Word: prefect
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...best way to preach the Roman Catholic faith to Americans. Within a few days, he found himself expelled from the Redemptorist Congregation on the ground that his trip had violated his vows of obedience and poverty. For the next seven months, the worried priest hurried from prelate to prefect, pleading the need for an English-language mission to the U.S. At last Pope Pius IX dispensed Father Hecker and four other priests from their Redemptorist vows, with the tacit understanding that they would live in community and form a new organization...
Britain's Queen, said the young English nobleman firmly, presents to the public the personality of "a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for confirmation"; her manner is that of a debutante, her speaking style is "a pain in the neck"; her court is outmoded; and those who surround her "are almost without exception of the 'tweedy' sort...
...merely an amiable, drink-swilling traveler -Composer Egk accompanies them with a staccato, dissonant score pricked by brisk and frequently shifting rhythms. Old-fashioned opera buffs will be startled by the spare arias, which are stripped to a few essential Greek-chorus phrases (in his first aria, the prefect sings over and over again: "Clean shirts, clean nightcaps, Latin mottoes over the beds"). Egk also allows the singers to sing their essential recitatives against the support merely of a sustained bass. The result is an opera that moves with beery gusto and at a breathless, never confused pace...
Claude Rains, as the wary French Prefect of Police, a "poor, corrupt official" who must work with the Gestapo, cannot decide whether French or German grass is greener, and so sits between on a sharp picket fence. As Victor Laslo, Paul Henreid plays a leader of various resistance movements who has eluded the Germans once too often; his acting shows what a man tortured in a concentration camp must endure...
Crow & Cherries. The book's hero, a kind of clerical Candide, is the Abbe Victor Mas, naive young seminarist at Versailles who is sent to Rome to study and to live in the household of His Eminence, Cardinal Belloro, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. The cardinal is not far from being a Renaissance figure. He does not care much for the unceremonious style of modern cardinals like New York's Spellman ("the American Pope"). He savagely attacks Pius XII, whose order curtailing the length of cardinals' trains by one half annoys...