Pious protector: After 80 years, a pope is remembered for saving Rome thebostonpilot.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thebostonpilot.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Pius XII immediately decided to set off to visit the site of the destruction at San Lorenzo, arriving at 2:00 p.m., while the American bombing raid on Rome was still underway.
The day when American planes rained 4,000 bombs upon the Eternal City catholicherald.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from catholicherald.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
6 . 9 . 21
It was a two-week whirlwind that changed my life forever, that first visit of mine to Poland in June 1991. Looking back on it, I’m reminded of something H. L. Mencken wrote of a similarly transformative experience: “It was brain-fogging and back-breaking, but it was grand beyond compare an adventure of the first chop, a razzle-dazzle superb and elegant, a circus in forty rings.” My first weeks in Poland were all of that and more. For what I learned in dozens of conversations during that fortnight became the crux of
The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism; the publication of that book (the first to argue that John Paul II and the Church had played pivotal roles in the collapse of European communism) led to my first serious conversation with the Polish pope. Our relationship ripened over the next few years to the point where, in 1995, I rather boldly suggested to John Paul that I write his biography; and the rest, as they say, is hi