Words & Works

P: The Vatican Press Office confirmed reports in the illustrated Italian weekly Oggi that Pope Pius XII had told of having a vision of Jesus Christ during his illness last December. The vision came, said Oggi, while the Pope was saying the prayer Anima Christi, just as he reached the words "In hora mortis mei, voca me" (In the hour of my death, call me). Added the article: "The Holy Father is certain that he saw Jesus and that he was not dreaming." Later Milan's Corriere della Sera, Italy's largest newspaper, reported that the Pope also had heard the "true and distinct" voice of Christ. Vatican officials denied press hints that 1) a miraculous cure of the Pope's stomach condition had followed the vision, 2) that a dossier of possible miraculous occurrences was being assembled with a view toward the Pope's eventual canonization. Nevertheless, when the Pope left his summer home at Castel Gandolfo to return to Rome, crowds cried: "Viva il Papa santo." P: The church must put sex "in its proper and God-given place," said the Church of England's Moral Welfare Council. "It is the church's care that sex should be rightly used and guided . . . Much of the sexual irregularity of today may ... be caused neither by wickedness nor by ignorance, but by the fact that man's creative instinct is being denied its proper channels." P: Winding up a ten-day campaign at Cambridge (TIME, Nov. 21) and Oxford Universities, Evangelist Billy Graham preached to an Oxford congregation packed so tightly into St. Aldate's Church that students could not kneel to pray.

Among the 400 who made "decisions for Christ" at Billy's campaign: Dr. Roger (four-minute-mile) Bannister.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.