Word: christian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Italy's powerful Communist Party went into last week's local and regional elections in a buoyant mood. After all, in last year's balloting for Italian candidates for the European Parliament, the Communists had outpolled the country's largest party, the Christian Democrats, by 34.5% to 33%. It was the first time the Italian Communists had come in first in a nationwide vote. Before last week's elections, however, Socialist Prime Minister Benedetto ("Bettino") Craxi, who heads the five-party governing coalition, threatened to resign if the Communists again emerged as the leading party. The outcome was in doubt...
Craxi's coalition won a decisive vote of confidence, with a total of more than 58%. The biggest winner was the Christian Democratic Party, which bested the Communists, 35% to 30.2%. What may have worked in the Christian Democrats' favor was a heavy turnout of 44.5 million, or 89% of eligible voters. Had the Communists repeated their earlier sorpasso, or overtaking, of the Christian Democrats, they could have pushed the Craxi coalition to the brink of collapse and possibly positioned themselves for an even more critical defeat of the government by calling for early parliamentary elections, which...
Instead, the Communists now return to their role as the second-largest party in the country -- and the largest Communist Party in the West -- but still the outsider in Italian politics. The Christian Democrats have reasserted some of their lost authority; in Rome, for example, they and their coalition partners took control of the city council after ten years of Communist leadership. As a result, Christian Democratic leaders are showing signs of restlessness at being the country's largest party but only a junior member of the government coalition. Analysts in Italy were asking last week if the Christian Democrats...
...more persuasive pop psychology works to come out of California during the 1960s. Author Thomas A. Harris managed the intellectual feat of combining the conventional sunlit optimism of the period with a few of the darker strains of Freudian and Christian thinking. The result: a surprising, 15 million-copy best seller...
Harris' emphasis on the universality of early psychic damage veers close to the traditional Christian concept of original sin. As a result, other transactional analysts have regularly accused the Harrises of determinism, a charge that their new book attempts to deflect. "At each juncture of life," they write, "we have had choices to make regardless of what our parents told us or showed us. We have said both...