1900th Passion

(See front cover*)

In a quiet Benedictine priory in Nassau fortnight ago, New York's gentle, white-haired Patrick Joseph Cardinal Hayes was spending the last few days of a seven-week vacation when he received a cablegram from his subordinate, Auxiliary Bishop John J. Dunn. Bishop Dunn sought his superior's approval of a plan: for the New York archdiocese to seize upon and dramatize President Roosevelt's inaugural sentiment, "When there is no vision the people perish." A mass meeting would be held on Passion Sunday (April 2) at Rockefeller Center. An honorary committee of the familiar Catholic-Protestant-Jew type would be arranged (Morgan J. O'Brien, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Henry Morgenthau). Alfred Emanuel Smith, Dr. Samuel Parkes Cadman and Dr. Alexander Lyons would be speakers representing the three faiths. Tenor John McCormack, who sang at Dublin's Eucharistic Congress last year and who last week was awarded Notre Dame's prized Laetare Medal (annual, for distinguished Roman Catholic laymen), would sing Cesar Franck's Panis Angelicas. And President Roosevelt would speak, perhaps in person, surely by radio.

Cardinal Hayes was swift to approve, swift to perceive what a stroke of churchmanship the plan was. For on Passion Sunday morning in Rome, Pope Pius XI was, with highest ceremonial, to inaugurate the extraordinary Holy Year which he announced last Christmas and explained last month as a means for "spiritual raising up of hearts and minds . . . universal concert of good works and prayers. . . . We propose to pray every day and we invite everyone to do so with us." Coupling President Roosevelt's New Deal with the Pope's Holy Year would be churchmanship indeed. And no church in the U. S. save the Roman Catholic was geared to do it.

Holy Years or Jubilees are regularly proclaimed by the Pope every quarter-century. In 1925 more than 500,000 pilgrims, counting only organized groups, were drawn to Rome. Energetic Pius XI has had two good reasons for two extraordinary Jubilees. In happy 1929 it was the 50th anniversary of his ordination. This troubled year it is (by most calculations) the igooth anniversary of the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ. As a Holy Year it should turn even the most casual Christian to thoughts of his Savior. Whatever material improvement the year may bring, may, after prayer, honestly be attributed by Christians to Christian faith. And once more a Holy Year will serve to remind the world that Pius XI, 261st Pope, once a mountain climber named Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, is at 75 a world figure, the hale, vigorous-minded ruler of some 300 million souls of all races. A temporal sovereign-in his 108.7-acre Vatican City, he is master of millions & millions in wealth. He said last February, "God after accepting the offerings of the shepherds accepted those of the kings. Therefore, He does not disdain material things providing they serve the great aims for which He came to earth, namely, the glory of God and the salvation of souls." For that work the Church, too, must fight Depression.

All Churches have found the Depression an admirable background for a vigorous renewal of their age-old attacks on Mammon. But only the Roman Catholic Church may be said to have an official attitude on "Economics." This attitude, based on Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), the Statesman-Pope, Pius XI, has elaborated in many a pronouncement. Denouncing Communism, rejecting Socialism, chiding Capitalism, finding Syndicalism (the Fascist type of government-in-business) too powerfully concentrated, Pius XI has come out for: minimum wage laws; old-age pensions; private property, even a "modest fortune" for workers; government regulation of business; co-operation between Capital & Labor in some form of local unit resembling the medieval guild. Without anywhere attempting to promote these ideas by direct political action, and without reducing them to concrete proposals, Pius XI has offered them to the world as supreme economic wisdom, divinely inspired and backed by the sublime authority of God's earthly vicar.

Holy Door. A brilliant floodlight filled one corner of great St. Peter's one night last week. A small train of prelates approached, led by the Very Rev. Monsignor Camillo Caccia Dominioni, plump Master of the Papal Household, a favorite of Pius XI and, it is believed, one of the two cardinals secretly nominated at last month's consistory (TIME, March 20)-- secretly because, certain to be one of the busiest Vatican functionaries during the Holy Year, he would have no time for a cardinal's duties. Monsignor Caccia Dominioni consulted a picture postcard, directed workmen to a spot on the wall. With chisels and mallets they chipped away plaster. Presently a hollow was discovered, containing a bronze casket and a cylinder. These Monsignor Caccia Dominioni removed. The prelates departed, officially sure that the Holy Door of St. Peter's, walled up at the end of the 1925 Holy Year and containing mementoes of it, had not been disturbed.

This Sunday Pius XI will re-open the Holy Door, while Cardinals do likewise at the basilicas of St. John Lateran, St. Mary Major, St. Paul-without-the-Walls. In solemn, robed procession the Pope will move from the Vatican to the front portico of St. Peter's. Thrice he will knock, with a golden hammer, on the Holy Door. Within, Sanpietrini (St. Peter's workmen) will lower the door away. The Pope will pray while prelates sprinkle the aperture with holy water. Then all will enter, kissing the jambs as they pass. Thereafter the public may enter all through the year. Calendar, Audiences with Pius XI will become increasingly frequent through the year. Railway and steamship lines advertising Holy Year tours point out that scarcely a week will pass without the Pope taking part in some ceremony. Kings and queens and ex-monarchs will visit him. Easter Sunday he will pontificate in St. Peter's, perhaps bless the multitude from the loggia as no other Pope has done since 1870. In June there will be six or seven canonization and beatification ceremonies. On the Feast of Corpus Christi in June, the Pope may visit Rome for the first time in his eleven-year pontificate. Or he may go to Rome later, climb on his knees the famed Scala Santa (Holy Stairs) which are said to be the very ones Christ ascended in Pontius Pilate's palace. That Pius XI plans to leave Vatican City has been denied, but he keeps his own counsel, is fond of springing surprises.

Peter's Bones, Another matter which the Pope has been considering is a shrine nearer home. In a crypt beneath St. Peter's is the reputed tomb of the very founder of the Church. After Christ's resurrection Peter was delivered from jail in Jerusalem by an angel, went to Antioch and then, according to some Protestant and all Catholic opinion, to Rome, where during Nero's persecutions he was crucified head downwards near the spot where his basilica now stands. St. Peter's head is in St. John Lateran. His body is supposed to be in the crypt of St. Peter's, which was sacked by the Saracens in 846. The crypt has never since been reopened. Archeologists begged for a look in 1900; their request still stands. To exhume the remains of his predecessor, with appropriate ceremony, would be for Pius XI one more sure means of centering the eyes of the world on Rome this year.

*From a painting by Philip de Laszlo, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

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