Death of Pope Pius XII - Illness and Last Days

Illness and Last Days

Many people who worked closely with Pope Pius XII were present during his last days. Domenico Tardini was possibly his closest associate. Robert Leiber, a professor at the Gregorian University, helped him with his speeches and publications. Augustin Bea, rector of the Biblicum, was his personal confessor and is considered the spiritus behind the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu on biblical research. Madre Pascalina Lehnert was for forty years his housekeeper and loyal assistant. All of them published memorials on Pope Pius XII, which depict a highly intelligent, sensitive, shy, and disarmingly friendly person. Leiber and Tardini describe him as warm and yet distant. Tardini: “Pius XII was truly separated from all and everything. Not that he was absent or did not participate. He saw everything in the light of God and evaluated everything with God and for God."

This fascination with the personality of Pope Pius XII was not limited to close associates. Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, not a Catholic, wrote after an audience with Pope Pius XII:I kneeled not in front of a person, but before a mild idol in white, who visualizes two millennia Cardinal James Hickey of Washington, D.C. described the extraordinary impression of Pope Pius during a private audience for United States army chaplains by the Holy Father. Entering the room, Pope Pius asked the first chaplain, a war hero from the Normandy landings, for his name. The priest could not answer. Pope Pius then asked about his dioceses. The priest did not remember either. Finally the Pope gently hugged the American war hero and went on the next guest.