Word: maura
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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There are two side-swipes at the lost art of satire, and both flop for the same reasons. Felicia Lamport's "By Henry James Cozened" begins with a light touch, lapses into gray elaboration, and drags on to repetitive dreariness. Maura Cavanaugh (a Radcliffe History major) embarks on a twenty page slash of Samuel Beckett in a vindictive farce called "Waiting for God." Both satires lack any self-substance beyond the parody. Both blunder on after the comic veneer has worn thin enough to recognize their paucity. And both conveniently ignore or unhappily miss a good deal of their victims...
...case of Maura Lyons, 16, the Roman Catholic girl who disappeared from her Belfast home after becoming a Presbyterian (TIME, March 18), was closed by a court order that she be returned to her Catholic parents-but on the condition that they do nothing to shake her new Protestant faith. After her conversion last fall, her parents had threatened to put Maura in a convent, whereupon she was smuggled out of Belfast and into England. There a kind of Protestant underground railroad shifted her from hideout to hideout until, two weeks ago. she turned up at the Belfast home...
...Pretty Maura Lyons was 15 years old and a member of Northern Ireland's Roman Catholic minority (34.2%) when she went to work a year ago as a stitcher in a Belfast garment factory. There she met several members of a splinter sect known as the Free Presbyterian Church, and soon she became a Protestant. Her father, a shipyard worker, and her mother were horrified; so was the parish priest. There were family conferences, prayers and tears. Then Maura Lyons disappeared...
Abduction! cried her family and their Catholic friends, and they accused the Rev. David Leathern, who had converted Maura, of spiriting her away. Free Presbyterian Leathern denied any knowledge of the girl's whereabouts, and so did Alan Paisley, moderator of the church. But Paisley eventually produced what he said was a tape recording of Maura's voice, and played it to an audience consisting of all of Belfast's 1,000 Free Presbyterians, Maura's family and the police. "My Roman Catholic religion had been fear and dread," said the voice. "The new religion...
...that was not Maura's voice at all, said her father, and the Catholic accusations and Free Presbyterian counteraccusations went on and on in Belfast, The controversy bounded across the Irish Sea when Reporter Norman Lucas of London's News Chronicle (circ. 1,252,778) wrote a story of a "secret rendezvous" he had had with Maura in northwest England, "to which I had been driven in a closed car-blindfolded for the last 20 minutes . . ." She had been flown to England and smuggled in and out of about 25 houses in 18 weeks, wrote Reporter Lucas, constantly...