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Pope Pius XI
The death of the Pope took place too late for mention in last week's Spectator. With his funeral on Tuesday one chapter closes and another opens ; on a later page the issues involved in the choice of a successor are discussed by Lord Clonmore. Of Pius XI's sixteen years' tenure of the Holy See three memories will remain outstanding—the con- clusion of the Lateran Treaty with the Government of Italy in 1929, restoring temporal sovereignty to the Vatican ; the issue of the great encyclical Quadragesimo Amu), on the reconstruction of the social order, in 1931; and, most notable of all, the fearless and vigorous condemnation by a sick and aged man, to whom conflict was temperamentally distasteful, of the wrongs done to the Christian Church, and to the Roman Catholic branch of it in particular, by the present rulers of Germany and Italy. Pius XI has not lived to see the struggle between a pagan National Socialism and Christianity, Protestant and Catholic, reach the point of crisis which seems to lie ahead; that will fall to some younger, though hardly to a more courageous successor. His own sun has set in the midst of storm, but he has taken with him to the grave a record unstained by compromise. He was a true defender of the faith, to Catholics a great prelate, to non-Catholics a great Christian, to non-Christians a man whose unfaltering fidelity to his beliefs compelled unstinted honour.
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