Word: rerum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This spring the Vatican is publishing the A-to-L volume of a lexicon turning into Latin some 15,000 phrases that did not exist in the time of Cicero and Caesar. Among the neologisms from the complete opus: ampla rerum venalium domus (supermarket), ignitabulum nicotianum (cigarette lighter), nuntius fulminans (news flash) and mulierum liberatio (women's lib). Beams Abbot Egger, who is also the editor of a Latin newspaper: "This is proof; Latin can be used even today for everything...
...letter is the latest in a long series of Catholic pronouncements on economic questions. Beginning with Pope Leo Kill's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which stressed the right of individuals to a living wage, the church has consistently called for improvements in the lot of workers. In 1919 the American bishops put forth a Program for Social Reconstruction that urged the establishment of a minimum wage, social security and un employment insurance. Pope John Paul II's 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens decried what he considered the tendency of unregulated capitalism to reduce workers to the status of instruments...
Since Pope Leo XIII wrote his Rerum Novarum in the late 1800s, the Church has been looking at the world around it. And though the view of the Catholic bureaucracy is still often regressive and dogmatic, the theology and the political practices of many Catholic priests becomes more human, more revolutionary, more Christlike with each passing year. It is no accident that Poland and El Salvador share an active, powerful, and near universally respected Catholic Church; in both cases, organized religion has been empowering, emboldening. In both cases, it has been instrumental in the decision of the people to cast...
...letter to the Roman Catholic Church, John Paul underlined those concerns, this time through the theme of human work. He had intended to issue the 24,000-word document, titled Laborem Exercens (On Working), last spring in connection with the 90th anniversary of Pope Leo Kill's encyclical Rerum Novarum, the first Catholic document devoted to social questions. Its release, however, had to await his recovery from the bullet wounds he suffered last May. "It is only after my stay in hospital," he explains at the end of the document, "that I have been able to revise it definitively...
...consistent themes: the duty of the rich to help the poor. John Paul was commemorating the 90th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's pioneering social encyclical Rerum Novarum; the draft of the speech, which as usual John Paul had written himself, asserted that the encyclical "was not only a vigorous condemnation of the undeserved misery of working conditions of that time, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, but above all, laid the foundation for a just solution to the problems of human coexistence, which go under the name of 'social problems.' " John Paul...