Word: vaticans
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While Richard von Weizsacker was on the front, drafted at the age of 18, his father, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, was working in the foreign ministry, first as a chief diplomat, and later as an ambassador to the Vatican. His brother, Karl Fredrich, was a prominent physicist, who was at work for the Nazi regime in attempting to develop an atom bomb...
...undisputed lord of this domain was the bishop. Until very recently, "Dom Miguel was a strongman," observes Anthropologist Luciene Guimaraes de Souza of the government's Indian agency. But now the frail prelate has reached the Vatican's mandatory retirement age and will soon return home to Sicily...
...Vatican, too, raised a storm last March when it issued a document calling for legal restraints on medical manipulation of human birth, including in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood and termination of flawed fetuses. Moral traditionalists of all faiths cheered. Biomedical science, they claimed, must not intrude on natural life processes. But many liberals sided with Michigan Lawyer Noel Keane, a pioneer in arranging surrogate agreements, who reportedly declared, "I think the church is a little out of touch with reality." The document has prompted serious debate, but so far it has moved the country no closer to a consensus...
...beyond South Bend. He has always insisted that "my purpose is to produce educated Christians. I don't want to be Harvard, I want to be the greatest Catholic university in the world." Nevertheless, last fall he acted as point man for 111 Catholic college presidents who rebutted a Vatican schema for greater control over the appointment of theology professors at Catholic schools. Their objection was that such control could infringe academic freedom. "The church proclaims the word of God loud and clear without any doubts," says Hesburgh, whereas the "university is in the business of pushing the frontiers...
This was not Hesburgh's first exchange with the Vatican. He declined a Cardinal's red hat from his friend Pope Paul VI. His commanding presence also elicited an offer from Lyndon Johnson to run the space program, which Hesburgh declined, commenting that a priest with poverty vows should not be running a $6 billion agency. He also rejected a Nixon proposal to head up the poverty program. "I never wanted to be a sort of Cardinal Richelieu," he commented of these Government offers. However, he has sat as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation and as a board member...