The Pope Indomitable
It is the custom of biographers to speculate on the early lives of great men, to discover in their first years the elements that flowered in their last. With the great Pope who passed away on February 10th, however, there is this difference. His "early" years numbered sixty-one. It was only an extraordinary series of events that segregated them. But for this we would now be writing the life of a great librarian, perhaps, but not that of a Pope. Those long "early years" furnish almost no clue to his later greatness.
Up to the age of sixty-one, then, Achille Ratti was a librarian, a writer, and a researcher into the dusty dim annals of the past. If he watched the world of today, it must have been with the incurious eyes of one whose chief anxiety would be wonderment as to what degree it would interfere with his time schedule and his future publishing projects. In this there is a nice but contrasting analogy with the "early" life of Pope Leo XIII. He, too, became Pope at an advanced age, even more advanced than Achille Ratti, for Joachim Pecci was a Bishop in a small hill town in Italy up to the age of sixty-eight. But Pecci was more than a country Bishop. In his early thirties he was thrust, perhaps prematurely, into the Vatican's diplomatic service as Nuncio to Belgium; and at thirty-six was retired in semi-disgrace to Perugia. But Archbishop Pecci carried on in his retirement an intensive intercourse of letters and visits with all the great of Europe and America, and finally came to the Papacy with an unrivaled preparation to be a world ruler.
Achille Ratti (born May 31, 1857) was marked out for an intellectual career from the beginning. He was ordained, at the age of twenty-two, in Rome in 1879, the year after Leo XIII came to the throne. He took graduate studies in Canon Law and Theology and emerged a doctor in both branches. It was just at the dawn of the great revival in Scholastic philosophy, which Leo was to carry to brilliant heights. Back home, in Milan, he was put to teaching theology in the diocesan seminary at the age of twenty-five. Six years later, he joined the corps of doctors of the great Ambrosian Library, one of the eminent book centers of the world. This library, however, is more than a collection of books; it is a faculty of historical and theological research, and the corps of doctors specialize each in a different subject. Ratti took for his specialty the history of the diocese, and in particular of the liturgical rite, of Milan itself. He immediately began the series of learned publications — books, articles in reviews, editions of old documents, which was expected of him.
Of his life at this time but few incidents are related, though one has received much publicity. I mean, his mountain climbing. He was big-boned and robust, and seems to have taken his vacations in this way soon after his arrival back from Rome, and he continued it up to 1913, in his fifty-seventh year. One of his feats was the ascent of Monte Rosa from the Italian side, the first time it had been achieved, and he wrote the story of it in glowing prose in a mountain-climbing review. His reports on his various ascents were later translated into English and appeared in the United States under the title of Climbs on Alpine Peaks. The qualities, which he claimed are developed by climbing are prudence, courage, and strength of body and will.
During his library days he often traveled abroad, and an English biographer reminds us that he was undoubtedly the only Pope who ever rode on the top of a London bus. These trips in search of manuscripts made a cosmopolitan of him. He got to know the people of many nations, he learned to speak their languages, but it is difficult to imagine that he ever thought to use them except to correspond with learned men in Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, and to read their books.
After nineteen years of this obscure labor, known only to the few in his branch of learning, he was promoted to be Prefect of his own library, which must have seemed to him to be the goal of his earthly ambition. He was due to spend only five years there, for in 1912 Father Francis Ehrle, S.J., later made a Cardinal by Pius XI himself, retired from the post of Prefect of the Vatican Library and Pius X reached out to Milan to the Prefect of the Ambrosian and brought him to Rome to take the vacant place. He had now certainly arrived at the top of his profession. He was already a Monsignor, and Pius gave him a canonry of St. Peter's, which supported him. He was an able executive, it transpired, and made many reforms in the Library. He must have looked forward to ending his days there. There he remained after the coming of Benedict XV and all during the Great War, which seemed to touch him not at all.
But it was preparing a great surprise for him. Certainly nobody on earth would have predicted that five years after its close he would be Pope. He was undoubtedly a superior librarian; and besides, a cosmopolitan, an athlete, a linguist, and a scholar, but after all, a recluse. Yet, as I once wrote elsewhere of him, he was also "a man of tremendous personal force and powerful will — a strange equipment, if you will, in a librarian, but one that makes the long obscurity more puzzling than his emergence from it" (The Historical Bulletin, January, 1937, p. 23).
