A tall, lean, sad-eyed man sat at his desk last week in his summer palace at Castel Gandolfo near Rome. Before him was the text of a 13,000-word document which he had written and re-written three times in longhand. Pope Pius XII made some final corrections, sent the document off to the Vatican printers. It was his first encyclical, long delayed by the seismic events of World War II. Non-Catholics as well as Catholics waited to hear it as the keynote of the Holy Father's reign. Two days later the encyclical, entitled, from its first...
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