Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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United Front. Aware that the trend of public sentiment is toward the bill, the Vatican in its eleventh battle against a divorce law is making less of a direct attack. In a shrewd maneuver, the church and pro-Vatican Christian Democrats have mounted a campaign largely aimed at wives. "Pay attention," says a street poster. "If the divorce law passes, your husband, when he happens to lose his head over a girl younger than you, can leave the house, ask for a separation and after five years move on to a new marriage whether you like...
Extramarital Relationships. Blocked at home and abroad for 40 years, Italians have had no release from unhappy marriages except separation or complicated, costly and time-consuming annulment by the Vatican. Even so, an estimated 2,500,000 people are presently separated from their spouses; of these, one-third have made more or less permanent extralegal arrangements. Writer Gabriella Parca, author of a much-discussed book on the predicament (I Separati), estimates that "no fewer than 5,000,000 people [one-tenth of Italy's population] are involved in the drama of indissolubility and suffer its consequences." The total includes...
...others, the lack of divorce laws works a greater hardship. One girl married at 20 only to discover that her musician-groom was impotent. She has spent the past six years petitioning the Vatican's marriage court for an annulment. Until the Sacred Rota finally decides her case, she must avoid any relationship that would destroy the only evidence on which her plea rests: her virginity. A woman married her brother-in-law after her husband was declared dead in World War II and bore her second spouse two children. When the first husband reappeared unexpectedly, he became...
...another story, often they are local boys who had made good. Thus when word came out of Rome last month that some saints had been dropped from a new liturgical calendar (TIME, May 16), both their devout followers and a surprising number of nondevout allies were outraged. The Vatican apparently viewed the new calendar as a routine liturgical change, hardly noticeable in an age of guitar Masses. But the Pope might just as well have issued an encyclical against baseball...
Central Mysteries. Actually, Rome's reform was an attempt to carry out one of the mandates of the Second Vatican Council: to update an antiquated liturgical calendar that was cluttered with unfamiliar, and in some cases probably fictional figures. Some of the updating consisted of replacing little-known early martyrs (and no less than 17 early Popes) with a wider sampling of countries and vocations: the newly included Uganda martyrs,* for instance, are among the calendar's relatively few laymen. A more important reason: renewed emphasis through the liturgical year on the central mysteries of Christ...