Word: monsignore
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...Monsignor Giuseppe Righi, a tall, erect Vatican diplomat, is flying to New York to take up his post as the Holy See's observer to the United Nations. During a stopover at London's Heathrow Airport, he is accosted by a pair of thugs, bundled into a waiting truck and whisked off into the night. When Righi's ongoing flight departs, the "prelate" in his seat is Colonel Vladimir Panin of the Soviet KGB, physically the monsignor's double, and now fully disguised with a black suit, clerical collar, and a briefcase on his knee...
...begins Requiem per una Spia (Requiem for a Spy), a tantalizing espionage yarn that was no sooner published in Italy last week than it drew critical praise for the authenticity of its Vatican and U.N. settings. Small wonder: the author is Monsignor Alberto Giovannetti, 65, a retired papal diplomat of 30 years standing. The stout, deceptively cherubic Giovannetti was the Holy See's observer to the U.N. for nine years; he obviously knows as much about the murky subterfuge that pervades the corridors of the U.N. as Jacques Cousteau knows about the deep...
...that Giovannetti is, or ever was, a spy. Nevertheless, the monsignor readily admits that Requiem for a Spy, which he describes as "part autobiographical" and "part political fantasy," is a roman à clef based on his long experience and his personal acquaintance with a number of spies he has known, if not always loved. "I knew all the spies in the U.N. organization itself, but they were not up to much," he says. "The big spies are in the various delegations. In any case the book is not based on any particular episode, and there is no real model...
...state of religious exaltation." Some who grasp those charged serpents will themselves incandesce in celebrity for a little while and then wink out (goodbye, Clifford Irving; goodbye, Nina van Pallandt): defunct flashlights, dead fireflies. Thus they will have obeyed Warhol's Law, first propounded by Andy Warhol, the monsignor of transience and junk culture: "In the future, everybody will be famous for at least 15 minutes." But many survive long after the deadline. Their 15 minutes stretch into years and years, until the public, whose adulation sometimes conceals a hard little rock of vindictiveness, wishes that, after...
That earnest prayer for the 165,000 striking coal miners was offered by Monsignor Charles Rice at a labor rally in Pittsburgh last week. His words perfectly reflected the miners' own mood in this long, three-month walkout: religious fervor, intense solidarity, a degree of self-righteousness, and a hint of violent passions as deep and often as murky as the mines themselves...