Word: bea
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...heroine (Bea Richards) is a Harlem storefront preacher, and she preaches and preaches and worries and cries. The husband she left years ago, an alcoholic trombonist, has come home to die, and that turns out to be a play-length process. The son she has cowed into seemingly submissive piety sneaks out to bars, and surreptitiously plays his father's jazz recordings. A kind of Greek chorus of Harlem harpies gibber, clown, and rummage about as if they were witnessing the fall of a discount house of Atreus...
...warning did not reflect any lessening of ecumenical interest on the part of Pope Paul VI, who last month authorized Augustin Cardinal Bea to set up a theological "working group" to explore the possibilities of collaboration with the World Council of Churches...
With the exception of Daniel Freudenberger as Alfieri the lawyer-narrator who seemed dimly aware that his part didn't belong in the play, the leads were uniformly splendid. Maeve Kinkead (Catherine) played a flighty coquette in the early scenes, perhaps, and Anne Bernstein (Bea) was a bit too much the sit-down, have-some-soup Molly Goldberg--but both more than redeemed themselves in the second act, which built enormously on all levels...
Ominous Title. Felici's ambiguously phrased letter implied that these directions had come directly from Pope Paul VI himself. Actually, as Bea and his secretariat soon discovered, the letter did not have papal approval. The suggestions had come from Amleto Cardinal Cicognani, who had no authority of his own to give the orders, despite his important roles as Vatican Secretary of State and president of the Council's Coordinating Commission...
...bishops' letter apparently proved effective. In interviews with Bea and Frings, Paul VI agreed that the Christian Unity office would bear the major responsibility for revising the two declarations, said also that the bishops themselves could decide whether a fourth session was necessary. Nonetheless, some Roman observers feared that there might be further attempts to render the declarations ineffective...