Fiat Lux

What happened at that private meeting last March between Pope John XXIII and Khrushchev's son-in-law?

Apparently the Pope did most of the talking--at least according to Monsignor Loris Capovilla, the Pope's private secretary.

Capovilla told an audience in Assisi last week that after Aleksei Adzhubei had raised the question of diplomatic relations between Moscow and the Vatican, the Pope gave him a brief homily in reply. "You are a journalist," he said, "so you know the Bible and the progression of the work of Creation. You know that the Lord took six days for the work of Creation before coming to man. But as you know, the days of the Bible are not days but epochs, and the epochs of the Bible are very long.

"We are now at the first day. We are looking each other in the eyes and we see that there is light there. This is the first day, the day of Fiat lux: Let there be light. The light is in your eyes and in mine. The Lord, if He wishes, will make known the road to follow. But it needs time, it needs time. For now we can only hope and pray."

Kindly Pope John then took Adzhubei and his wife Rada on a brief tour of the papal apartments, explained the meaning of his tapestries and paintings. He asked Rada to tell him the names of her children (Nikita, Aleksei and Ivan) because "the names of children acquire a special sound from the lips of their own mothers." John gave Rada a rosary because it reminded him "of the prayer my mother used to recite by the fire when I was a boy."

The Adzhubei visit stirred a lot of criticism in Italy at the time, and some Italians even blamed the Pope for the increase in Communist voting strength in the national elections a month later.

John himself apparently felt the meeting might have been arranged by God. After the Russians left, Capovilla said, the Pope wrote in his diary: "It may be a delusion, or it may be a mysterious thread of Providence that I, as Pope, do not have the right to break."

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