Dec 5, 2017
Pius XI’s words had such force because he bound himself to what had already been believed by Catholics throughout history and had been reaffirmed by his predecessors.
“G. K. Chesterton seems to have had an intuition of this: On his visit to Rome in 1929, he received the papal blessing and suddenly understood why popes and kings used the plural “we.” [...] For when Pius blessed the group, Chesterton realized “that it was indeed ‘We’; We, Peter and Gregory and Hildebrand and all the dynasty that does not die.’“