Condition of the Pope

More than a week after the general public heard on excellent authority that His Holiness Pius XI was bravely ignoring prostatic discomfort to complete his Jubilee Year festivals, hattings and canonizations (TIME, July 7), L'Osservatore Romano, official Vatican newspaper, emphatically announced:

"We are authorized to declare most categorically that in these alleged details there is nothing, absolutely nothing true or even approximately true. We say that also because, as everybody has been sure to ascertain in the past few days, the Holy Father has not taken great care of himself or limited his daily activities, we wish no one to feel apprehensive over such apparently dangerous disregard of medical advice, which, as a matter of fact, never existed, and thank Heaven, never had reason to exist."

Certainly during the tedious hours spent canonizing ten new saints last week His Holiness exhibited none of the physical distress so evident at the canonization of two new saints the week before. But his long Jubilee Year has certainly been most tiring. During it he received, besides hundreds of small visitations and individual audiences, 543 pilgrimages with some 126,900 members--3,175 from the U. S. and Canada, 600 from Latin America, 78,290 from Italy, 44,143 from the rest of Europe, 562 from Africa, 152 from Asia. His household, by stressing his need for rest, discourages additional pilgrimages this summer. A last group whom he received was composed of Vatican officials, employes and servants who presented him with a portrait of his brother, the late Count Fermo Ratti (TIME, Jan. 13).

Final decoration of the Jubilee Year was the secret election of five new cardinals:

Most Rev. Sebastiano Leme da Silveira Cintra, 48, archbishop of Rio de Janeiro.

Rt. Rev. Achille Lienart, 46, Bishop of Lille, France.

Most Rev. Raffaello Carlo Rossi, 54, titular archbishop of Thessalonica, assessor of the Consistorial Congregation.

Rt. Rev. Giulio Serafini, 62, titular bishop of Lampsacus, secretary of the Sacred Congregation of the Council.

Most Rev. Francesco Marchetti-Selvaggiani, 58, titular archbishop of Seleucia in Isauria, secretary of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of Faith. Cardinal Marchetti-Selvaggiani several years ago served with the Pontifical delegation at Washington.

At the secret consistory Pius XI delivered an allocution. Since the recent Lateran treaties between the Vatican and the Italian Government, which assured non-Catholics equal freedom with Roman Catholics to worship, Protestants, particularly U. S. Methodists and Baptists, have vigorously pushed their creeds in Italy. Said His Holiness to his Cardinals: "[To counteract] the proselytizing Protestant effort which from 1870 onward has never ceased its work of corrosion and gain, but pursues it with increasing persistence," the number of Catholic parish churches in Rome and its suburbs must be increased. "We could never have expected these forms of worship to receive such treatment as to seem not only tolerated in theory and admitted in practice, but favored as well in no small way, affording the opportunity of which this regrettable proselytism cannot fail to take advantage."*

*Of Italy's 43,000,000 population, at least 95% are Catholics, less than one-third of 1% Protestants.

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