Word: assisi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Giotto painted his Bible stories and tales of saints across the cathedral walls of Italy. Yet we see his brilliance today in a bare handful of surviving documented works. The famous 28 scenes of St. Francis' life adorning the Upper Church in Assisi--to most of us the embodiment of his work--are of hotly disputed authorship. Yet many experts still believe no other known hand could have created the economical drama, narrative power and intense depiction of human emotion that mark the best of them...
Cindy, raised a Roman Catholic, told him she did. Frankel shook his head. "How can you believe?" asked the man who had once established a phony Catholic charitable organization, the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation, in the hope of legitimizing his fraudulent operations...
...Vatican--the ultimate cover. Through a prominent New York City attorney, Thomas Bolan, Frankel met with Father Peter Jacobs, a gadabout clergyman who has ties to New York luminaries, including Walter Cronkite. Jacobs introduced Frankel to Monsignor Emilio Colagiovanni, a Vatican official. Frankel claimed that his St. Francis of Assisi Foundation would distribute more than $2 billion to Catholic charities. He took to obsessively studying the lives of the saints, almost as avidly as he consulted astrological charts. He got the monsignor's blessing--and the use of a Vatican bank account controlled by Colagiovanni...
...which was "launder money." Also seized were personalized astrological charts answering such questions as: "Will I go to prison?" "Should I leave?" and "Will I be safe?" So far, so good. In addition to the insurance money, Frankel may also have pocketed $1.98 billion from the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation, allegedly established by him in the British Virgin Islands last August. Six weeks after his disappearance, authorities can only hope Frankel neglected to ask the stars about one last thing: extradition treaties...
...wasn't done by monks rattling tin cups on street corners. Gregory IX, the Pope who canonized St. Francis, wanted to establish San Francesco partly for religious reasons and partly for political ones--Assisi, which had been wrested from the Holy Roman Emperor only some 20 years before, was the major power base for the papacy in central Italy. He took the sanctuary under his ample wing, supplying the land and encouraging donations to it. Later Popes sometimes took up residence there...