Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...triple coffin (oak, lead and cypress) and interred in the most sacred spot in Christendom-below the Bernini altar near St. Peter's supposed grave, whose discovery the Pope himself announced in 1950. Buried with the Pope was a red bag containing a sample of every Vatican coin minted during his reign, a parchment copy of the eulogy read at the final funeral Mass and the pieces of his broken Fisherman's Ring...
Despite the grandeur of the funeral, the mourners 'who thronged the Vatican this week-the foreign statesmen as well as the crowds of Romans who had cheered him for years as he rode through his city -knew the simplicity and the intelligent humanity that had been present beneath the papal pomp. And they would scarcely agree with his humble self-assessment of "failures" and "insufficiency." Men of all faiths agreed that Pius XII had been a great Pope...
When Pacelli was born in 1876, in Rome, the papacy seemed doomed to a decline. Six years before, it had been stripped of temporal power beyond the tiny (108.7 acres) Vatican enclave. Only 22 years before that, Pope Pius IX had fled when Mazzini and his revolutionists seized control of Rome. In Pacelli's childhood the world outside the Vatican seethed with anticlericalism and glowed with humanist confidence in the ever onwardness and upwardness of history. Today the papacy and the Catholic Church are immensely stronger. Part of the story is told in numbers: during Pius...
...with "life in that Vatican City called Downing Street," Macmillan had announced that he was "out to have some fun." In Wolverhampton, while Lady Macmillan unpacked the bags at the hotel, he popped up at a local Butchers' Association ball, announced that he could not "resist a good band." Next day, his pants rolled up, he tramped through the Kidderminster cattle market, chuckled loudly when a runaway pig scampered between his legs (being photographed with pigs was a specialty of a previous Tory Prime Minister. Stanley Baldwin). Later Macmillan dropped in at the Half Moon for a spot...
...Nobody Knew. Back at "Vatican City," the Prime Minister had every reason to be pleased with his lot. With the Laborites in near disarray, Tory stock was going up, the nation's gold and dollar reserves were at a seven-year high of more than $3 billion, and not even Britain's fear of war over Quemoy had produced much of a public clamor. The man nobody thought could ever be popular had brought his party a long way from the dark days of Suez. Said one happy Tory last week: "We're well...