Universal Pope

No Pope in modern history has so persistently cultivated the universality of the Roman Catholic Church as Pius XII, and no Pope since the church began has seen and been seen by so many people.

During the past year, the Vatican announced, the 80-year-old Pope received a million people in audiences, delivered more than 200 major speeches and radio addresses, not to mention minor messages and talks. His visitors comprised all sorts, conditions and faiths. Before 700 gynecologists the Pope discussed painless childbirth; he lectured racing drivers and members of an Italian automobile club on politeness; he received Germany's Evangelical Lutheran Bishop Otto Dibelius and U.S. Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss, the workers of Lombardy, the Roman nobility, 360 U.S. servicemen from NATO, and officials of the U.N. Office of Public Information. Baptist ex-President Harry Truman came to see him, as did Moslem President Sukarno of Indonesia, the Irish Pioneer Total Abstinence Association, the Seventh International Astronautical Congress, to whom he said that their efforts to explore the universe were legitimate before God.

Last week the Pope granted a special audience to "Miss Ideal Woman" of Italy, 18-year-old Miss Maria Paola Carletti, winner of a beauty contest that earned this unique papal approval by rating cultural, moral and housekeeping gifts higher than mere physical beauty.

"Never, perhaps, in the history of the church," writes British Catholic Historian Christopher Dawson, "have the peoples come to Rome in such numbers and from so many different regions . . . We seem to see the beginnings of a new pentecostal dispensation by which again 'all men hear in their own tongues the wonderful works of God.' "

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