Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Critics scoffed when computers were first enlisted to help restore Michelangelo's magnificent frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. What could an electronic filing system in some Vatican basement contribute to the painstaking, labor-intensive task of liberating one of the world's largest and most famous paintings from nearly 500 years of accumulated grime and murky glue? But the computer -- an Apollo workstation programmed to map every curve and crack down to the last millimeter -- proved so indispensable that it was installed 20 meters (65 ft.) above the ground, on the main scaffold, where it put a wealth of data...
...Sistine Chapel project was a breakthrough that made believers of the skeptics. Even the Vatican's chief restorer, Gianluigi Colalucci, concedes that future computers will recall in an instant visual information that used to require years of research, including, he adds with a laugh, "the errors we are making now." But more important, the restoration marked the beginning of the Italian art establishment's love affair with technology. Nowadays, computers linked up to gamma-ray detectors, infrared cameras and thermographic sensors are turning up in art-restoration projects all across Italy, from the vast ruins of Pompeii to the crowded...
...route to Malta, Gorbachev stopped in Rome to visit John Paul II. His momentous meeting with the Pope marked the beginning of the end of more than 70 years of antagonism between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. The first Soviet Communist Party boss to set foot on Vatican soil, Gorbachev conferred with the Pope for an unexpectedly long 75 minutes in the library of the 16th century Apostolic Palace. Addressing John Paul II as "Your Holiness" -- no small gesture for the leader of a nation and party formally pledged to atheism -- Gorbachev promised that the Supreme Soviet would...
Gorbachev also agreed to reopen diplomatic relations with the Vatican and discussed a possible papal visit to the Soviet Union sometime in the future. John Paul hedged on that, making his acceptance conditional upon some evidence of real improvement in the situation of Soviet Catholics. But the Pope did offer his endorsement of perestroika, all the while pressing home his "expectation" that Ukrainian Catholics would be allowed to exercise their faith fully and openly. The Ukrainian Church, which follows the Eastern liturgy but claims the Pope as its spiritual leader, was banned and driven underground by Stalin...
...with Gorbachev, he achieved his reconciliation without humiliation. As he had done before, the Soviet leader let the ongoing crisis of the Communist system serve as an opportunity to push his nation toward a broader vision of the future. "We need spiritual values," Gorbachev declared the day before the Vatican meeting. "We need a revolution of the mind...