Pope Pius XII was a gracious man who met the 20th century publicity attending his office with tolerance and sophistication. At his investiture in 1939, the flashbulbs of news photographers flared for the first time inside St. Peter's Basilica. During his reign, he must surely have learned of the longstanding system under which the Vatican press corps hired—and even bribed—tipsters (usually laymen) on the papal staff. When, a few years ago, the papal physician peddled pictures of his patient down on the floor doing pushups, the Pope—with a grace few men could have mustered—forgave even this assault on the papal privacy.* But even the patient Pius would have been tried by some of the press relations that attended his death.
Prepaid Signal. While Pius XII lay dying inside the cream-colored stone walls of Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence 15 miles southeast of Rome, 200 newsmen gathered for the courtyard deathwatch. United Press International rented a room on the square and dickered with a nun for the use of her telephone; the Associated Press signed up a village butcher's phone; reporters lounged in their cars or on cots and sleeping bags, drinking Cokes, shaving in the fountain. Rome's Italia news agency, mistaking a fluttering Gandolfo curtain for a prearranged, prepaid signal of the Pope's passing, flashed the news—16 hours premature—that the Pope was dead, and four Rome papers rushed out with erroneous extras.
To restore order, the Vatican radio, broadcasting from an antechamber off the Pope's bedroom, stepped up its reports. In a calm voice, the Rev. Francesco Pellegrino, S.J., projected such a sense of immediacy ("I have just come from the bedside of the Holy Father") that one listener was moved to observe:"You could almost hear the Pope breathe." After the Pope's death,† the mills ground out rumor (e.g., that the Pope's secret diaries had been stolen) and worked up enough "dope" stories discussing the "papabili" of the church's 53 cardinals to bring a public remonstrance from the Vatican.
With a Price List. All of this could be classified as oldfashioned, aggressive journalism until the Pope's physician, Professor Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi—the same who offered the photos of papal calisthenics—entered the story. A mild-mannered oculist, Dr. Galeazzi-Lisi first met the Pope when he was still Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican's 54-year-old Secretary of State, suffering from eye-strain headaches, which Galeazzi-Lisi relieved. When Pacelli was made Pope, he appointed his friend Galeazzi-Lisi as archiater,* or papal physician.
Galeazzi-Lisi stood the deathwatch for four years. During the papal illness of 1954, he tried to peddle personal accounts of the Pope's life and illness. At his price —$12,000—and while the Pope lived, he found no takers. But his chance came when his patient died.