Word: pius
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After his election, Pius XII received the first "obedience" of the College of Cardinals, each kissing his red leather slipper. During the ceremony, he was heard to murmur: "Miserere mei, Deus [Pity me, Lord...
...Pius XII, now 77, works an 18-hour day, seven days a week. He rises at 6:15 every morning, opens his windows, prays, and takes a cold shower. He shaves with an electric razor. While he shaves, a goldfinch named Gretel-one of five small pet birds he keeps-perches on his arm as it moves with the razor.* Until he goes to sleep in his simple brass bed between 12 and 2 a.m., Gretel is his only entertainment. He rarely listens any more to the records from his fine collection (favorites: Bach, Brahms, Wagner), and he has given...
...staff and a personal theologian, an Irish priest named Michael Browne, but, as in the days when he was a "library mouse," the Pope loves to do his own research. He will not trust a secretary to verify a quotation. Unlike his predecessor (who locked it in a closet), Pius XII uses his telephone constantly; he has a one-way line-no one can dial the Pope...
...Church-among its spokesmen are Cardinals Ottaviani, Canali and New York's Spellman-which believes that the Red regimes are slowly strangling Catholicism in Eastern Europe, and that it might be better to take a tough line, even if this should force the Church to go underground. Pius, gentle by nature, and diplomatic, will not accept this view unless there is clearly no alternative...
...perceived, like Marx, that the key to the Western World was the worker. In his famed social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, Leo proclaimed the worker's inalienable right to a decent living, the employer's duty to provide it, and the right of both to private property. Pius XII has reasserted Leo XIII's line. In 1945, he approved (reluctantly) the daring social experiment of the French worker-priests...