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. Vian, “Gli anni santi di Pio xi”, in La storia dei Giubilei, vol. 4, (ed.) F. Margiotta Broglio, Firenze: Giunti, 2000, 117–131. 2 That the jubilee pilgrims had come from the four corners of the earth would be emphasized by the Pope himself in his summing up of the jubilee during the Consistory on 14 December 1925 (Discorsi di Pio xi, (ed.) D. Bertetto, vol. 1, 497–500). 3 See L. Scaraffia, “Dalle reliquie al museo”, in La storia dei Giubilei, vol. 4, 103–109. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi �0.��63/97890043�879�_005 <UN> The Holiest Of Nations 105 advances of scientific progress of a positivistic stamp. The aim of the Fair was to bring together geographically far-removed cultures and to document the Church’s commitment to evangelization, with the primary objective of widen- ing support for the missions. For the first time in the jubilee tradition, the streets of the Eternal City were plastered with colored posters dominated by the image of Bernini’s angel from the Ponte Sant’Angelo with the cross in his hand, against the backdrop of the dome of St. Peter’s and accompanied by the motto Pax Christi in regno Christi in Latin, Italian, French, English and German. The doctrine of the social King- ship of Christ, consecrated by the introduction of the feast of Christ the King, thus became the emblem of the Catholic reconquest. But the community of saints, reinforced by new canonizations during the jubilee year, also helped in the ambitious project. The Carmelite nun Thérèse de Lisieux, the curé d’Ars Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, and the humble shepherdess of Lourdes Marie Bernadette Soubirous were the most celebrated of those raised to the altars or launched on the road to sainthood in 1925. They were very young women and men of faith who in their life had been distinguished not by the more heroic virtues, but by having achieved holiness in a simple life, apparently far removed from the triumphalism of the Kingship of Christ. With them Pius xi began to design a model of sainthood, which in the following years he would reinforce through a considerable number of canonizations.4 Exemplary among them was the dazzling hagiographic career of Thérèse of the Child Je- sus, the first Blessed and then the first Saint created by Pius xi, less than thirty years after her death. An assiduous reader of Histoire d’une âme, the fortunate spiritual autobiography of the Carmelite nun which represented a model of holiness accessible to everyone, Ratti, already in 1923, had placed Thérèse of Lisieux alongside the “true giants of saintliness”: Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, Filippo Neri, Carlo Borromeo, and Teresa of Ávila.5 In the eyes of the Pope, according to the testimony of his personal secretary, Monsignor Carlo Confalonieri, an essential message was epitomized in the exemplary life of the Carmelite nun: 4 On the general characteristics of this model, see R. Rusconi, Santo Padre. La santità del papa da san Pietro a Giovanni Paolo ii, Roma: Viella, 2010, 488–490. 5 Thus Carlo Confalonieri in his Pio xi visto da vicino, new edition with the addition of two appendices edited by G. Frasso, Torino: Edizioni Paoline, 1993, 171–172. On the importance of devotion to Thérèse of Lisieux in the spiritual development of Achille Ratti see E. Fattorini, Pio xi, Hitler e Mussolini. La solitudine di un papa, Torino: Einaudi, 2007, 39–44 (English trans- lation: Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican. Pope Pius xi and the speech that was never made, Cambridge: Malden – Polity, 2011). <UN>.

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