Religion: Rome & the Future

Almost fully recovered from his long bout of winter illness, Pope Pius XII was back last week at his hard-working routine. He was up in the morning at 6:30, and often the light in his study above St. Peter’s Square was burning at midnight. Yet Eugenio Pacelli, still as slim and erect as a brigadier in the 15th year of his reign, is also in the 78th year of his life, and so, among Rome’s churchmen, the talk is of his successor.

In a church which has elected Italians to the papacy for four centuries, the attention of Rome’s churchmen turns chiefly to outstanding Italian members of the College of Cardinals. Among them:

Giacomo Cardinal Lercaro, 61, archbishop of Bologna. A jovial and unpretentious man who six years ago was still a parish priest, Lercaro is now the most popular bishop in Italy. A wartime antiFascist, he made a postwar reputation in such Communist strongholds as Ravenna and Bologna, where he took the sting out of the Reds’ propaganda by putting his weight behind social reforms. Hard-working as any Communist, he put on a spectacular Catholic youth festival in Bologna’s Margherita Gardens (called the “Red Gardens”) last month, outfacing Bologna’s Red mayor (TIME, March 30). Lercaro feels that religion, largely through social-action projects, must close the gap. often found in Italy, between the church and a hard-pressed, often desperate working population. The fact that 19% of Italy voted Communist in the last nationwide provincial elections does not unduly depress him. Says he: “The only thing that cannot be Christianized is sin.”

Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini, 65, Archbishop of Palermo. At 27, Ruffini was a professor of biblical introduction (interpretation of the Bible in the light of science, history and doctrine) at Rome’s Gregorian University. He has since become one of the church’s foremost educators and theologians. In 1944 he founded the Medical Biological Union of St. Luke, whose aim is to clarify Catholic doctrine in the field of medical science.

For all his scholarship, he is an effective and devoted pastor. When the bandit Giuliano (TIME, Sept. 12, 1949 et seq.) terrorized Ruffini’s Palermo diocese so that hardly anyone dared go into the hills, Cardinal Ruffini left Palermo on foot and unaccompanied, walked up the stony hills toward Giuliano’s lair and cried: “Giuliano, Giuliano, you are killing my flock, you are ruining their fields . . . Come and talk to me.” After several hours waiting in the sun, when Giuliano still did not come, the cardinal gathered his vestments about him and cried aloud: “Giuliano. I am your archbishop, and I forbid you to kill!” Not till then did he walk home alone through the darkness to Palermo.

Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, 46, archbishop of Genoa. The youngest member of the College of Cardinals, a former pupil of

Lercaro’s, Siri lacks something of Lercaro’s popular appeal, but has a knack for popularizing his own sound scholarship. A professor of theology like Ruffini, he is more interested in explaining church doctrine to laymen than to priests. Since 1931 he has been organizing meetings with businessmen in an effort to show them how theology and ethics bear on everyday life. One of Cardinal Siri’s most earnest endeavors in today’s Italy: persuading employers with a mid-19th century notion of capitalism that they must set Christian limits to their profits and property.

Problems of the Papacy. Should a new papal conclave break with tradition and choose a non-Italian, one man who might receive thoughtful attention is Gregory Cardinal Agagianian, 57, patriarch of Cilicia of the Armenians,* whose headquarters are in Bzommar, near Beirut. In addition to his duties as leader of some 100,000 Catholics in the Near East. Cardinal Agagianian is one of the church’s experts on Russia. As a young Armenian refugee in Tiflis, he took a mathematics course at the Orthodox Seminary which Joseph Stalin had earlier attended.

The decision of a future conclave would substantially depend on the conclave’s estimate of the challenges facing the church. Today there are at least three: 1) aggressive Communism, 2) the application of church doctrine to new social and philosophical problems, and 3) weakening of church discipline, particularly in the persecuted churches behind the Iron Curtain.

The leading candidates to the papacy would deal with these differently. Lercaro could help settle a lot of problems by the enthusiasm which his strong leadership could arouse among the faithful. Ruffini and Siri might be more aloof and scholarly, but might hold the line better in matters of church dogma and discipline. Election of Agagianian would be a striking gesture of the church’s friendship toward the East and its non-Latin rites.

Meanwhile, as aware as anybody of the inevitability of death, but with a vast program of work before him, Pius XII was already busy with plans for 1954. Among the prospective activities of next year: 1) the canonization of one of his predecessors, Pius X, and 2) celebrating the first centenary of the proclamation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

Moreover, Vatican circles are convinced that there will be new appointments to the College of Cardinals as soon as vacancies justify them. Should no vacancies occur, Pope Pius might even decide to increase the maximum number of the College (now 70). A new consistory, possibly late this year, might produce additional men well suited to lead the church.

*And thus leader of one of the Oriental-rite communions of the Roman Catholic Church, which acknowledge the Pope’s authority but follow ancient liturgies of their own. Oriental-rite communions: the Byzantine, Alexandrian, Antiochene and Chaldean.