Word: pontiff
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...shabby courtroom* in the little town of Chieti last week, Laura Diaz, a young (30), comely Communist, stood charged with the crime of having publicly insulted the Pope. Under the 1929 Lateran Treaty between the Vatican and the Italian government, ratified in the republican constitution, insults to the reigning Pontiff are punishable by imprisonment or fine. The prosecution charged that at a 1948 electoral meeting in Ortona, Laura Diaz had said that the Pope's "hands dripped with the blood of the children of Greece and Palestine" because the Pope had not prevented wars in those countries and that...
...call themselves Christians submit to the authority of the Roman Church, they say, and the unity of Christendom will thereby be established. And again Protestants cannot agree. The Bible and the conscience of the individual soul, they believe, are higher and more trustworthy authorities than any pontiff, any single church...
...most surprising phenomena of the year had been the formidable strength and staying power of the frail-looking, 74-year-old Pontiff himself. No Pope had been seen by so many in a similar length of time; thousands were received in special or private audiences, 2,830,000 crowded into St. Peter's for general audiences, sometimes more than 40,000 at a time. During the year, 42,000 pilgrims took part in 34 international congresses held in Rome, and 203,558 visited special exhibitions of missionary...
Born Joseph Sarto, a poor man's son, Pope Pius X reigned as pontiff for eleven years, died in 1914. He was the hero of countless warmly human stories. One told how he got to Rome to be elected Pope. Having given away all his money to the poor of Venice, he applied to the Catholic banks for a travel loan, but was turned down as a poor risk. Finally a Jewish admirer lent him the money for the journey, but Cardinal-Patriarch Sarto was so certain he would not be elected Pope that he bought a round-trip...
Bishops should also "scrupulously take precautions and firmly insist that, in the history of the Reformation, the faults and foibles of Catholics be not overemphasized while the defects of the reformers are dissimulated . . . Nothing embraced in Catholic truth concerning the nature and means of justification . . . the Roman pontiff's primacy of jurisdiction, and the fact that real reunion can only be effected by the dissidents' return to the one true church, may be passed over in silence or told ambiguously...