IN THE WHITE ROBES of his sacred office, which made a striking contrast with the scarlet gowns of the Cardinals beside him, the newly elected Pope Pius XI stood on the balcony of St. Peter’s Church overlooking the crowded square, to bestow his first apostolic Benediction on the city and the world.

Since the break between Church and State in 1870, Popes had stayed inside the church to give this blessing, and by shattering this precedent in his first official act, the new Pontiff seemed to press and people to be setting the keynote of his pontificate. When the new Pope’s sister in Milan was told of the act, she said she knew her brother could do nothing else in view of his profound patriotic sentiments. The Marshal of the Conclave of Cardinals promptly issued the official statement that “his Holiness Pope Pius XI has given his first blessing from the exterior balcony overlooking the Square of St. Peter’s, in the special intention that his blessing should be addrest not only to those present in the square, and not only to those in Rome and Italy, but to all nations and all peoples, and should bring to the whole world the wish and the announcement of that universal pacification we all so ardently desire.” The next day the Paris journals all seized upon the significance of the appearance of the white-robed figure in that Roman balcony, L’ Homme Libre telling its readers how the Pope “opened his windows to look out upon a vast world overturned by war, to see empires crumbling, oligarchies disturbed and the people rioting. The appearance of the white-robed Pontiff was like a ray of daylight, a sudden rift in a horizon troubled by uncertainty.” Likewise our own daily papers, in their first comment on the elevation of Cardinal Ratti to the chair of St. Peter, enlarged upon the significance of the blessing from the balcony. To the Springfield Republican it seemed to signalize “a policy of restoration, of harmonious relations with the Quirinal, a policy for which the new Pontiff has stood as a member of the party of Cardinal Gasparri.” The Brooklyn Eagle finds food for thought in the fact that Cardinal Ratti, Archbishop of Milan, takes the name of Pope Pius XI:

Pope Pius XI

“It was Pius IX who entered the Vatican a prisoner in 1871 after his troops had been defeated and the Government of Italy had confiscated the papal territories. It was Pius X who launched a policy tending to diminish some of the asperities in the relations between Quirinal and Vatican. And if prediction does not fail, Pius XI will find a way to establish ‘peace with honor between the Church of Rome and the political authorities of Italy.”

That the new Pope will build toward reconciliation with the Italian Government upon the foundation which Benedict XV laid, and “that during his reign the Church will reach some kind of a compromise whereby the present condition of affairs may be terminated,” is the prediction of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Achille Ratti had been Archbishop of Milan less than a year. But during these few months he had come into close contact in that great industrial center with some “of the most turbulent elements of the so-called proletarian movement outside Russia, ” and had been made familiar with the struggle between capital and labor. So the New York Evening Mail observes that since “it is the fashion to speak of Popes as either ‘political’ or ‘religious,’ perhaps history will designate Pius XI ‘sociological.’”

It is natural that American editors should look back upon the past career of Achille Ratti to discover his qualifications for the leadership of 300,000,000 Catholics. They find a scholarly priest, a learned librarian, yet an outdoor man who has won fame as a mountain climber. They find this same scholar taken from his books, and sent to troublous Poland to achieve diplomatic triumphs and then returning from Italy to display executive capacity as Archbishop in the great city of Milan. We glean from the newspaper biographies that Achille Ratti was born in a weaver’s household in a suburb of Milan, May 30, 1857. He was educated in the seminary in Milan, came back there to teach, entered the Ambrosiana Library of Milan in 1888, and remained there for more than twenty years, while continuing pastoral work, eventually becoming head of the library and only leaving it to become Prefect of the Vatican Library in Rome in 1914. In 1918 the Pope sent him as “visitor” and later “Nuncio” to Poland. There he was credited with displaying, in the words of a Catholic writer, “such remarkable tact and diplomatic skill, and even heroism, that he played quite a leading part in the final settlement of both the political and ecclesiastical difficulties which surrounded the birth of the new Republic.” He was made Archbishop of Milan in April, 1921, and Cardinal in June. Thus he had been Cardinal less than eight months when on February 6 he became the 261st Pope.

Source: The Literary Digest for February 18, 1922