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PIUS THE ELEVENTH

Rt. Rev. Thomas J. Shahan, D.D.

,
RECTOR

OF THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY

OF AMERICA

Reprinted from the

Catholic Educational Review

April, 1922





PIUS THE ELEVENTH

When the son of a Lombard silk weaver ascended the Chair

of Peter the world was not astonished, accustomed as it had

been for centuries to the surprises of ecclesiastical democracy.

Born May 31, 1857, within sight of the Alps and familiar

from youth with the rounded “cols” and the green “vals” of

this loveliest region of Italy, Achille Katti grew up amid the

charms and advantages of what is also the most historical

region of Europe. Desio, his birthplace, is almost a suburb of

ancient Monza, the city of the Iron Crown and the custodian

of the oldest traditions of Lombard life and culture. Near by,

at Legnano, took place the great battle (1176) in which the

Guelph commoners of Milan broke the pride and the heart of

Frederick Barbarossa and shattered the stiff feudalism that

hung like a yoke on the necks of the rising “popolo.” For that

matter, there is scarcely a village of Lombardy whose name

does not shine on some page of history. Headers of the

“Promessi Sposi” will recall the delightful descriptions of

Manzoni—the fertile meadows and pastures, the festooned and
trellised vines, the fruit trees rich with sweetest gifts, the

blossoming mulberrys, the uninterrupted crops, the imme-

morial but complex system of irrigation, the blue lakes and the

bluer skies, the distant white line of glaciers, the dense popula-

tion, the marvelous industry of the peasants and the weavers.

Three thousand years of history lie before us between Milan

and the Alps. Etruscan and Celt, Roman and Lombard, Frank

and Spaniard, German and Frenchman, have in turn been mas-

ters of this fair land, and in the Milanese dialect each power-

ful race has left some trace of its passage. Like Belgium,

these level spaces have been the cockpit of Europe, while be-

'teaiAMM



2 The Catholic Educational Review

tween times its own Viscontis and Sforzas imposed their stern

rule on the proud burghers and thrifty peasants of this vast

plain over which the flowing waters of the Alps pour forth

daily the most inexhaustible sources of natural wealth.

At an early age this peculiarly active and strenuous boy

entered the Seminary of Milan and came thus into daily con-

tact with the rich and varied life of a city that yields to

none, save Rome, for antiquity and splendor, for the civic

virtues of its people, or for the magnificence and elevation of

their municipal temper and life. Celtic roots and German

words can yet be detected in the dialect of the citizens as

they sip their beer or wine on the broad spaces of the Duomo

piazza
;
Sant’ Ambrogio, rises yet on the site where that great

Roman magistrate originally built it (386), and where the

next year he baptized the young Augustine of Hippo; all

about the city are scattered relics and reminiscences of Lom-

bard and Carlovingian administration; the Cathedral laments

yet the relics of the Three Magi which Frederick Barbarossa

gave to Cologne after he had burned Milan to the ground

(1162)
;
Milan still preserves the drawings and manuscripts

of the first great engineer of Europe, Leonardo da Vinci
;
after

five centuries the Castle of Milan rises yet four-square in the

heart of the city, an aged but true witness of virtue and vice,

of sanctity and wickedness, of dynasties and races, of the

sciences and the arts, of all the passions and emotions which

could dilate the human heart in those eventful ages. What

richer nourishment of the historical spirit, the literary tastes

and accomplishments of the future scholar who was to raise

Milan to a new level of greatness? The city abounds in pic-

ture galleries and museums. The Brera Gallery, an old Jesuit

College, is one of the best in Europe. Milan’s learned insti-

tutes of the sciences, arts, music, and history are famous.

To its Scala Theatre music and song are deeply indebted.

The palaces of its great families, the Borromeos, the Trivul-

zios, the Littas, open yet their broad portals ; half the art of

Italy is yet treasured in its churches, beginning with the

glorious “Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci. Here Catholi-

cism entrenched itself for the final conflict with the great

Teutonic revolution, and in the person and works of Saint



Pius the Eleventh 3

Charles Borromeo (1538-84) opened the new ways along which

seemed destined to return its golden age, the ecclesiastical

seminary, the missionary college (Collegio Elvetico), the

diocesan communities (Oblates), the synod, the retreat, the

frequent sermon, the religious instruction of children (cate-

chism, Sunday schools). Here one can see the Great Hospital,

with its nine courts, one of the largest in the world. Here

above all, in the heart of the great city, rises the incom-

parable white bulk of the cathedral, with its six thousand

statues, all culminating in the gilded figure of the Blessed

Virgin, in some aspects the greatest church of Christendom.

