Word: priestes
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...idea of what it's really celebrating. Or at least no idea of whom it celebrates: St. Valentine could be any of half a dozen Christian martyrs whom the early church recruited to clean up and bless pagan fertility festivals. Of the top candidates, the best known is a priest named Valentinus, who was beheaded by Emperor Claudius the Cruel on Feb. 14, A.D. 269. Upon slim evidence, whole layers of legend are stacked: that Valentinus performed secret weddings after Claudius banned marriage to prevent soldiers from deserting his armies; that he refused to deny Christ and so was thrown...
...Monfreid meets, among others, an imprisoned spy (a "venomous reptile") whose escape he enables and later regrets; a Chinese trepang trader on a deserted island; a metrosexual polyglot butler; a Bedouin shouldering a Remington; a priest who manufactures hashish; and a hashish distributor who operates from an undertaker's office. He sketches all the misfits he encounters with anthropological and sartorial precision, colorfully and poetically noting the red tarboosh of a Tigrean guard; the "sublime crease" of a servant's "beautiful putty trousers"; and a Greek engineer's soiled celluloid collar, "yellow and clouded as a clay pipe...
...successor, a low-key Dutch priest named Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, was credited with reestablishing a serene rapport with top Vatican officials. Last year, Pope Benedict XVI accepted Kolvenbach's unprecedented request to retire from what had always been a lifetime posting...
...victims, the Nazis also shot tens of thousands of Gypsies, as well as Polish and Soviet citizens and Italian soldiers. A 26-year-old Ukrainian translator for Desbois said she knew of those deaths, but was astonished to learn about the mass killing of Jews when she met the priest last year...
...Yaroslav Nadiak, Rava-Ruska's former deputy mayor, hired workers to lay a cement gravestone with a Jewish star in Borowe, a village on the edge of town, atop the mass grave containing about 1,500 Jews - the one Nadiak had first revealed to Desbois in 2003, setting the priest on his long quest for the truth. On the last Sunday in December, a group of Ukrainian Jews drove to Rava-Ruska from Lviv, an hour away, and gathered in the snow around the grave, where they recited Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. For Desbois, this quiet ceremony...