Word: vaticans
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...never know what to expect when Karl Rove calls. But when the phone rang for Mary Ann Glendon last summer, Rove, still President Bush's top adviser at the time, had a holy mission for her: Ambassador to the Vatican. Now, having just landed in Rome, she has one of the biggest tasks of that mission already waiting on her desk: coordinating Benedict XVI's first papal visit next month to the United States. "It's a great moment to arrive here," Glendon says of her assignment to the Holy See. "[The trip] will be interesting... Be prepared...
...Schafer had no idea that being in the right place at the right time—and knowing his Ovid—would lead to an epic meeting with Matt Damon.Harvard’s Classics department is often called upon to perform translations, from salad dressing labels and Vatican documents to military mottoes and movie lines, as the University’s scholars of the ancient world show a surprising impact on our own.In Schafer’s case, a department administrator found him in the graduate student lounge and told him that the dialect coach...
...answer is that to the men now running the church, Sister Lucia meant a great deal. She was the longest-lived of three children to whom an apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared in 1917 in the Portuguese parish of Fatima. And, as Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone makes clear in his upcoming book, The Last Secret of Fatima (May, Doubleday) she was the key human figure in a drama that eventually transformed the very nature of John Paul II's image of himself, and of his papacy. Lucia's superstar days may have waned in the memory...
...Cardinal Bertone's book helps make clear, the announcement served several purposes. The double beatification and the publication of the third secret endorsed the kind of potent popular piety inspired by Marian apparitions, a trend in popular Catholicism that had gained momentum in the 20th century. But the Vatican response also reined in the flip-side of such enthusiasm: unfettered religious hysteria that can occur when white-hot supernaturalism seems to rupture the staid rhythms of modern institutional religious life...
...centrality of Fatima to the second, "suffering servant" stage of John Paul II's papacy, and his involvement with the two men who would become the Vatican's numbers one and two after his death, may help explain why Lucia's cause has been fast-tracked for beatification. Of course, there are other reasons: Fatima still receives 5 million pilgrims a year, and there is no real downside in pleasing them. And since the Vatican had already carefully vetted the circumstances of Fatima to beatify Lucia's two companions, how much more work need be done to establish the heroic...