(8 of 10)
JEAN-BAPTISTE JANSSENS, 64, General of the Society of Jesus, an energetic, polylingual Belgian who heads the largest (32,008) order in the Church. (The Jesuit General has been known in Rome for centuries as "The Black Pope.") Pius XII relies heavily on Jesuits for advice.
NICOLA CARDINAL CANALI, 79, first Deacon of the College of Cardinals, a pudgy, pleasant but stern prelate who runs the tiny (1/6 sq. mi.), cramped world of Renaissance palazzi and medieval ceremony that is the Vatican city-state.
These men, and perhaps a dozen others, try to make their opinions felt. Sometimes political rivalries arise between them. Ottaviani, for instance, will write an article defending the stiff-backed stand of Spain's Cardinal Segura toward Protestantism (TIME, Aug. 3). A week later, Lombardi might preach a sermon urging that tolerance is a Christian virtue and required by Catholic beliefs. Sometimes local issues have a way of influencing decisions. Last February the Pope was urged to send a telegram to President Eisenhower asking mercy for the Rosenbergs, presumably by a small neutralist faction around Giuseppe Dalla Torre, editor of L'Osservatore Romano. Montini, while against it on principle, thought it would squelch a lot of Italian Communist propaganda about the Pope being "a prisoner" of the American reactionaries, and did not object. The Pope, who is not always as well informed as he would like to be, sent the telegram.
Generally, however, the Pope is surefooted amid such politics. As an Italian and a diplomat, he even enjoys them, and sometimes plays the game himself.
The Score. What has Pius XII accomplished in the 15 years of his pontificate?
It has been a period of great danger, but also of great activity. The Christian Democratic parties came to the fore in Europe, and decisively helped to stop Communism; the Church in the U.S. grew so mightily that now it is one of the most important units in the Catholic world; the Catholic missions in Asia and Africa grew so fast that one of the Church's biggest headaches today is to train enough native priests to keep up with the new converts, relieve missionaries. Catholic intellectuals reached a new degree of influence in Europe and the U.S.
Pius has diligently kept up with this growth (he has produced 24 encyclicals, ranging in subject from the holy places in Palestine to modern heresies), steering whenever possible a moderate course.
¶ In church affairs, he has been a moderate modernizer. He has told nuns to modernize their dress, ordered priests to study economics and sociology, unobtrusively replaced some old-fogy bishops.
¶ In temporal affairs, he struggled against endorsing or attacking specific states or political systems. Yet, as persistently as any public figure, he has denounced totalitarianism ("the Godless state"). Then, in 1948, he made the most difficult political decision of his reign: he took the Church straight into the Italian political arena ("the great hour of the Christian conscience has struck") and announced that Communists and their supporters would be denied the sacraments. The Pope still maintains that the intervention against Communism was moral, not political, since Communism represents an atheistic attack on morality itself.