Word: fortress
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...following no campaign master plan, but he does have a strategy for the next few weeks. He is expanding his efforts to raise funds, which so far total about $600,000. Last weekend he attended a $25-a-ticket fund-raising party at Hugh Hefner's fortress-like mansion in Los Angeles. This week he was campaigning in Nevada and mounting an aggressive write-in campaign in Oregon. But to block Carter he must surge in California on June...
Roman Catholic. The words are redolent of rich and solemn rituals chanted amid clouds of incense in an ancient tongue. Many American Catholics over 30 remember living in that history-heavy church as if living in a spiritual fortress-comforting at times, inhibiting and even terrifying at others. But it was a safe and ordered universe, with eternal guarantees for those who lived by its rules...
...That fortress has crumbled. Before the Second Vatican Council in 1962, the U.S. Catholic Church had seemed, at least to outsiders, to be a monolith of faith, not only the church's richest province but, arguably, its most pious. When the council ended in 1965, American Catholicism had been swept by a turbulent new mood, a mood of opened windows, tumbled walls, broken chains. It became a painful experience for many, and over the next decade the casualties were heavy: nuns leaving their convents, priests their ministries, lay Catholics simply walking away from worship and belief...
...language of the liturgy became English, not Latin; baroque high altars gave way to simple tables; members of what had once jokingly been called "the church of silence" were urged to sing hymns - and often Protestant ones at that (a familiar favorite these days: Luther's A Mighty Fortress Is Our God). Instead of incense and plain chant, parish churches now offered folk Masses, Masses with "sacred dancing," mixed-media Masses. Comedian Bob Newhart, a practicing Catholic usually comfortable with change, ruefully recalls the "wakko wakko wakko " sound of a Moog Mass he once attended. "The priest said...
Richard Nixon, who claimed he understood that a President gave himself totally to his country ("like taking religious vows," he once insisted), schemed to create a secret White House beyond public knowledge. Ironically, when the fortress collapsed, it turned out that Nixon had documented his private utterances better than any other President, and the public dissection of Nixon that is now under way is the most painfully detailed scrutiny of any President, but also one of the most instructive...