The Pope At Home

1877

How His Holiness Lives — His Outdoor Exercises — Playing Hide and Seek — Etiquette of the Vatican.

(From the Catholic World.)

In his great palace Pius IX occupies only a plain bed-chamber, with a bare stone floor, and a working cabinet with little furniture except a table and two chairs. He rises, summer and winter, at 5:30. He says mass, and hears a second mass of thanksgiving; or if sickness prevents him from celebrating the Holy Sacrifice, he does not fail to receive communion.

His hours of work are long and regular. His fare is plain, even to meagreness. Every day he takes exercise in the Vatican gardens, and one of his favorite resorts is a beautiful alley of orange trees, where the pigeons come to feed from his hand. One day he was discovered by three cardinals, playing "hide and seek" in the gardens with a little boy.

But with all his gentleness, he has a keen and caustic wit. The author of a pious biography sent his book to the Pope for approval. The Pontiff read till he came to these words: "Our saint triumphed over all temptations, but there was one snare which he could not escape — he married;" and then he threw the book from him. "What," he said, "shall it be written that the Church has six sacraments and one snare?" Of a Catholic diplomatist whose conduct and professions were at variance he said: "I do not like these accommodating consciences. If that man's master should order him to put me in jail, he would come on his knees to tell me that I must go, and his wife would work me a pair of slippers." During the French occupation of Rome a certain French colonel was guilty of so gross an offence to the Pope's authority, that the Holy Father demanded his recall. Before his departure he had the effrontery to present himself at the Vatican and ask for a number of small favors, ending with a request for the Pope's autograph. The Pope wrote on a card the words which our Lord addressed to Judas in the garden, "Amice, ad quid venisti?" ("Friend, wherefore hast thou come hither?") and the colonel, who did not understand Latin, showed it to all his friends as testimonial of the Pope's regard until somebody unkindly supplied him with the translation.

It is the etiquette of the Vatican that carriages with only one hone must not enter the inner court. This rule was enforced one day in 1867 against the Prussian Ambassador Count von Armin and Bismarck, for purposes of his own, endeavored to make a diplomatic scandal of the transaction, instructing the Ambassador to close the legation and quit Rome instantly unless he was allowed to drive with one horse to the very foot of the papal staircase. But Bismarck was no match for Pius IX. The Pope caused Cardinal Antonelli to write that "His Holiness, taking compassion on the difficulties of the diplomatic body, would in future allow the representatives of the great powers to approach his presence with one quadraped of any sort" — avec un quadrupede quelconque. It is believed that the Prussian Minister never availed himself of this permission in its full extent.