Word: lessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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United Front. Aware that the trend of public sentiment is toward the bill, the Vatican in its eleventh battle against a divorce law is making less of a direct attack. In a shrewd maneuver, the church and pro-Vatican Christian Democrats have mounted a campaign largely aimed at wives. "Pay attention," says a street poster. "If the divorce law passes, your husband, when he happens to lose his head over a girl younger than you, can leave the house, ask for a separation and after five years move on to a new marriage whether you like...
...home and abroad for 40 years, Italians have had no release from unhappy marriages except separation or complicated, costly and time-consuming annulment by the Vatican. Even so, an estimated 2,500,000 people are presently separated from their spouses; of these, one-third have made more or less permanent extralegal arrangements. Writer Gabriella Parca, author of a much-discussed book on the predicament (I Separati), estimates that "no fewer than 5,000,000 people [one-tenth of Italy's population] are involved in the drama of indissolubility and suffer its consequences." The total includes those separated, mistresses...
...recent years, of course, were Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren; Ponti eventually became a French citizen in order to marry her. Film Director Michelangelo Antonioni and Actress Monica Vitti lived in separate apartments with a connecting interior staircase, until Antonioni won an annulment and the two were married. In less sophisticated circles, extramarital relationships are also common and accepted. "You want to know which of your friends are living together," says a Milan doctor, "not for gossip or to spread scandal, but to know how to address invitations to your parties...
...uncommon for Souths and Norths in any land to diverge on the issue of charm v. hustle. But in Ireland the normal geographical split was widened by the nature of the settlers. In Ulster, these tended to be tough Presbyterian Scotsmen, with little taste for England but less for the Pope. Their role in an island without history was to keep the 17th century's religious acrimony and long-faced industry alive and to form a kind of museum for the Protestant ethic. The Scots seldom assimilate anywhere without a struggle, and Belfast is a lot closer to Glasgow...
...most gleefully. The Irish bishops ("the 26 Popes") have drawn their covered wagons up around divorce and the Pill. Book censorship gets feebler all the time, and is now at about the same mean level it was in the U.S. ten years ago. The young clergy are far less tempted by politics than their elders-or by clanking displays of power. "They should put the hierarchy and the politicians on one side" one of them told Paul O'Dwyer recently, "and everyone else on the other...