Word: pious
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pious Triviality. Could it be revived? The present Pope, Paul VI, hoped so. "The friendship between church and artists must be re-established," he declared ten years ago. Thus began the Vatican's collection of 20th century religious art, which is now receiving its first summer of tourists after some private viewings in 1973. About 542 works by more than 250 artists are displayed in the redecorated windings of the Borgia Apartments...
...Rodin's Hand of God, some Rouault aquatints and so forth. Third, with such few exceptions, it is an aesthetic swamp. If some mischievous curator had been asked to as semble a study collection of rhetorical sham, displaying all the cliches of modern art at their meridian of pious triviality, he could hardly have done better...
Perón alienated the pious masses in 1955 when he challenged the Roman Catholic Church. He ended religious instruction in the schools, permitted divorce and took steps to legalize bordellos. After 100,000 Catholics demonstrated against these measures in June 1955, the Peronistas retaliated by sacking and burning some of the most beautiful churches in Buenos Aires. The Vatican responded by excommunicating him, a banishment it did not lift until eight years later when he confessed that he had erred by acting against the church...
Many conservatives-or traditionalists, as some prefer to be called-are also alarmed at what they see as the casual abandonment of a culture that once seemed both rich and reassuring. They miss not only the Latin Mass and many familiar old hymns but many other pious practices that have been widely discarded since Vatican II: novenas, benediction, meatless Fridays, priests wearing cassocks and birettas, nuns wearing wimples. The old rituals and disciplines were visible symbols that Catholics were different from (and perhaps better than) other people. Many who resent the passing of traditional Catholic ways seem to feel that...
...victims, including that of Solzhenitsyn himself, a prisoner for eight years in the gigantic "archipelago" of Stalinist labor camps run by "Gulag," the Central Corrective Labor Camp Administration. Between 1918 and 1959, Solzhenitsyn believes, 66 million men, women and children were shuttled to these islands of slavery under the pious official slogan "Correction through labor." In fact, Solzhenitsyn charges, it amounted to "extermination through labor...