Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When correspondents picked up application forms for new press cards at the Vatican press office last week, they were handed a little leaflet. Newsmen, the leaflet said, would be expected to maintain "an attitude completely proper regarding the Holy See and the Catholic Church." Anyone who demonstrated an "incorrect attitude" might lose his credentials...
While reporters fumed, Monsignor Fausto Vallainc, head of the Vatican press office, excused the standards as "merely a rephrasing of the old rules." In point of fact, only three journalists, have had their Vatican credentials lifted in the past 18 years-and only one lost his permanently. Vatican press briefings, moreover, have increased and improved (TIME, Oct. 31). Yet some officials-among them Deputy Secretary of State Archbishop Giovanni Benelli-apparently felt the need to protect themselves against misinterpretation. Explained a Vatican insider: "Journalists today try to write like theologians, getting involved in highly controversial doctrinal matters. Any journalist...
Only four men were even aware of the secret nocturnal meetings last spring in the Vatican's baroque Apostolic Palace. Two were top cardinals in the church hierarchy. Two were key participants: Pope Paul VI and Michele Sindona, the tough Sicilian lawyer who in two decades has risen from obscurity to eminence as a financier and industrialist. It is almost unheard of for a Pope personally to conduct the church's business affairs, but this was no ordinary occasion. Sindona and Pope Paul closed a deal that started a shift of profound consequence in the Holy...
Last week a new prior arrived in Boquen. Dom Besret (pronounced beret) had been summoned to Rome and dismissed for threatening to destroy the monastic concept. Cistercian superiors were unmoved by his pleas to be permitted to stay on as "president" of a more open community. Explained a Vatican official privately: "If you are going to have a monastery, you must have a monastery. It can't be a country club...
After an hour of official briefing and an hour of unofficial panel analysis, many correspondents remained unsated. For them there was still perhaps the oldest method of probing the Vatican, a method used by diplomats, spies and merchants long before there were newspapers: taking a cleric to dinner. At such restaurants as Romolo's, where Raphael is supposed to have found his model for The Baker's Daughter, or Galeassi's, which also attracts a movie and theatrical crowd, the clergy last week responded as usual to the pleasures of the table, and crumbs of information mingled...