Word: pope
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Rome's 432 churches, prayers were offered "to spare Italy the calamity of divorce." Before an audience of 250 Italian newlyweds, Pope Paul VI declared that legislators should "venerate, honor and defend" the indissolubility of marriage. Premier Mariano Rumor urged his colleagues to make "one last careful meditation." All to no avail. Amid prayer vigils, the Chamber of Deputies adopted, by a 325-to-283 vote, a bill that will permit divorce for the first time in modern Italian history...
Only four men were even aware of the secret nocturnal meetings last spring in the Vatican's baroque Apostolic Palace. Two were top cardinals in the church hierarchy. Two were key participants: Pope Paul VI and Michele Sindona, the tough Sicilian lawyer who in two decades has risen from obscurity to eminence as a financier and industrialist. It is almost unheard of for a Pope personally to conduct the church's business affairs, but this was no ordinary occasion. Sindona and Pope Paul closed a deal that started a shift of profound consequence in the Holy...
Escaping the Onus. Actually, the sale of Immobiliare reflected the Pope's decision that church control of major Italian companies had become a liability. The Vatican owns some $200 million worth of stock in Italian firms. The church until recently either controlled or owned a substantial part of at least a dozen important enterprises, including cement-making Italcementi, paper-manufacturing Cartiere Burgo, pasta-making Molini Biondi and Vianini, a major engineering firm. The investments provide a handsome income to help defray the huge cost of running the papal establishment. But social unrest is growing in Italy. Anxious to align...
...carrying out the new "Pauline policy" is how to keep the Vatican's income high while rearranging its portfolio. Accordingly, financial men expect the church to invest more funds outside Italy than it has in the past. By adopting a low domestic profile as a capitalist, the Pope hopes in time to erase the "Vatican satellite" image from Italian companies...
Many of the episodes-and actors -are charged with a peculiar magic that dilates space and annihilates time. Centuries collide; the imagined becomes surreal, as when Jean daydreams of the Pope's assassination-and the shot is clearly heard by a passerby. Or when a nun's self-sacrifice becomes actual crucifixion. But where he should use a No. 3 paintbrush, Buñuel too often employs a palette knife. What is intended as subtle Human Comedy becomes broadly laughable, as when Jesus and his disciples run through the woods in chromo-colored sequences, or when Mary miraculously...