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