Word: priestly
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...took two years of screening before New Jersey's controversial Bishop John Spong approved J. Robert Williams, 34, as the first Episcopal man to be ordained a priest while openly living in a gay relationship. It took six weeks for the bishop to decide the ordination was a big mistake. Williams has now been forced out of his job at a gay ministry while the diocese investigates whether he misrepresented his moral beliefs...
...little Sicilian town's ex officio movie censor, rings a bell whenever anything on the screen strikes him as salacious. Up in the booth, Alfredo, the projectionist (Philippe Noiret, who is becoming Spencer Tracy to our age), slaps a piece of paper into the reel marking the spot the priest has X-rated. The walls of Alfredo's aerie are festooned with ribbons of film he has cut from movies before showing them to the public, for the good father sees in even the most chaste movie kiss an occasion...
Secretly watching these censorious rites, though not entirely comprehending them, is a little boy named Toto (played by a delightful discovery, Salvatore Cascio). For him, any moving image is the nearest available occasion for bliss. An indifferent altar boy to the priest, he is a passionate acolyte to the projectionist, who is quite literally the keeper of a flame (the arc lamps inside his machine), the cranky guardian of a mystery more awesome -- or at least more attractive -- to the child than anything the church has to offer...
...this alternative religion, Toto will rise from novice (as the projectionist's assistant) to parish priest (he takes over when Alfredo is blinded in a nitrate-film fire) to bishop (he becomes a director). But it is one of the many graces of Cinema Paradiso that it is content merely to observe the analogies between two faiths, not point up the conflict between them. Writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore's manner is gently reflective, not satirical. His largest aim, and greatest success, is to re-create the lost spirit of a vanished movie era: the late 1940s and early...
Although most lay Catholics are accepting of married priests, Fichter writes, the Vatican skittishly restricts their contact with ordinary U.S. parishioners. Most of the 43 work in such careers as teaching or chaplaincies and perform regular parish work only on temporary weekend assignments. That means that a priest's wife and children do not live in a regular parish rectory and usually do not attend the church where he celebrates Mass. Nonetheless, when families do mingle with parishioners, said one wife, "people get used to you after a while...