POPE ON BASENESS OF OUR AGE

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23053, 22 June 1940, Page 12

POPE ON BASENESS OF OUR AGE

- DESIRE FOR DOMINATION* ROME, May 2. The Pope, addressing a congregation of 60,000 in St. Peter’s to-day, denounced ‘‘insensate desires for supremacy and universal domination.” This was interpreted as referring to Hitler. The occasion was the first canonisation ceremony of the Pope’s reign. He canonised two new saints. Marie Pelletier, a French nun, who died in 1808. and Gemma* Galgani. an Italian girl who was 26 when she died in 1903. Mane.Pelletier founded the' Order of the Good Shepherd, which is specially concerned with work for girls arid now has houses all over the world populated by some 100,000 persons. Gemma Galgani belonged to a family in humble circumstances and lived mostly at Lucca. , In places of hCnour sat Gemma Galgani’s sister, and members of the family with whom she spent the latter part of her life, and great nephews of the French saint.

The Pope contrasted the lives of the new saints with the baseness of our age. It was because men had forgotten the virtue of charity or love on which justice was based that countries which he loved were involved in war.