Benedict XV, after the heartbreaking failures of his attempts to end the War, and the gratuitously insulting treatment he had received from the Powers in the secret treaty of London, which brought Italy into the War on the side of the Allies, set himself generously to the task of healing the wounds that were left among all the peoples. New nations had arisen, and old ones were given new life. Poland was among these latter, and it lay along the frontiers of the surging Bolshevism of Russia and the sullen revengefulness of Germany. It was essential that it begin its new life under the fair auspices of its Christian heritage. The envoy of the Pope would be an important personage in the rebirth of Poland. There was a sensation when in May 1918, Benedict passed over his diplomatic corps and to the astonishment of everybody picked the Librarian of the Vatican for the position. Monsignor Ratti was sixty-one years old when his public life began. He was sent off to Warsaw as Apostolic Visitor to Poland and the Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia, and Lettonia. His task was to begin the establishment of new hierarchies in those countries, where the Catholic population had long lain under the oppression of the Czars, and to start them off on the right foot. It was no easy one.
On June 6, 1919, Benedict XV recognized his services and the stability of the new Poland by promoting him to be the first Papal Nuncio at Warsaw, and raising him to the Archbishopric of Lepanto (a fateful title!). At that post he remained two years and a week.
Within a year a terrible crisis arose to test his nerve and the other qualities he had consciously cultivated as a mountain climber. Poland found itself at war with Russia. How this happened has been disputed, but it seems certain that it came about when the Christian people of the Ukraine rose up against their Red oppressors, and, revolting, called Poland to their aid. Poland came, but the Red army under Trotzky and Tukhachevsky was triumphant all along the line. The Russian hordes rolled up to the gates of Poland's capital, Warsaw. The whole diplomatic corps fled to safer climes, all but the Pope's Nuncio. Archbishop Ratti stood firm, and his inspiring presence in the threatened city did much to bring about the outcome. Women and children as well as men fought on Our Lady's Day, August 15, 1920, in the Battle of Warsaw under Pilsudski and the Catholic French General Weygand, and the Red army suffered a terrible rout. That will surely rank as one of the really decisive battles of the world, for at that dreadful moment the safety of Western civilization was at stake, and it was the Archbishop of Lepanto who was there to turn the tide. It was the first time he had looked the Red Menace in the face, and it burned a scar in his soul. He was to be at war with Moscow to the end of his days.
In June 1921, he was recalled to Rome, and on the 21st of that month Benedict made him a Cardinal and Archbishop of his own city, Milan. He was sixty-four years old. Two others became Cardinals the same day, and when they came before him the Pope whispered that soon one of them would "wear the white" (of the Papacy). It is ironical, in the light of later events, that previous to this, when rumors of the approaching promotion reached Warsaw, Archbishop Ratti had expressed the opinion that he would be spared the Milanese Bishopric on account of his age!
The promotion to Milan took place in June 1921. The following February, the Archbishop of Milan took the train to Rome, to play his part in his first Conclave to elect a new Pope. Benedict had come down with bronchial pneumonia on January 17th, and in five days, worn out with worry and work, he was dead. He was the most misunderstood Pope of modern times, I think, but his conduct of the Papacy during the World War is slowly growing in men's estimation as that cataclysm recedes into history.
The Conclave opened on February 2, 1922. Four days later, after fourteen ballots, Cardinal Ratti received the necessary two-thirds vote, changed his red robes for white, and announced that he took the name of Pius: "It was under the Pontificate of Pius IX that I was made a member of the Catholic Church and started my ecclesiastical career. Pius X summoned me to Rome… I take the name of Pius." Outside, the vast multitude that had been waiting in the Piazza of St. Peter's soon heard the news, and was wild with enthusiasm.
They were soon to have a greater thrill. Since the taking of Rome in 1870 no Pope had appeared publicly before the Roman people. The tension with Italy made it inadvisable. The first decision made by Pius XI was that he would give his benediction Urbi et Orbi — To Rome and the World, in person, on the balcony. It was a decision that had been made by Leo XIII also, but the Cardinals talked him out of it. This time it was done, and it was taken for the omen of peace that it was. Reconciliation of the Holy See and Italy was only a question of time.
After his election, for almost a year, as far as the world at large was concerned, the Pope was silent. He was studying. He knew Italy and Poland. He must now know the world. He tells us that he talked or corresponded during that time with nearly every bishop and archbishop in the whole Church. He had conceived the daring plan of writing out beforehand the program he proposed to follow in his pontificate. On December 23, 1922, the program was published. It was the Encyclical "Ubi Arcano."
