Word: popes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seen anything like it. For a week in July, more than 250,000 Iowans, including Governor Tom Vilsack, came in droves to applaud, cheer and gawk at the stars. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED called the event, the 20th Senior U.S. Open golf tournament, "the biggest thing to hit the state since Pope John Paul II's visit," which happened 20 years earlier. The mere arrival in town of Arnold Palmer, about to turn 70, made headlines in the statewide newspaper, the Des Moines Register...
...scene is the papal kitchen, 1942. Pope Pius XII is holding two closely written sheets. On them is his denunciation of the Nazi persecution of European Jews, to be published by evening. But word has just arrived that after Holland's bishops issued a similar statement from the pulpit, the Germans deported 40,000 Catholics of Jewish origin. If the Dutch protest cost 40,000 lives, Pius says, "my own could cost the lives of perhaps 200,000 Jews. I cannot take such a great responsibility. It is better to remain silent before the public and do in private...
That gemlike story has long served as a key anecdotal exhibit in the defense of Pius for his public silence during the Nazi genocide. In his scathing new book, Hitler's Pope, British author John Cornwell repeats it--but not to Pius' benefit. The 40,000 figure, he reports, was impossible--twice the total of all Jews deported from Holland by that date. The likely number of deported Jewish-Catholic converts, Cornwell says, was "no more than 92." Though undeniably tragic, 92 deaths seem a thin reed on which to base a continent-wide policy of discretion in the face...
Such painstaking--and painful--revisionism suggests why, three weeks before its publication and a week before the appearance of a long excerpt in Vanity Fair, a Vatican theologian had already branded Hitler's Pope a "shameful libel." Cornwell, a practicing Catholic, says he originally enlisted "on the side of all these chaps in believing Pius had had a really bad deal" at his critics' hands. But research into the lightly trod territory of Pius' decades-long German involvement before his papacy left Cornwell in a state of "moral shock," he says. "The material I had gathered amounted...
...chance to nab a speedier ticket to heaven will do the trick. On Friday, the Vatican released an updated manual on indulgences, with several additions to the acts of faith that lessen a Catholic?s time spent in purgatory ?- the heavenly holding pen outside the pearly gates. The pope announced the church will now give "partial" indulgences to parishioners who quit smoking, even for a day. (A full indulgence is achieved when the self-restraint is accompanied by confession and communion.) The money that would have been spent on the cigarettes should be donated to the needy, the manual intones...