Word: abbe
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Crow & Cherries. The book's hero, a kind of clerical Candide, is the Abbe Victor Mas, naive young seminarist at Versailles who is sent to Rome to study and to live in the household of His Eminence, Cardinal Belloro, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. The cardinal is not far from being a Renaissance figure. He does not care much for the unceremonious style of modern cardinals like New York's Spellman ("the American Pope"). He savagely attacks Pius XII, whose order curtailing the length of cardinals' trains by one half annoys...
Presumably to help the reader know the church, Author Peyrefitte mixes painstaking research with scurrilous gossip, pokes facile fun at the hairsplitting of moral theology and at the bookkeeping of indulgences. (The church, the abbé is told, no longer sells indulgences but gives them away, and his Roman associates collect them "like a crow after cherries...
France & Purity. The ending is, nevertheless, edifying. The cardinal collapses while celebrating Mass, and dies. With his last words he says to Abbé Mas: "Be happy in the Lord." And "in that moment the abbe found his vocation again . . . The old man . . . on whom miracles had long palled had performed a miracle." When they laid out his body "it was found that this ironist, this witty censurer, had worn a hair shirt...
...Desnoyers wanted more than anything else to be a surgeon. But there was no money in his family to pay for long years of medical education, so after brooding for a while over his lost dreams. Guy. at the age of 29, turned to the priesthood. As the abbé of the little village of Uruffe in the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, he became a dynamo of public service, always busily organizing youth groups, a theatrical society, football team and other worthwhile projects. On Sundays, his sermons crackled with reproof of parishioners less disposed to such constant activity...
...perpetrated such a frightful crime? After a night of questioning, the police got the answer from the criminal himself-the frustrated surgeon-turned-priest, who had performed his first operation on the dead body of his mistress. "I offered Régine absolution before I killed her," said the Abbé Desnoyers...