Inasmuch as Achille Ambrogio Damiano Ratti, Pope Pius XI, is now a temporal as well as a spiritual Sovereign (TIME, Feb. 18). His Holiness allowed himself to be interviewed as such for the first time last week.
Without a doubt the Most Blessed Father had excellent reason for awarding this major journalistic plum exclusively to Thomas B. Morgan, onetime Associated Press correspondent and now Chief of the Rome Bureau of the rival United Press. Although lean, astute, close-mouthed Tom Morgan has been getting down to the Vatican for over a decade, he professed himself “amazed,” last week, when the Summus Pontifex received him not in the Papal Throne Room but privily in his library. Observant Tom Morgan noted that Pio Undecimo was wearing “his little zucchetto or skull cap,” and that “he spoke in a calm deliberate way”. . . . first in Italian and then in English.”
Presently the Beatissimus Pater signified his pleasure that United Press alone had cabled throughout the U. S. and South America every one of the 5,000 words in his Encyclical of May, 1928. He blessed Correspondent Morgan and benignly added: “Tell all your collaborators that they have our blessing, and carry to them my invocations to God for their welfare.”
The substance of the interview proper was an expression of His Holiness’ “joy” at the “joy” and “great joy” with which the settlement treaty was greeted by Catholics throughout the globe. “We have received,” he said, “a real avalanche of telegrams of jubilation. They say the churches never were so full and the people never so enthusiastic.”
As Pressman Morgan withdrew, the Dominus Apostolicus raised his hand, and with a smile, said in English, “Good-bye.”
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