Word: churches
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...known facts aren't salacious enough: the King's impatience with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, in providing him with a male heir; his divorce of Catherine to marry Anne; his break with the Pope over the divorce and his establishment of the Anglican Communion as his own personal church. With all this as backdrop, Gregory foregrounded scenes of calumny and chicanery, of paternal pimping and near-incest, to create an international best-seller that cried out to be visualized. Indeed, the novel was made into a 2003 TV movie, with Jodhi May and Natascha McElhone as Anne and Mary...
...Vatican rule: candidates for sainthood wait five years beyond their deaths before the Catholic Church begins its investigation of their "heroic virtue," the first step toward canonization. Only two figures in recent history have received a fast-track exemption: Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II, both of them superstars in the Catholic and wider popular firmament. So, when the Vatican recently added Sister Lucia dos Santos, who died in 2005 at age 97, to this list, many wondered why she had been put in that esteemed company...
...answer is that to the men now running the church, Sister Lucia meant a great deal. She was the longest-lived of three children to whom an apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared in 1917 in the Portuguese parish of Fatima. And, as Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone makes clear in his upcoming book, The Last Secret of Fatima (May, Doubleday) she was the key human figure in a drama that eventually transformed the very nature of John Paul II's image of himself, and of his papacy. Lucia's superstar days may have waned in the memory...
...will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI." Both would have qualified as prophecy back in 1917. So would an even more topical prediction: that if Russia were not converted to Catholicism, that nation would "spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the church." From that moment on, Fatima provided mystical expression, and became inextricably entwined, with Catholic anti-communism...
...Unlike other famous apparitions of Mary, such as the one at Lourdes, the Fatima message was focused less on holiness than on geopolitics. And in 1952, Lucia sent an even more dramatic "third secret" - rumored among millions of "fatimists" to predict a schism in church or even the world's end - which she sent to Rome in 1952, where three successive popes remained either indifferent, or ambivalent enough to keep it under wraps...