It is a diagnosis of the evils of the world, their causes, and their remedies, and the announcement of his concrete plans for bringing these remedies to fruition. War, he says, is still being waged in society, and the family and the individual are its victims. That war is the result of naturalism, the expulsion of Christ from His world. What is needed is a new social order, Christian marriage, Christian education, under the Kingship of Christ: "Pax Christi in Regno Christi"—the Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ.
The plague of modern times, he asserts, is "a species of moral, juridical, and social modernism," which is no less dangerous than "theological modernism." Just as the latter divorced faith from reason, so the new modernism divorces it from the whole of life. Therefore, the secular and regular clergy must be imbued with the new spirit of Christ; the laity will be united with the Church in Catholic Action; business and industry will have justice and charity preached to them; governments through concordats will respect an order "superior to the State"; Italy will be bidden back to friendship with the Throne of Peter; and the Vatican Council will be re-assembled. Only the last of these remained unfulfilled, and it is one of the extraordinary events of modern times that a Pontificate could have been laid out in advance as Pius XI laid out his. It was an evidence both of the kind of mind he had, and of his indomitable will.
Pius XI was before everything else a reformer. Nothing in the Church remained quite the same after he had touched it and it is a paradox that the historian, the lover of things dead and gone, felt no compulsion on him to leave things unchanged merely because they "had always been that way." It was the late Cardinal Cerretti who said that his Pontificate was one of the most personal and individualistic on record. To those about him he seemed possessed of a perfect fury to correct all that was wrong or relaxed in the Church, and to get it all done in a hurry before the shadows fell. There is not a single one of us whose life is the same as it was before he came. He literally shook the Church up.
More than that, of all the modern Popes he had the keenest sense of the value of that modern device we call publicity. It was not a mere accident that he called Signor Marconi to him, made him one of his entourage, and had him perform his radio experiments in ultra-short wave under his Papal patronage; or that when Nobile set out to fly over the North Pole the Pope gave him a cross and a Papal flag to drop from his airship. Better than any Catholic alive, the old archivist gave us all lessons in what constitutes news. This was because he realized the value of what we call "propaganda" from an old Papal institution for spreading the Good News of the New Testament. "Go, teach all nations," said the Founder. Pius XI took that command very seriously. Within a few years it got so that the mere rumor in newspaper offices that the Pope was contemplating a new Encyclical was enough to set wires and air waves humming between here and Rome and to keep extra staffs on through the night so as not to miss the first flash. Thus wisely did the Pope cause the channels of information to remain wide open, always ready to carry the words of his teachings. Would that we could have sufficiently imitated the example he was setting us!
Yet his message was always spiritual, and even when writing on technical subjects the burning love of Christ that was in his heart colored everything he said. One of his first acts was to give a great impulse to closed retreats for men and women. In the Apostolic Constitution "Summorum Pontificum" and the Letter "Meditantibus Nobis," in 1922, he had ordered the spread of the spiritual exercises among the laity, and made St. Ignatius Loyola the patron of them. On January 26, 1923, the third centenary of the great missioner and spiritual writer, St. Francis de Sales, he issued his Encyclical "Rerum Omnium," a treatise on the spiritual life for priests and lay-folk. Three years later, it was the seventh centenary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi that impelled him to repeat his lessons in the Encyclical "Rite Expiatis" (February 28, 1926).
From the spiritual life he turned to the intellectual. June 29, 1923, was the sixth centenary of the canonization of St. Thomas Aquinas, and in the Encyclical "Studiorum Ducem" he foreshadowed that reform in ecclesiastical studies and the formation of the priesthood, which he soon outlined in a letter to Religious Superiors on March 19, 1924. This reform had its consummation in the Constitution "Deus Scientiarum Dominus," which required all faculties of higher studies to conform their curricula to the exemplar he had himself set up at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Biblical Institute, and to take out a license, as it were, to show that they had actually conformed. St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis de Sales, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, these were his patrons. It is characteristic and significant that he broke all records during his Pontificate by creating three new Doctors of the Church: St. Albertus Magnus, St. Peter Canisius, and St. Robert Bellarmine. He capped his intellectual interests towards the close of his life by re-creating the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and inviting as members many famous scientists from everywhere.
