Word: coactus
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...Coactus Feci." Mindszenty had been expecting his arrest. It came on the day after Christmas, in 1948, when 16 political policemen armed with automatic rifles took him to their notorious Andrassy Street headquarters, stripped him of his breviary, rosary and religious habit. "For 16 days and nights they hammered at me, squeezed me with questions. My interrogators worked in shifts . . . They tortured both my soul and my body...
...what the letters C.F.' meant. Despite my dazed state, the defense mechanism of the human body worked, and even smiling at them, I answered: 'It means a cardinal without office.' " It took his captors some time to find out that C.F. stood for the Latin coactus feci ("I have been forced to act") -a symbol used by many Christians to sign extorted confessions during the years of Turkish rule in Hungary...
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