Word: peasant
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Nonetheless, the celebration was a festive occasion. Throngs of peasant women and men, peddling sausages and souvenirs, clustered in the newly washed streets of the normally drab industrial city. When Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski arrived two days before the ceremonies, he was nearly mobbed by frantic tens of thousands, chanting wildly "Long live the Pope"* and singing the ancient Polish hymn We Want...
Father Dan came by his fiscal acumen purely through "priestly duty." On his first assignment in Peru in 1950, in the poor (per-capita income: $65) Andean town of Puno, he decided that what his peasant charges needed was financing as well as faith. In 1955, he organized the Puno Credit Union-Peru's first-with 23 members and $25 capital. While private banks were paying 4% interest on savings and lending at 20%, Father Dan's union paid 6%, loaned at 12%. Before long, the villagers were depositing what cash they had in the union...
Worldly Concerns. Having scotched the Peruvian bankers' old complaint that the peasant could not be induced to save, Father Dan in 1961 set up a nonprofit savings and loan association to finance desperately needed low-cost housing. U.S. savings and loan men provided technical assistance. So far, Father Dan's El Pueblo association has loaned $11.9 million to build 3,613 houses in the Lima area...
...story's hero, 16-year-old Gennaro, is named for the city's patron, San Gennaro, whose clotted, vial-encased blood, according to tradition, miraculously bubbles three times each year. Gennaro's blood bubbles daily. The ebullient bastard child of a peasant mother and soldier father, he divides his zealous energies between caring for his impoverished, half-paralyzed Chinese grandfather and carrying on grandfather's moribund undertaking establishment...
...lapsed Catholic," and he blames the breach on the "lack of a tradition of charity, even on the level of almsgiving" of the church in Sicily. His fall from the faith he also attributes to the sermons of two Sicilian priests: one denounced a destitute congregation of peasants as "a pack of Jews" for failing to supply the church lire they did not have; the other instructed his peasant parishioners to ostracize sinners...