Word: monke
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...went first to a nearby Chinese bar for two quick bracers, then to Sarit's headquarters. Along the way, Phao unbuckled his police automatic and chucked it into the viscid, green waters of a Bangkok canal. Sarit gave him two choices: leave the country or become a Buddhist monk. Phao chose to leave for Switzerland, where he can count his money. He had not been exiled, said a Foreign Ministry official and, in fact, would go to work in the Thai legation in Geneva. In what capacity? "Oh," said the official, "as an adviser, or something like that...
Enter the Monk. Laughing satire soon gave way to bitter invective in the growing passion for reform. The unity of Christendom had been precarious for centuries before the Reformation. The marvel is, suggests Durant, that with its half-dozen-odd principal nations all out of step-in time, in psychology, in power, in learning-the Roman authority survived as long as it did. Italy was not only the home of the papacy, it was the source and cradle of European civilization itself-sophisticated, modern, even decadent, when England and Germany were still medieval, while France and Spain were somewhere midway...
...when he arrived in Rome in 1510 on a minor mission for his order, the young Augustinian monk of Wittenberg, Martin Luther by name, fell on his knees and cried: "Hail to thee, O Holy Rome!" Luther "went through all the devotions of a pilgrim . . . and earned so many indulgences that he almost wished his parents were dead, so that he might deliver them from purgatory...
Luther's slow rebellion during the next decade is a puzzling, fascinating story to theologian and psychiatrist alike. Tentatively, the earnest, orthodox-minded monk began to stray from the fold-and with every step he took, a new, hidden facet appeared in his character until he became the very opposite of his former self...
Born to War. Much has been made of the dramatic spectacle of the bold monk lustily hammering his propositions to the church door and challenging all and sundry to debate them with him; but, as Durant points out, the truth is more ordinary. The door of Wittenberg's Castle Church was used by clerics as a notice board on which they pinned invitations to debates and news of what would now be called "coming attractions." When Luther posted his theses in 1517, he had no notion that the coming attraction would be history's fiercest spiritual drama...