During these first two years he was slowly maturing a step, which was destined to have a profound effect on theological thought itself. I well remember the fury of excitement, which possessed the New York newspapers, and particularly the old New York World, on the morning of December 12, 1925, when the flash came that the day before the Pope had issued an Encyclical on Christ the King. The Ku-Klux Klan was at the height of its power, and the burden of its attacks on the Church was the political ambition, which it was supposed to harbor over the nations and the enmity it was accused of having for democracy (though the Klan, precursor of Hitler, as a friend of democracy seems very comic to us now). The sequel was amusing. The papers spent vast sums of money having the text of the Encyclical translated and cabled, and it is putting it mildly to say that they were bewildered when they had it in their hands and found themselves with a profound theological treatise on Christology, not an assumption of world-wide temporal sovereignty. Very little of that cable appeared in the newspapers' columns. Later, through the co-operation of the newspapers and the N. C. W. C. News Service, complete texts of Encyclicals were cabled here on time.
This Encyclical, Quas Primas, on Christ the King, was perhaps the greatest theological innovation of his Pontificate, for it restored the Pauline teachings to Christology, and was a systematic synthesis of a line of thought that had been obscured in the heat of Reformation polemics on the visible Church, but was outstanding in the teaching of those two great doctors, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. The tremendous present interest in the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ dates from this Encyclical, and if the Vatican Council had been re-convened, it cannot be doubted that the project to make that doctrine a defined dogma, abandoned in 1870, would have been pushed to completion.
The idea of Christ the King penetrated the masses also, and Viva Cristo Rey! was the last defiant shout of many a Mexican Catholic as he faced the firing squad. It was the battle cry of the Spanish Nationalist insurgents. It gave a name to a political party, the Rexists in Belgium and to the party organ. Rex vaincra! was the slogan of thousands of Belgian youth as they marched to the polls though under the severe reprobation of their Bishops, who rightly feared the end of the Catholic party.
But the triple crown of Pius's teaching was set in the Great Encyclicals: on the school, the family, and the social order. The Encyclical on Education, in December 1927, condemned secular education, and set at rest the controversy on the canonical prohibition of attendance at secular universities as well as schools and colleges. The mere addition, said the Pope, of a course in Catholic doctrine to a secular curriculum does not make an education suitable for Catholics; to be this, the whole curriculum from top to bottom must be permeated with the Catholic idea.
Next came "Casti Connubii," on Christian Marriage, in December 1930, in which the Pope turned from the individual to the next unit in society, the family. In moving language he re-established the ideal of the sacred union of matrimony, like to the bond between Christ and His Church, in St. Paul's striking analogy. And once again, the supreme authority of the Church proclaimed the divine law on birth control, sterilization, and eugenics.
Last of all, and perhaps in its effect on the world, the greatest of the three, was "Quadragesimo Anno," on the Reconstruction of the Social Order, on May 15, 1931, the fortieth anniversary of Leo's great Encyclical "Rerum Novarum." The striking aspect of this Encyclical is its profound knowledge of modern finance capitalism. He laid his finger on its fatal error, the concentration of wealth and economic and political power in a few hands: "Not alone is wealth accumulated," he asserted, "but immense power and despotic economic domination are concentrated in the hands of a few, and these few frequently are not the owners but only the trustees and administrators of invested funds committed to them; and they control it at their caprice and choice." It is to this impersonal character of modern property that most economists attribute the disasters of our time and Pius was in full agreement with them. In burning words he excoriated the selfishness of those wealthy men who blindly seek an immediate profit at the expense of society, to the loss of both poor and rich. Moreover, the Pope not only exposed the evils; he proposed a new organization of society, one composed of compact groups of employers and workers, each according to his own vocational occupation, and all of them coalescing to form an organic society, not an atomized one such as we have at present.
The child, the family, society itself; these were the capital objects of his reforming and crusading zeal as he looked out over the world. But within the Church he was no less critical and practical, and with much more immediate and visible success. I have already mentioned his reform of studies for the priesthood. But beginning with his own house, the Vatican, he re-fashioned everything to his powerful will. The Vatican Museum, Library, and Archives were put on a new basis, with the help of the latest library science and of experts from the United States. The normal business routine of the various offices of the Holy See was revised to make it more efficient. His mind embraced every detail. He had to have an effective instrument in his hands, if he were to impress his will on the world. His northern temper often made him impatient of the leisurely ways of "eternal Rome."
