Joys & Sorrows

In quiet, prayerful alarm one noon last week, there gathered around a plain brass bed in a modest chamber on the third floor of the Vatican a churchly diplomat, an eminent physician, a radio technician, two secret chamberlains. Propped up in the bed lay a sad but plucky old man, who had said: "It is to be hoped the world will at least believe I am still alive." He had marshaled words to speak into the silver microphone which now was suspended over his sickbed.

While his Secretary of State Pacelli, his Dr. Aminta Milan! and the others stood silent, his Holiness Pope Pius XI began speaking to the farthermost corners of the earth. His voice was thin, tired, feeble. Sadly, erudite Cardinal Pacelli heard his usually meticulous superior utter mistakes in gender, omit a verb from a Biblical quotation. At times the Pope mumbled, at other times seemed to summon all his strength to raise his voice. Pius XI spoke 29 minutes, much longer than his doctor desired. When he had done, choking with sobs near the end, the Holy Father was informed by a radioman that his words had undoubtedly been transmitted with clarity. "Thank God," muttered Pope Pius XI. He drank a cup of broth, sank back into instant sleep.

Immediately following the radio broadcast, very likely the last Pius XI ever would make, U. S. listeners heard a 19-minute English version of the Italian words the Pope had gasped out. In form, the address was the usual account of his "joys and sorrows" in the year past which the Pope was wont to deliver to his assembled Cardinals. A solemn repetition of ideas which the Holy Father had often voiced before, it began with a reference which recalled his sturdy mountain-climbing days: "We are near and present to you and to all the Catholic world in spirit, in thought which, transcending time and Alpine heights and the vast expanse of oceans, rises above the universe and its tempest, even unto God." It ended optimistically enough with an invocation of ''the gifts and graces which [Christ] came to scatter as seeds of an eternal and imperishable triumph on the face of the earth for men of good-will."

To Pius XI, 1936 had brought few joys, many a sorrow. For the agony of spirit which Christmas brought him he blamed "the spread of atheistic Communism" and the civil war in Spain, where he declared that "propaganda and . . . evil forces . . . have wished to make the supreme experiment of all destructive forces scattered throughout the world which they have at their command. Here is a new menace, more threatening than ever before for the whole world and principally for Europe and its Christian civilization. Here are signs and portents of terrifying reality of what is being prepared for Europe and the whole world if they do not hasten to adopt the necessary remedies of defense."

The Pope's most intimate sorrow of 1936 he did not mention. Bedded for three weeks with asthma, uremia and badly swollen legs, he ended last week in agonizing pain, was reported paralyzed throughout his left side.

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