Word: pius
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...Deputy, German Playwright Rolf Hochhuth earned instant international notoriety by indicting Pope Pius XII for his failure to speak out against Nazi persecution of the Jews. Hochhuth's second play, Soldiers, which had its world premiere in Berlin last week, casts an accusing glance at Sir Winston Churchill. In essence, Soldiers contends that Churchill was responsible for the mysterious death, in July 1943, of General Wladyslavv Sikorski, leader of Poland's exile government...
Hochhuth portrayed Pius XII as a Machiavellian "inverted mystic" who hoped to use Hitler to save Europe from Communism. The Churchill of Soldiers seems to be an equally callous caricature. According to the play, Britain's wartime Prime Minister (played by Otto Hasse) was a tragic figure who authorized immoral acts in hopes of saving his nation. Among them was the murder of Sikorski, a stiff-necked patriot who infuriated Stalin first by demanding the postwar return of Polish territories annexed by Russia, then by calling for an investigation of the Katyn massacre of 4,253 Polish military prisoners...
...known as "the new Phidias," had carved an earlier Perseus for a Milanese nobleman at his atelier in Rome. It was inspired by the celebrated 1st century Roman marble of Apollo Belvedere, which had recently been carried off from the Vatican by invading French soldiers. Pope Pius VII liked the new Canova so much that the Roman authorities refused to grant an export permit, and it was bought for the Vatican where it now stands. (The Apollo was also returned.) A Polish countess, Valeria Tarnowska, then commissioned a second Perseus, which many consider even more finely modeled and technically expert...
...peak of influence, modernism was an intellectual movement involving at most a few thousand avant-garde Catholics in France, Germany, England and Italy. The church nonetheless moved to suppress it as if a phalanx of Luthers were in its midst. Pius' encyclical Pascendi ordered that all seminary teachers who were tainted by the heresy be fired, required bishops to take other stern measures to eradicate the spiritual disease. Loyal Catholics suspected of involvement with the movement were forced to issue humiliating public denunciations of modernism...
Stunted Development. Some church historians now contend that the repressive measures of Pius X (who was proclaimed a saint in 1954) stunted Catholic intellectual development for a generation. Biblical experts were particularly suspect. For years Catholic exegetes were required to abide by the conservative judgments of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, set up at the beginning of the century; among its dicta was the ruling that Moses authored the Pentateuch-even though it contains an account of his death clearly penned centuries later. Not until Pius XII's 1943 encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu, were Catholic Biblicists able to study Scripture...