Teddy poignantly recounts the day he received his First Communion from Pope Pius XII:

I wore a blue suit and had a white rosette on my left arm. As he blessed me, [the Pope] said, “I hope you always be good and pious as you are today.” It caused a great deal of a stir in some circles – a seven-year-old American boy given his First Communion by the Pope, who himself was giving that honor for the first time as Pope and to a non-Italian to boot. [Pius had been elected just 13 days earlier.] But it was among the greatest moments of my life.

Amazingly enough, this was not the first meeting between the two. Three years earlier, Joseph Kennedy had escorted then-Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli on a tour of the United States. “One of his last stops was at our house. I remember crawling up onto his lap. I was fascinated by his long robe and scarlet skullcap, and his long aristocratic nose. We still have the couch where he sat, and the plaque that Mother put on it.” A remarkably domestic encounter between two men who would be each be the subject of more than his share of controversy, during his life and even after his death.