Word: papal
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Ordinarily Monsignor Jose Sebastian Laboa, the Vatican's Ambassador to Panama, greets visitors with a tray of coffee and cake. But when General Manuel Antonio Noriega strode into the papal embassy on Christmas Eve, such hospitality was hardly appropriate. The fugitive strongman was agitated, pacing the nunciature's marble floors like a caged tiger. The four aides who accompanied him were carrying suspicious vials of injectable liquids and an assortment of guns. Laboa demanded that Noriega relinquish the weapons. At first he refused, but then he apparently complied -- although a submachine gun was later found under...
...took shelter in the nunciature from Noriega thugs after he had won an election last May that the dictator annulled. One high-ranking Vatican official summarized the thinking: "The right to asylum must be defended, even for Lucifer." Moreover, contended a church statement, Noriega's surrender to the papal legate "helped in a very positive way to put an end to the conflict ((with invading American troops)) and to hasten the time of peace." The implication is that the asylum was in fact serving a moral cause rather than shielding a criminal...
...frustration at not being able to bring Noriega to justice, however, Bush hailed the dictator's surrender to the papal nuncio as "a marvelous Christmas present." It promptly put a stop to the fighting that had threatened to drag out into a guerrilla campaign; Noriega loyalists saw no point in battling on after their chief was gone. Last week American troops turned their attention to restoring law-and-order and suppressing looting in Panama City, sometimes in joint patrols with members of the Panama Defense Forces (now renamed Public Forces) with whom they had exchanged gunfire days earlier...
...beginning to celebrate Christmas in Rome. He will be preaching about the inn where Joseph and Mary were turned away. Can you refuse me? Laboa decided he could not. Shortly after, a nunciature vehicle picked up Noriega at the Dairy Queen. And why had American troops not surrounded the papal embassy as they had the Cuban and Nicaraguan embassies, where it was suspected Noriega might seek asylum? The State Department answered, in effect, that they had simply never thought of doing...
...self-appointed National Salvation Front takes charge of the country. But the shape of the new order is far from clear. -- In Timisoara, cradle of the revolution, people ricochet between agony and elation, fear and hope. -- Panama's strongman has fallen, but Manuel Noriega takes refuge in the papal embassy, sending Washington and the Vatican into diplomatic deadlock. -- As a military operation, the U.S. invasion gets a glowing assessment from the brass and the experts...