Word: vaticans
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Roger Cardinal Etchegaray, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was recently in Baghdad to bemoan the "perverse" impact of the economic sanctions against Iraq. But Etchegaray -- who is the Vatican's chief planner for the 2,000th-anniversary celebrations -- was also laying groundwork for a papal visit. The thinking is that the pope will visit biblical sites, including Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, in present-day Iraq. Other tantalizing events for 2000, in the talking stage, are a summit meeting for world Christian leaders and an interreligious gathering, Jews and Muslims included, on Egypt's Mount Sinai...
...sculptor for whom the aging Rockefeller posed thought that "if he'd lived in the Middle Ages, he'd have been Pope at Rome." It's a shrewd thought: the Standard Oil monopoly represented a centralized, hierarchical organization that was as intolerant of competitors as the Vatican was of heretics. Chernow proposes a shrewder thought: "At times, when he railed against cutthroat competition and the vagaries of the business cycle, Rockefeller sounded more like Karl Marx than our classical image of the capitalist." America is still trying to figure out where it stands concerning monopoly and competition...
...Vatican refuses to condone the use of birth control pills yet unofficially endorses Viagra, prostituting itself to some warped code of priorities. So men are allowed to bang away while women remain sinners. No wonder thinking Catholic women have become religiously stateless, bound by years of indoctrination but alienated by rampant discrimination in the church. JENNIFER TAIT Waverley, Australia...
What gall! A hacker has evaded the Vatican's electronic defenses and impiously placed a message in the Pope's personal computer. The interloper begs the Holy Father to help save Seville's 17th century church of Our Lady of the Tears, threatened by the wrecker's ball. Who is this modem-armed intruder? And why should the Pontiff intervene to preserve a crumbling edifice with a handful of worshippers...
Answering those questions is clearly a job for Father Lorenzo Quart, ace trouble-shooter at the Vatican's cloak-and-dagger Institute of External Affairs. Although lacking Agent 007's license to kill, Quart is distinctly Bondish: tall, cool, impeccably clad and cursed with dreamboat looks that fluster women into worrying if their lipstick is on straight...