Word: vi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Kelly does his best to be fair to all. Of Clement VI (1342-52), who proclaimed that his predecessors "had not known how to be Popes" and then began staging bacchanalia for his "niece" and his courtiers, Kelly says judiciously, "The charges brought by contemporaries against his sexual life cannot be explained away, but he was personally devout, a protector of the poor and needy who showed charity and courage when the Black Death appeared at Avignon in 1348-49, and defended the Jews when they were blamed for it." So he did know something about how to be Pope...
Even the villainous Alexander VI (1492-1503), who won election by bribery, reputedly hired assassins and fathered the even more villainous Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, gets good marks as an administrator and patron of the arts. It was he who persuaded Michelangelo to undertake the grand rebuilding of St. Peter...
Kelly offers measured praise to all the last four Popes: John XXIII ("warm-hearted and unaffectedly simple"), Paul VI ("He was able to steer the church through a period of revolutionary change"), John Paul I ("a man of practical common sense") and John Paul II ("Few Popes have had such wide- ranging intellectual equipment as John Paul, and none has had such a far- reaching impact"). Such judgments are quite unexceptionable, but a secular- minded reader will find more of interest in some of the bad old days...
Lady Jane, her first film, is no formula flick, but an ambitious costume melodrama about the violent period after the deaths of Henry VIII (in 1547) and, six years later, his sickly young son Edward VI. Nevertheless--castles, moats, 16th century costumes and all--the film sinks at its worst moments to the level of teenage fantasy. Bonham Carter, small and dark haired, with huge brown eyes and a face that suggests a miniature in an antique locket, plays the doomed Lady Jane Grey, who lost her life at 16 in an attempt to prevent Henry's Catholic daughter Mary...
...most important church documents in recent years, Pope Paul VI wrote that the preaching and teaching of the Christian message always entails a twofold fidelity: "fidelity to the human person, and fidelity to the word of God." I find this principle helpful in offering this article on the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality...