Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...faced old man, who combines warmth, wit and frankness with a dignity that is free of pomp. He is an able, creative, precedent-breaking administrator with a rare humility and an ever-present concern for people. He has been readier than any other Pope in memory to leave the Vatican, a man about town who likes nothing better than to dodge his chauffeurs and stomp through Roman streets on his own. They call him "Johnnie Walker...
...Pope Sent You." During the past fortnight, his audiences have included Tibetan Lama Cohimed Rigdzin, two football teams, the children of Vatican City employees, the Italian National Blood Donors Association, Pennsylvania's "flying grandfather," Max Conrad, Mount Everest's Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, Fiat Auto Co. President Vittorio Valletta, the U.S. 686th Air Force band and choir (which serenaded him), the officers and men of his own Swiss Guard, and 30 of the carabinieri and motorcycle police who escort his car around Rome...
...Pope can be counted on to bless anything, from a new U.S. helicopter (the first aircraft ever to land in the Vatican) to a crowd of bicycle racers departing for Sardinia. In his Latin blessing of the "helicopterum," he asked God to "grant that in the same way it rises into ethereal spaces, our minds be elevated toward celestial things and be united by ties of charity." And he advised the cyclists: "When you get to Cagliari, tell the Madonna of Bonaria that the Pope sent you, and she will bless Italy, you and your families...
Pope John's love of living sometimes dismays Vatican sticklers for protocol, as in his fondness for inviting old friends to dinner. "I tried to keep to the tradition," he told one intimate, "but it didn't last eight days. After all, nothing in Scripture says that I have to eat alone." The ultra-conservative editors of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano have even been known to censor what they consider an unseemly papal frankness. When, on a precedent-breaking visit to Rome's Queen of Heaven prison, John told the jailbirds that...
...tour of Rome. Everest-conquering Nepalese Guide Tenzing Norgay squeezed in a Vatican visit and a papal audience. "So this is Tenzing, the famous Sherpa," said Pope John XXIII, beaming. "Bravo, bravo, we all need to ascend more and more." Later, Buddhist Norgay summed up, imprecisely, the brief encounter: "The Pope is very likable, a very holy person, but it's hard to explain what a man feels in his presence...