Saints

Last week on Easter Sunday a canonization ceremony, for which he had been conserving his waning strength, brough aged Pope Pius XI into St. Peter's in Rome for his first public appearance this year. With his doctor hovering nearby the Holy Father sat for two-and-one-half hours on the pontifical throne, looked well, if thin, and spoke clearly. Before him knelt three consistorial lawyers, pleaders for three saints whose visages and deeds the people beheld upon great banners in St. Peter's--Andre Bobola, Polish Jesuit (1592-1657), Giovanni Leonardi Italian founder of a religious congregation (1541-1609), Salvador da Horta (1520-67), humble Spanish Franciscan lay brother. Thrice the lawyers begged the Pope--instanter, instantius and instantis-sime--to grant the canonizations. The Pope, imploring the guidance of the Holy Ghost, pronounced a formula of sanctification for each saint, then intoned a prayer while the bells of St. Peter's and all the churches in Rome rang out.

Previously, Pius XI had received the Primate of Poland, Alexander Cardinal Kakowski, had told him he was proclaiming St. Andre Bobola the Protector of Poland. That land, nominally 75% Catholic, is dear to the Pontiff. Nearly 20 years ago he was its Papal Nuncio Achille Ratti. He and U. S. Minister Hugh Gibson were among the few foreign diplomats who remained in Warsaw when in 1920 the Bolsheviks advanced upon the city. Warsaw did not fall, but as the Russians retreated they pillaged the countryside, snatched from a shrine in Polotsk the venerated body of Andre Bobola.

Now a remarkably well-preserved mummy, this relic has traveled much since Bobola, a Jesuit teacher of noble Polish birth, was scourged, beaten, flayed and scalped by Cossacks, who put him to death near Pinsk in 1657. The nearby shrine in which he was buried was successively guarded by Jesuits, Greek Catholics and Russian Orthodox monks before Bobola's relics were taken to Polotsk. In Bolshevik hands they ended up in a medical museum in Moscow--although Roman Catholics were not then aware of their whereabouts. In 1922, within a month after he became Pope, Pius XI ordered a U. S. Jesuit, director general of his Papal Relief Mission in Russia, to "seek and find" the body of Andre Bobola. That Jesuit was Rev. Edmund Aloysius Walsh, today the stocky, white-haired vice president of Georgetown University, founder and regent of its excellent School of Foreign Service.

In hostile Moscow, Father Walsh prowled around hunting the body, was once within a few feet of it without being permitted to go farther. Finally in 1923 he asked outright for it, argued that its continued loss made the Poles hostile to Russia. Soviet authorities took him to the medical museum, showed him a body which he identified by reading his breviary's account of the martyrdom of Andre Bobola. Because the Russians feared pious demonstrations in Poland, Father Walsh was invited to take the body to Rome by any other route. He took it by way of Odessa, Constantinople and Brindisi. Suspicious lest the Bolsheviks might seek to switch bodies and thus hoax the Roman Catholic Church, Father Walsh took pains to pack the body against tampering. His pains were rewarded. The body of Andre Bobola arrived in Rome on All Saints Day 1923, was unpacked in the presence of cardinals, physicians. Vatican officials and Father Walsh. The false screws, the Red Cross sheet which Father Walsh had sewed up and sealed--these were intact, and so was Father Walsh's calling card which, as a last precaution, he had placed in Andre Bobola's scalped skull.

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