Word: diplomatic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...white portable). He strongly suggested that nuns' garb be modernized, liberalized many church rules. But he was an innovator also in far more significant works, which he performed in defense of Christianity against ideological dangers. In a long career (one of his first assignments as a young diplomat was to help represent the Vatican at Queen Victoria's funeral) he saw these dangers of the soul veer from Edwardian complacency to existentialist despair. Perhaps his most important efforts were in these areas: ¶ COMMUNISM. When Pius XII was born, the Communists had nowhere won political power...
Gothic Figure. Above and beyond his diplomatic and intellectual role there was always the Pope's incandescent personality. In a prayer to Mary he once asked that all men be made to "feel the attraction of Christian goodness." That was what most men felt in the presence. It was in a sense ironic that this sophisticated diplomat, member of old Roman aristocracy, should become so popular a Pope. Before World War II, a papal audience for a layman was a prestigious and protocol-encrusted enterprise. Under Pius XII, however, a visit to the Pope was heartwarming and almost informal...
...preoccupation with the world at large and with his diplomat's tendency to avoid sharp edges, Pope Pius often neglected the Vatican itself. He seemed to shrink from making much-needed appointments to the central machinery of the church. Result, at the time of his death: 15 vacancies in a superannuated College of Cardinals, no Secretary of State, no governor for Vatican City, no camerlengo (see The Succession). Said one of his closest advisers sadly last week: "He provided badly for his successor...
...passions, the Turks appointed as their adviser to Foot not someone from Ankara-who might have been welcomed at the airport with bombs-but the Turkish consul general in Nicosia, who was already there. Shrugged 55-year-old Burhan Ishin, a husky onetime Turkish national soccer star and longtime diplomat: "After all, I can only die once...
...middle-aged but still attractive heroine of this excellent novel by the wife of an Italian diplomat. "Mamma" Cossati is an intimidated, tradition-bound Roman housewife. She is intent on one thing: to maintain a perfect reputation for hard work and for saintly devotion to her family and her gentle husband, an underpaid bank official. Yet her problems cannot be dismissed as resulting merely from poverty and Old World attitudes about a woman's place. When she dreams guiltily of "leaving the dishes in the sink, the laundry unwashed, the beds unmade." or when she tries...