Word: xii
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...