In this Milan, itself a seminary of history, letters and the

arts and sciences, Achille Ratti grew up, his impressionable

youth roused ever to higher levels of thought and endeavor by

the countless monuments of a rich Catholic life which his

eye could not fail to admire and of which his faith held the

key. Two years in the Lombard College at Rome enriched

greatly his peculiar genius for historical study and research,

and he returned to Milan in 1882. A brief period of teaching

in the seminary, marked by sustained studies of ecclesiastical

history and Hebrew, rounded out this first period of his life

and prepared him in peaceful retirement for the peculiarly in-

fluential calling which Divine Providence had in store for him.

One of the most honorable offices to which an Italian scholar

can aspire is a place in the learned body known as the Doctors

of the Ambrosiana Library, founded at Milan some three

centuries ago (1609), by Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, and com-

mitted by him to the perpetual custody of nine scholars whose

sole occupation should be the administration of the books

and manuscripts, research among their treasures, and publi-

cation of their researches. The great Cardinal also decreed

that it should be a public library for the use of the citizens

and of visiting scholars, the first of its kind in Europe, and

strictly administered in that sense to the present day. Occa-

sion offering, the young professor of ecclesiastical history and

Hebrew in the Archiepiscopal Seminary was appointed (1888)

one of the Doctors of the Ambrosiana, and entered upon his

duties with the joy and zeal of one who had found his true

calling. The saintly and enlightened archbishop who in the



4 The Catholic Educational Review

early years of the seventeenth century, before the white man

had founded Boston or Baltimore, endowed richly this unique

institution, not only gave it a great number of books and

valuable manuscripts, Greek, Latin, and Oriental, but created

large galleries of sculpture and paintings, also a museum of

coins, engravings, prints, and other rare objects. At his behest

it became at once and remained an active democratic center

of good studies, open to all Milan and to the learned men of

Europe who sought principally the great collection of manu-

scripts, some fifteen thousand, which Cardinal Federigo had

gathered from all parts of Europe and the Orient, and which

ranks after the Vatican Library in the number and importance

of its treasures. Its printed books number at present about

five hundred thousand. Abbate Ratti was soon the right hand

and the confidant of Antonio Ceriani, the Prefect of the

Library, a learned Orientalist, and one of the foremost scholars

in the delicate arts of reading and interpreting ancient manu-

scripts, particularly scriptural and liturgical texts of an early

date. In this field Ceriani remains to this day a conjure-name

for all trained critical workers in the slow and difficult restora-

tion of the original text of the Scriptures. When this learned

priest passed away in 1907, he had endowed his young assistant

not only with a large share of his vast scholarship but also

with his intellectual apparatus of acumen and cultivated in-

dustry, and with that rare sense of vision or savor which alone

opens to the critical philologian or medievalist the world that

lies behind the shadowy fragments of his classical or ecclesi-

astical page, stained or torn, faded or worm-eaten, ragged or

incomplete.

It was in these surroundings, amid the opportunities of a

great intellectual and art center, among like-minded men, in

the heart of a community intensely Catholic and heir to a

rich and varied culture no longer common, that the young

priest was destined to prepare himself, however unwittingly,

for the Chair of Peter. For twenty years he was the humble

and devoted servant of all the scholars of Europe and America

who had reason to seek his aid. Magliabecchi scarcely sur-

passed him in the extent of his literary good-will and fraternal

service. During those years he devoted himself entirely to



Pius the Eleventh 5

the service of a studious public, the study and elucidation of

the manuscripts committed to his care, and the better organiza-

tion of the library, art galleries, and museum. The Ambros-

iana possesses several valuable Old Irish manuscripts from

the monastery of Bobbio, that nestles quasi-inaccessible in the

Apennines between Piacenza and Genoa, and for centuries kept

alive in Northern Italy the love of learning which character-

ized its sixth century Irish founder, Saint Columbanus. Ab-

bate Ratti cherished these rare survivals of ancient Irish

culture and wrote with scholarly distinction about them, visit-

ed Bobbio itself with the hope of tracing the remnants of its

library scattered during the French Revolution, and welcomed

whatever scholar came to consult the Antiphonary of Bangor,

the Bobbio Missal, or any other of the Old Irish manuscripts

which Cardinal Federigo secured when the decay of Bobbio

permitted these treasures to be carried off to Turin, Florence

or Rome. In 1891 he visited Vienna, and in 1893 Paris, on

both occasions as attache of a cardinalitial embassy. He was

the guest of Oxford on the occasion of the Roger Bacon cele-

bration and was received with much distinction. At one

time he thought of visiting the United States, but the death

of a near relative removed all motive.

