Religion: Prisoner Emerges

At six in the morning, most Roman citizens are still abed. Few were the early risers who saw, one morning last week, four automobiles speeding by a devious route—past the Temple of Vesta, the Palatine, the Circus Maximus and the Coliseum—to the Basilica of St. John Lateran, which is the cathedral of the Diocese, its high altar reserved to the Bishop of Rome, who is the Pope. A small party of ecclesiastics got out of the motors, entered the church.

Inside the Basilica, Pope Pius XI, served by only one acolyte, celebrated mass at the spot where, 50 years before, he had been, ordained to the priesthood. After mass he went next door, visited the Lateran Palace. Then back to the Vatican he went, as quietly as he had come. Next day the Pope, robed in the full majesty of his Pontificate, in cream-colored silk cloak, gold-&-silver-embroidered, crowned with the Triregnum (triple crown), closed his golden jubilee with a solemn mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, where 70.000 Catholics cheered him. Then he beatified the relics of Father John Ogilvie, Scottish priest hanged by the Calvinists 300 years ago.

After conferring the galerum rubrum (red hat) and cappa magna (Cardinal’s cloak) on the six new Cardinals named last month (TIME, Dec. 2), His Holiness Pope Pius XI last week published an encyclical letter to the Catholic episcopacy. Excerpt: “The greatest malady of the modern age, the principal source of the evils we all deplore, is the lack of reflection. . . . There is only one remedy which I can propose. This is to invite tired souls to have recourse to spiritual exercises. . . . We must not neglect this supernatural breath which is life to many souls.”