Word: romane
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...Poland's Roman Catholic station Radio Maryja (pronounced Maria) has always blended the sacred world of faith with the profane arena of politics. Its archconservative commentators love to slag off the "evils" of the free market and the perils of joining Europe. But this month they acquired an opponent tough for them to dismiss. After one pundit declared that Jewish groups were "humiliating Poland internationally by demanding money" for property expropriated during World War II and likened their efforts to a "holocaust industry," the Vatican itself decided this was the last straw. It instructed the Polish Catholic church to prevent...
...Brown's best seller (40 million copies in 44 languages, with 6 million paperbacks sold since they arrived in bookstores March 28) portrayed Opus Dei as an ecclesiastical Cosa Nostra. That was painful enough for the secretive Roman Catholic society. But the thought of having those words put into pictures called for direct action, especially after the group's attempts to negotiate with the filmmakers were declined. "We could not just sit still and wait for the flagellation of the film itself," says Juan Manuel Mora, director of Opus Dei's communications department. "Nobody wanted a battleground. But not just...
...limits peaked with Escrivá's 1992 beatification, a brief (for those days) 17 years after his death. Faultfinders, notes Allen, claimed that the judging panel had been packed and Escrivá's critics blackballed; they viewed his fast move toward sainthood as the muscle-flexing "ecclesiastical equivalent of [the Roman emperor] Caligula making his horse a senator." Allen sees the beatification as legitimate, as did 300,000 people who thronged Rome for Escrivá's 2002 canonization...
...Vinci Code's Opus Dei--a powerful, ultraconservative Roman Catholic faction riddled with sadomasochistic ritual, one of whose members commits serial murder in pursuit of a church-threatening secret--is obviously not reflective of the real-life organization (although author Dan Brown's website states the portrayal was "based on numerous books written about Opus Dei as well as on my own personal interviews"). Yet in casting the group as his heavy, Brown was as shrewd as someone setting up an innocent man for a crime. You don't choose the head of the Rotary. You single out the secretive...
...begin with some culture. The Scuderie museum on the Quirinale hill accepts visitors until 7 p.m. Sun.-Thurs. and 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat., and has good modern-art exhibits and arguably the best view of the city from its exiting stairway. With an appetite revved for Roman food, get a steaming plate of bucatini all'amatriciana, a classic pasta with bacon, at Matricianella on Campo Marzio. Plop down afterward in Piazza San Lorenzo in Lucina for a relaxed nightcap, or stroll over to the Spanish Steps, pictured, for a bit more buzz...