Door

Roman Catholics in the U. S. turned their hearts and thoughts with extraordinary awe last week to Rome, meekly regretting their inability to be there in person the day before Christmas to see His Holiness Pius XI close with his own hands, with a jeweled trowel of ivory and silver spread mortar and set stones to close the Holy Door in the portico of St. Peter's magnificent basilica on the 23rd Jubilee Year of the Catholic Church. The closing ceremonies were gorgeous, drawing some 70,000 clerics and lay people into St. Peter's itself, and many thousands of the more humble into the public square outside, where they got a vicarious spiritual elation from the processional screened from their sight.

While the crowds waited, pushed for better positions, hissed at one another gutturally, as is the moda of the displeased Roman, in the Ducal Hall of the Vatican Pius XI donned his ceremonial vestments; prepared to set out accompanied by his religious and secular court, by Princes Orsini, Boncompagni, Massimo, Aldobrandini. On the way to St. Peter's there joined this group the Noble Guard, the Knights of the Cape and Sword, all the Cardinals in Rome, Patriarchs from the East, white-mitred abbots, purple-clad canons of St. Peter's, Swiss Guards, Palatine Guards, members of religious orders in sombre habits. At the entrance of St. Peter's the Pope was raised on his sedia gestatona; the bearers of the fiabelli (huge, iridescent fans of ostrich and peacock feathers) took their places; so too the various guards took their positions; the procession entered St. Peter's.

At first demure applause rippled over the throng; then as the Pope neared in a soft sway the faithful fell to their knees, crossed themselves, received the Pope's blessing as he passed, his left hand holding a lighted candle, his right, with two fingers extended, gesturing over the heads of his children. So passed the glorious personage gowned in white and gold,* crowned with the jeweled triple tiara, with the Papal pectoral cross hung from his neck.

A few U. S. citizens were among the good folk, and these noted with pride and pleasure Patrick Joseph Cardinal Hayes of Manhattan among the primates, and close after him, Bishops Thomas F. Lillis of Kansas City, Michael John Hoban of Scranton, Thomas W. Drumm of Des Moines, John J. Lawler of Lead, S. D.

Before actually closing the Holy Door, the Pope immersed his blessed trowel in holy water, dried it on especially blessed linen. He scooped up a little mortar; picked up three small rectangular stones emblematic of the Trinity; set each carefully in place, saying: "In fide et virtute domini nostri Jesu Christi filii Dei vivi." With the second trowelful he said: "Qui apostolorum principi dixit tu es Petrus"; and with the third: "Et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam." Into a special crevice he had placed coins and medals commemorative of the Holy Year just then closed for at least another quarter century--until 1950.

Finished with the ceremonies, the procession worked its way through St. Peter's; some women from the audience tried to push into the line, were restrained; all went home; the sampietrini, Vatican workmen, rubbed their palms, went home too. A year before Pius XI had opened the Holy Year by hitting the Holy Door with a gold hammer (TIME, Jan. 5). Although strong enough to give a stalwart blow (until immured in the Vatican by papal policy since his election in 1922, he led an active, energetic life; was even a famed mountain climber), he contented himself then with only cracking symbolically a piece of slate in the Door. Sampietrini finished the work of removal.

From Desio, his home, and from Milan, seat of his active archbishopric, friends and relatives of Pope Pius XI came to spend Christmas with the sturdy man they had known as Achille Ratti.

*Papal colors used to be red and gold, but in 1805 Napoleon casually trapped out his Italian troops in those colors. In 1808 the Papacy changed to white and gold.