Word: papal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Many men have been tempted to refuse election to the papacy, and some have done so. One day in 1294, after rivalries between candidates had kept the papal throne empty for more than two years, an 84-year-old hermit in the mountains of Abruzzi watched a small procession of cardinals winding up the path to his hermitage, where they kissed his hand and proclaimed him Pope. He protested that he was unequal to the task, but they dragged him off weeping and crowned him Celestine V (they finally permitted him to resign six months later...
...defined last week in solemn ceremony for the man who would leave the conclave as the 262nd Pontiff. At a Mass in St. Peter's before the cardinals retired into their sealed-off quarters, Monsignor Antonio Bacci, Secretary of Briefs to the Princes (an ancient office in the papal household), told them in finely chiseled Latin what sort of man they must choose...
...they assembled to make their choice will probably never be known, for no conclave in the history of the church has been bound by such rigid rules of secrecy. Author of the rules was the late Pope Pius XII himself; in his 1945 constitution, most recent of only 29 papal decrees in almost 1,000 years on conclave procedure, he ordered that the cardinals maintain absolute secrecy not only during the conclave, as heretofore, but afterwards as well. Pius XII banned from the conclave all "telegraph instruments, telephones, microphones, radios, cameras, and other such." He also tightened the balloting procedure...
...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...
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...