However absorbed in historical, literary, artistic, or critical

studies, he never lost touch with the religious life of Milan.

He was a friend and confidant of the chimney-sweeps, and

prepared them regularly for their First Communion. To the

Ladies of the Cenacle, the Children of Mary, and other reli-

gious associations, he gave many years of service, counsel and

spiritual direction. He was always much in demand as a

popular preacher of the “Month of Mary,” and for many years

was the helpful director of an association of Catholic female

teachers. He was ever devoted to the ecclesiastical authority

and the clergy of Milan, whose pride in him grew from year

to year, as various high diocesan offices were confided to him.

In all the works of the famous “Azione Cattolica” of Milan

Cardinal Ferrari found in him a wise counsellor and a zealous

agent.

Had the placid current of his life been allowed to run its

course, he would probably have followed in the footsteps of



6 The Catholic Educational Review

his master Ceriani, and added one more star to that galaxy

of ecclesiastical savants of whom Italy is rightly proud, the

Muratoris, the Maffeis, the Zaccarias, the de Rossis, and others

to whom erudition, ecclesiastical and secular, is very deeply

indebted. Gradually he was finding his life-work in the re-

searches that led to a new edition of the famous “Acta” of the

Church of Milan, going back from Saint Charles to the earliest

appearance of the Christian faith. The Great War inter-

vened, and led him first to the definite custody (1914) of the

Vatican Library, and then to distant Poland, where he repre-

sented the Holy See at the birth of the new constitution, took

a sympathetic and helpful part in all the vicissitudes of the

new Polish State (1918-21), and returned to Italy in the latter

year to be made Cardinal of Holy Roman Church and Arch-

bishop of Milan, destined no longer to deal with dumb medieval

parchments, but with those human documents that furnish all

content to history. On February sixth of this year he was

elected Pope, took the name of Pius, and became Vicar of

Christ on earth, and the two hundred and sixtieth successor

of Saint Peter, declaring at the same time that the highest

aim of his pontificate was universal pacification.

Universal Pacification! When all is said, what greater

force exists in distracted Europe than the moral authority

of the papacy ? Arms and diplomacy, ambitions and suspicions

and old, slow-burning hatreds, have brought civilization to the

edge of the abyss; only a restoration of mutual respect and

confidence can quiet the widespread apprehensions that the

Great War has left behind it. In an unparalleled manner the

papacy is raised today immeasurably above the aims and

objects of secular life. It alone views the world situation as

a whole, with cordial sympathy for all nations and races, and

a just appreciation of the deep causes of the world’s discon-

tent and restlessness. The unity of Catholicism and the har-

mony of its vast activities are not lost upon thoughtful ob-

servers the world over, and solicit from all honest minds the

query of their source and their guarantee. Surrounded by his

bishops and the Catholic peoples of the world, Pius the Elev-

enth is an object-lesson to the chancelleries of Europe, an evi-

dence of the mutual trust and esteem which only the Gospel



PIUS THE ELEVENTH 7

of Jesus Christ can establish and secure among men. Bad

philosophies and worse men have brought human society into

an almost hopeless impasse, but sanabiles fecit nationes,

the conditions of the world are never hopeless while Christ

lives and reigns in the hearts of His disciples. It is not im-

possible, of course, that we have entered the crepuscular hour

of civilization, but it is also possible that the growing renewal

of religious temper and of faith heralds the dawn of a new

social life on the part of many nations and races which have

long lived on low unhealthy levels, fed on a coarse naturalism,

without hope and without vision, lost in a wretched mire of

doubt and pessimism. In Pius the Eleventh this sad-eyed

world will find a great “Paciere,” a peace maker endowed with

all the qualities of that holy office, rich in those gifts of mind

and heart which history, art, and letters quicken immeasur-

ably, and of all men the most devoted by his exalted office

to the restoration of the kingdom of Christ on earth and the

welfare of mankind.

iJiThos. J. Shahan,

Rector of the Catholic University of America.