The Holiest of Nations
chapter 3 The Holiest of Nations 3.1 The Italian Way to Holiness In 1925 Pius xi succeeded in celebrating the jubilee on its traditional date.1 Mussolini’s parliamentary speech on 3 January had passed over the event in silence, followed by the chamber at Montecitorio itself, but the churches and streets of Rome were abuzz with sermons, celebrations, illuminations, and pro- cessions. Some 600,000 pilgrims arrived from various countries; the wealthier, for the first time, by airplane, even by hydroplane. They came from Argentina, Canada, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia.2 They found a city in which the great basilicas were ablaze at night, thanks to the massive use of electricity – a city modernized by the building works completed for the occasion, in particu- lar an enlarged central railway station (Stazione Termini). The civic authorities had also taken the step of restoring Christian symbols to their proper place, restoring the cross to the Campidoglio and demolishing, together with other buildings, the clubrooms of the Circolo Giordano Bruno, too close for comfort to the colonnade of St. Peter’s. Over one million visitors, including children and schoolchildren, crossed through the Vatican Walls to visit the World Missionary Fair that Pius xi had chosen to hold in his own gardens for the Holy Year. With over a 100,000 ar- tefacts exhibited in twenty-four pavilions, it was the biggest exhibition that the Church had ever mounted in its history.3 The exhibits included African sculptures of crucifixes and madonnas, Chinese vases painted with scenes por- traying the Christian churches of the Far East, curious head-rests used by the Congolese to sleep without rumpling their sumptuous ceremonial coiffeurs, but also more utilitarian objects such as anatomical pieces and photographs, microscopic specimens and wax moulages which illustrated terrible diseases such as leprosy and the plague, in the eradication of which Catholic missionar- ies had helped to spread Western medicines, and thus to disseminate the latest 1 See G.M.
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