Word: rerum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...before an audience of bishops, 6,500 miles from St. Peter's, John Paul delivered a 5,000-word speech that may mark the entire course of his papacy. The text was designed to strip away any ambiguity over future papal social policy. From Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) to John XXIII's Mater et Magistra (1961), papal encyclicals have rejected both the "unregulated competition" of laissez-faire capitalism and Marxism's class struggle with its elimination of private property. However, in his 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio, Paul VI allowed for revolutions in extreme cases...
...admittedly, a sentimental man whose confessed fondness for Leni fuels his excavation of her past and who confesses, in a defensive way late in the narrative, that he is concerned with what Virgil called Lacrymae rerum, or the quantity of suffering/tears that is endemic to life. That is about as generalized as the Au. ever gets about his pursuit. The rest of the time he simply measures and records, indefatigably, such essentials as the number of air-raids over Germany in 1944 during which Leni found time to have intercourse with a secret Russian lover, and the number of seconds...
...human intangibles that he knows he must reckon into his Factual account if he would emerge with a judgement. And so T., W., L., B., P., and S. are all defined briefly but methodically, and suubsequently designated by their initials, as useful coordinates for plotting the lacrymae rerum of any one of the clump of characters he has exhumed in the course of his research...