Word: riccardo
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...integrate a nun's spiritual and educational training. One current debate within the conference involves this spiritual training; some religious superiors, like Mother Regina of the Sisters of Mercy, believe that the conference should take its norms from the zealous Better World Movement, founded by Italian Jesuit Riccardo Lombardi...
...hero of the play is a priest, a kind of angry young martyr of burning faith and compassion who deliberately pins the yellow Star of David to his cassock and eventually goes to his death in the gas chambers. Father Riccardo Fontana (Jeremy Brett) is a Jesuit serving with the papal nuncio in Berlin when a distracted SS lieutenant bursts into an afternoon tea and begins a semihysterical recital of the statistical horrors of the "factories of death for people" at Treblinka and Belzec. "I'm sorry . . . why must you come to me?" says the nuncio in visible dismay...
...goes to Rome, where his aristocratic father and a cardinal friend are close advisers of the Pope. The cardinal (Fred Stewart) is a jovial, fleshy connoisseur of wine, rare flowers, and the chess game of international politics. "Trouble tempers dictators," he remarks after Hitler loses Stalingrad, and presses Father Riccardo to be a realist, since "the realist compromises." In his uncompromising way, the young priest finally sees Pius and begs him to damn Hitler openly. The Pope knows Hitler's wrongs, but he reminds Father Riccardo that "a diplomat must see with discretion...
...portrayed him, Pius is all discretion and no valor, and as Emlyn Williams plays him, he is gently dignified but bloodless, Christ's bookkeeper rather than his vicar. While Hochhuth robs Pius of all stature, even he cannot deprive him of sound sense. The Pope reminds Father Riccardo of the mounting Communist danger from the East, thus proving at least as prophetic as Winston Churchill at Fulton, Mo. Pius keeps silent, he tells Father Riccardo, to prevent worse misfortunes -and Hochhuth is scarcely in a position to argue that Hitler was not capable of further madness. But like Hochhuth...
...name of God, the final scene all but denies the existence of God and drains meaning from the rest of the play. "The Angel of Death," a satanic concentration camp doctor who "selects" those who will die from those who will live a little longer, taunts Father Riccardo with the emptiness of his death. His martyrdom will be unknown and unfelt. Is he dying for the Jews, when his own church has, in centuries past, itself persecuted the Jews? If God exists, why does inexplicable evil persist and triumph? "God is silent," mocks the Angel of Death. Father Riccardo finds...