Word: priesthoods
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...have been glorified by many historians; nevertheless, these books make clear that the battle was between the armed faith of Christian Europe and a cruel empire whose ceremonies seemed to the Spanish soldiers a bloody, blasphemous parody of the Mass. Inland, the conquistadors first met the strange Mexican-Indian priesthood, men whose hair was caked with human blood and whose temple floors were clogged with it. The Christians had no hesitation in breaking their idols. Even then they had no notion that in the city of Tenochtitlán as many as 20,000 human sacrifices had been made...
...young man, Guy Desnoyers wanted more than anything else to be a surgeon. But there was no money in his family to pay for long years of medical education, so after brooding for a while over his lost dreams. Guy. at the age of 29, turned to the priesthood. As the abbé of the little village of Uruffe in the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, he became a dynamo of public service, always busily organizing youth groups, a theatrical society, football team and other worthwhile projects. On Sundays, his sermons crackled with reproof of parishioners less disposed to such...
Though he does not see the Qumran sect as the originator of Christianity, Allegro feels that it profoundly influenced the first Christians. Withdrawn into the desert from the persecution of a corrupt priesthood in Jerusalem, holding in contempt the scribes and Pharisees (whom they called "Seekers After Smooth Things"), the Qumran community practiced baptism, chastity, community of goods. They wrote the ritual of a Messianic banquet with breaking of bread and blessing of wine, which Allegro boldly suggests may prefigure the Last Supper and Christian Communion. They expected the imminent end of the world and the coming of two Messiahs...
...with this caveat, the bishop invites Catholic psychiatrists to pay special attention to the problems of mystical phenomena (ecstasy, levitation, visions, stigmatization), vocations to the priesthood and religious life, and such common lay problems as sexual aberrations and "the ever practical matter of the validity of the assent given to the marriage contract...
...Roman Catholic Church in Berlin has published statistics showing that Communist antireligious propaganda is paying off in Germany's East zone. Candidates for the priesthood number only 33%-about half the normal expectation. Church membership "leakage" increased from 3,733 in 1948 to almost 10,000 last year...