Another far-reaching reform concerned the foreign missions. With all due fatherly appreciation of the French Society for the Propagation of the Faith, he held that it could not be brought to its highest efficiency in collecting funds unless it were divorced from the suspicion of nationalist and political influences. So he brought its headquarters to Rome, and saw his justification in a doubling of the funds that are the life-blood of the apostolate in pagan lands. In the Holy Year, 1925, he set on foot and saw brought to magnificent proportions a worldwide Mission Exhibition in the Vatican. Millions of visitors thus became aware for the first time of the importance of the missions. He capped the work with an Encyclical on the Missions, "Rerum Ecclesiae," on February 28, 1926. Along with this went a drastic reorganization. A native clergy was his ideal. He saw the day coming where in many places the Church would stand on its own feet. To keep a foreign clergy in places where a native clergy could operate, such as India, China, and the Philippines, was, to his mind, only to put that day off to an indefinite date. His idea of a successful foreign mission was one, which had ceased to be a foreign mission, as once the United States had. The application of this doctrine to our Negroes in this country is obvious, and Pius XI blessed every effort looking to that end.
It will always be one of the striking facts of history that one of the contemporaries of Pius XI was another Italian with a raging impatience to get things done. Mussolini reformed Italy to a degree that had been approached only by Napoleon in France. With two such men as Pius and Mussolini it seems now a foregone conclusion that they would put an end to the impasse between Italy and the Holy See, with all its deplorable consequences in loss of faith and national decadence.
The solution came in February 1929, and when it came it was so simple that the world wondered why it had been so long delayed. After all, the demand of the Holy See was only that it have temporal sovereignty to guarantee its independence of Italy. The demand of Italy was to keep Rome as its national capital. A separate piece of land, however small, was necessary for the temporal sovereignty, which the Pope must have. It came down to the simple problem of finding a piece of land for the Bishop of Rome, which should be in his diocese, and yet not be Rome itself. The State of Vatican City, to give its official name, was set up, and the problem was solved. It was once said that the men who would solve it would be the greatest men of their time. The simplicity of the solution was the gauge of its greatness. Its consequences will be incalculable, and not least on the Italian people, thus relieved of the corroding influence of a divided allegiance that had all but destroyed the faith of large numbers of them.
Years later, an excruciating problem was presented to Pius when Italy invaded and annexed the Kingdom of Ethiopia. Nothing more bitter was ever said about a Pope than the criticisms aimed at him for not openly condemning the aggression. It is not our duty to defend him at this late date. This much is certain, however: nobody could ever accuse Pius XI of cowardice. His policy, therefore, was dictated by some other motive. What was it? It could only have been what we call choosing the lesser evil, and we may remember that this is the policy most often imposed on the Holy See in this imperfect world. An open condemnation would not have stopped Italy; that we know now. But it would have caused a cleavage in Italian Catholic life that years would not have healed. The Pope made sufficiently clear his horror of war of any kind, and it is well to recall that the criticisms of his non-intervention came from people who ordinarily hold, especially when their own case is involved, that the Pope has no duty, still less any right, to pronounce on the rights or wrongs of national affairs.
The Lateran Treaty and the Concordat, which followed were typical of the world policies of Pius. In many ways he was a follower of Leo XIII, but in foreign policy he went far behind Leo to Pius IX, and brought back to the Church the system of Concordats, which Leo had allowed to lapse. It was Leo's way to keep the peace with the nations by direct and continual negotiation. The Concordat system is to attempt to foresee all possible sources of friction, set them down in advance, with the agreed methods of dealing with them. It was probably not possible for Leo to do this with the governments of his day, for they were paralyzed by a stupid anti-clericalism which would rather see decadence overcome a country than even admit that the Pope exists. It was that "liberalism" which had kept back the Roman settlement. The War killed it, or rather it died a natural death in the War it had itself brought on. Laicism was its watchword, and its practice was the de-Christianizing of the nations. It is bankrupt. Pius was quick to size up the new situation, and one after another of the countries came to terms with him. In 1928, twenty-seven nations already had diplomatic representatives at the Holy See. Between 1922 and 1933, Pius and his Secretaries of State, Cardinals Gasparri and Pacelli, negotiated ten Concordats: with Lettonia (1922); Bavaria (1924); Poland (1925); Lithuania (1927); Rumania (1927); Italy (1929); Prussia (1929); Baden (1932); Austria (1933); and Germany (1933). I cannot go into the terms of these treaties, but as a whole they represent, as one writer put it, "a notable setback for laicism and a considerable progress for Catholic liberties."
