Word: vaticans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lennon killing and the Reagan shooting, this attack looks like part of a chain reaction of violence," says Wynn. "One such highly publicized event seems to put the idea in yet another assassin's mind." Joining Wynn and Kalb was Bonn Bureau Chief Roland Flamini, a Vatican hand of long experience who served for three years as a TIME correspondent in Rome before moving to Bonn in March. Flamini, author of the recently published book Pope, Premier, President, has reported on the deaths of John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul I. Says he: "The first understandably confused accounts...
Despite their Renaissance garb, the Vatican's famous Swiss Guards are not entirely decorative. They carry halberds, but submachine guns are never far away. At the bronze door of St. Peter's they are stashed in a brass umbrella stand, unnoticed by tourists who click away at the guards' fanciful uniforms. Vatican security is, in fact, a mixture of modern and medieval. Plainclothes Swiss Guards and men from the papal gendarmes hustle alongside the Pope's car when he appears for audiences, just as the Secret Service does for the President...
Outside the Vatican, Pope John Paul II is largely dependent
...apparently insoluble problem: Vatican experts have only an approximate knowledge of where anything is. The effort to catalogue the papal treasures has been going on for more than 300 years now, and archivists still speak with awe of Cardinal Josephus Garampi, who managed, before his death in 1772, to inscribe more than 1.5 million catalogue entries, in strictly alphabetical order, in 124 large folio volumes. But since the millions of documents were all arranged by their places of origin rather than by subject matter, the problems of cross-indexing stretch toward infinity. And the staff numbers only 30. "If this...
...main purpose of the Tower of the Winds, built just before Galileo's time, was to house the Vatican's own astronomy laboratory, known as the Meridian Room. Here the progress of the light of the sun, on its eternal course around the earth, was measured as it entered through a slit in the wall. By the mid-1500s, the Julian calendar worked out by astronomers in Alexandria in 45 B.C. had fallen grievously into error. The spring solstices, for example, kept occurring two weeks early. So the same Vatican that denied Copernican theory used data compiled...