting "certain passages which appeared to us too crude."

How Could It Be? In the outcry following this journalistic coup, Galeazzi-Lisi first defended his act ("I waited until my patient was dead"), then denied that he had received "un soldo" for his pains, then resigned his post. The College of Cardinals banned him from the Vatican. As the storm of censure mounted, the greatest cry was appropriately against the money-hungry doctor rather than the story-hungry press. Milan's daily Il Giorno (circ. 150,000), coming to the astonished realization that the Pope's chief physician was not a tried clinician, asked what was, perhaps, the most startling question raised by the whole furor: "How could Pius XII entrust his health for so many years to a quack?"

This week, as the College of Cardinals balloted on a new Pope, they acted under the tightest code of secrecy in the history of the papacy. Author of the rules, which decreed excommunication for the slightest leak: press-relations-conscious Pius XII, who may have known more about the foibles of Popes' aides and press than anyone thought he knew. With the strict code in force, the edgy press corps watched smoke rise from the chimney in the Sistine Chapel after the first two ballots last week and, in each case, fired off false bulletins. They flashed too soon because the first puff of smoke seemed to be white (Pope elected) but on second puff it turned out to be black.

* Showing a higher sense of propriety than the physician, the publications that accepted the pictures decided not to use them.

/- At 3:52 a.m., a chronological fact that sent Romans scurrying to place their lire on numbers three and 52 in the daily lottery; both paid off.

* From the Greek archi and iatros, or "first physician," a title given to court physicians by both the ancient Greeks and Romans.

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