In the midst of all these triumphs, however, two great menaces rose up to threaten the Christian religion: Communism through a militant philosophy of materialism and atheism joined with ruthless force and diabolic cunning; and Fascism through a system of State supremacy which always had in its power the ability to crush religion if it did not do the bidding of the nation's masters.
Almost the day after the signing of the Lateran Treaties the Pope and Mussolini were locked in a violent and desperate struggle for the youth of Italy. It ended by the Pope securing, not the forms but the substance, of what he was bound to demand: the religious training of young people in the ranks of the various Fascist youth corps. To do this he had to sacrifice the youth movements promoted by the Church; but in return he secured religious training in the youth movements of the State itself.
The very same conflict arose in Germany, in spite of the fact that the Concordat with that country, based on previous experiences with Italy, guaranteed for the Church, by the pledged word of Hitler, the rights of education and Church control of its own youth movements. A long series of aggressions on the part of the Nazis—destruction of the Catholic press, muzzling of the pulpit, disgraceful judicial persecutions of the clergy on trumped-up "morality" charges, closing of Catholic schools, colleges, and seminaries, and violation of pledged troth on the youth movements— finally exasperated the Pontiff to such a degree that he delivered to be read in Germany the Encyclical "Mit brennender Sorge" ("With burning anxiety"), on March 22, 1937, bitterly denouncing the bad faith of Germany's present rulers. The Pope knew well that he had to deal with a man who, on June 30, 1934, had put to death in cold blood dozens of his closest associates and friends who he imagined were plotting to overthrow him.
Russia, as I have said, Pius had met face to face on the plains at Warsaw. He never ceased to warn the world that in Moscow lurked the most deadly menace to human civilization the world has seen in modern times. He knew well that it was not merely with a social-economic theory that he had to deal, in spite of its success in capturing the working classes in many countries. That part of Communism's progress he many times blamed on the stupidity and crass greed of the capitalist rulers of the world; and the remedy for that is the obvious one of social justice. But modern Communism, as a movement, is something more than that; it is before all the old, old atheism which hates God, and Christ, and His Church, and the civilization built in their name, and which has merely added to itself in these latter days an economic and political system of terrible and ruthless power. One of Pius's last Encyclicals, "On Atheistic Communism," on March 19, 1937, made this clear with brilliant realism.
Spain and Mexico were different problems altogether. Here were two Catholic countries of old and deep Christian culture, in which large numbers of people had apostatized and seized the reins of power. The first thing they did was turn on their Mother, the Church, and rend her apart with blind hatred. The long tradition of radicalism, dating from the French Revolution, was bearing its last fruit. Communism and Anarchism there were casual and merely opportunist. They utilized the exploitation of the poor, blamed the Church for it; convinced the world they were the real heralds of democracy, and conquered because they were willing to resort to force and bloodshed where their victims shrank from it. All the Pope could do in this crisis was to start the long laborious process of winning the masses back to Christ.
It is ironical that Pius XI lived to see his old enemy, Communism, a broken and a helpless force in Europe, while the reaction to Communism, Nazi-Fascism, was on the triumphant upsurge of world power. One of his last fights was in defense of the Jews, in the long tradition of the Papacy as the sole effective protector of a downtrodden race. With a flash of the old fire, in the midst of his declining strength, he lashed out at the sight of his beloved Italy following in the footsteps of pagan Germany. His sad remark that he wondered how Italy could "imitate" Germany went home, to judge by the violent reaction to it. The visit of Hitler to Rome, which saw the balconies of the Eternal City festooned with the hooked cross, and which reached its climax on the very Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, struck an acute blow to his failing heart, and in courageous but faltering tones he gave voice to the sadness which it caused him.
When in September 1938, it looked as if the world was at last to come to war again the only public words that came from him were an appeal for prayers for peace. What went on behind the scenes we do not yet know, but we may be sure that the whole force of the Papacy's great moral power, as in the past, was thrown on the side of pacification and justice. It will always be remembered that he lived to see the liberation of Catalonia from the Red yoke. Yet his last words were: "We have still so many things to do!"
Pax Christi in Regno Christi—the Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ. This was his ideal as he began his Pontificate. But as the shadows lengthened over his life, peace was all but absent from the world. He must have longed for release, except that his great spirit felt upon it the compulsion and the hope that it was his destiny to restore the world to sanity. If God took him before he realized that task, we can only bow to the Divine Will, and whisper for His servant with a new meaning: May he rest in peace!
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