Word: capranica
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Getting into the church was easy. The thieves probably walked in through the front door, posing as a few more of the faithful who come to bow their heads in St. John the Evangelist, the most important church in Capranica, 35 miles (56 km) north of Rome. They hid, waited to be locked in after the last people left, then went to work. They ignored the candlesticks, the alms box and the communion chalice: those are for amateurs - easy to grab, easy to sell. These were professionals, and they were after something specific: the Via Crucis, or Stations...
That was November 2006, and Capranica's Stations of the Cross are still missing. During pre-Easter celebrations, when parishioners would traditionally recite all 14 stations using the paintings as their guide, they had to pray before 14 small wooden crosses instead. The theft has left Capranica's small community with a sense of loss that is deep and personal, as if an old friend had disappeared. "We grew up with those paintings," says Marina, who owns a card shop across from St. John. "Yesterday," adds her mother Maria, "I was looking at those nude walls and I felt...
Leaving Sant Ignazio Church in downtown Rome, popular, jovial Pope John XXIII, 78, waved off his chauffeur, strolled some 300 yds. to the Capranica Seminary, where he was to speak to some young priests. It was his longest walk outside the Vatican since his elevation to the Papacy. Feeling much like a young priest himself, His Holiness observed: "Our legs can still bear us, and this is the best way to move. But on foot, in an automobile or in the air, the important thing is to go forward-wherever the Lord wants...
...rare foray beyond the Vatican's walls, Pope Pius XII journeyed a short distance in Rome, appeared at the sooth anniversary celebration of the Collegio Capranica, a small but distinguished seminary (world's oldest) where he was a young student 62 years ago. His Holiness kissed the feet of an old familiar crucifix, inspected the tiny room he once occupied, presented the college with a pearl-encrust ed chalice as a quincentennial present...
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