Widows & Weeds

During a typically crowded and varied schedule at Castel Gandolfo (including messages to 600 French railroad workers, to a leathermakers' congress, to an international youth meeting), Pope Pius XII called for austerity on two notable counts :

P: Addressing a congress on family problems, he reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church's longstanding position that while second marriages by widows are not wrong, it is preferable that widows do not marry.* Said the Pope (who made no reference to widowers): The church has "a special predilection for the widows who remain faithful to their husbands . . . The dead who see God face to face cannot tolerate in those they have loved . . . inconsistent attachment. What poor human consolation can equal the grandeur of widowhood when it is turned into a means of continuing a union and perpetuating the graces of the sacrament of marriage?"

P: Speaking to Jesuits now meeting in Rome in Extraordinary General Congregation (TIME, Sept. 16), he urged Jesuits and members of other orders to eliminate "without ado and with courage all superfluous things," including tobacco. Also to be shunned: pleasure trips and extended vacations. Plainly convinced that it is better to smoke than to burn, a spokesman for the hard-smoking Jesuits said: "Tobacco is usually a luxury, but it can be a necessity with some people."

*E.g., St. Paul in I Corinthians, 7:8-9: "I say therefore to the unmarried and widows. It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn." Argued St. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theological: A second marriage is "a somewhat defective sacrament, because it has not its full signification, since there is not a union of only one woman with only one man as in the marriage of Christ with the Church. And on account of this defect the blessing is [usually] omitted."

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