Word: vi
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...look at the Vatican books, he was apparently shocked at how little wealth there is. Like more worldly organizations, the Vatican is plagued by galloping inflation and an increasingly high overhead. The major problem is the swollen staff of more than 3,000 which John Paul inherited from Paul VI, a born bureaucrat. Hard-pressed Vatican workers (typical clerk's pay: $150 a week) talk of forming a union. Out of charity for loyal veterans, John Paul wants to trim the payroll only through attrition. That means he needs more cash...
Church intellectuals with a longer-term view are watching John Paul's approach to doctrine. They are upset over three developments begun under Pope Paul VI that have been continued by John Paul. One is this year's formal Vatican condemnation of writings by French Theologian Jacques Pohier on grounds that among other "evident errors," he denied the bodily resurrection of Christ. The Vatican is also quietly investigating iconoclastic Dutch Theologian Edward Schilebeeckx. The new "apostolic constitution" intended to reaffirm controls over faculties that grant degrees under Vatican authority, is also troubling. This last decree affects departments...
...size of their families. Nine years later the approval for marketing birth control pills raised the hope that such biochemical controls would be regarded as "natural" by the church. Pope John XXIII appointed a special commission to examine the matter. Its confidential, but later leaked, majority report to Paul VI in 1966 warned against avoiding childbearing for selfish reasons. Going beyond Pius XII's position, however, the report called for collaboration with "men of learning and science" to find "decent and human means" of birth control (by implication, the Pill). Morality depends on the good of the child...
...affair of Lady Amherst and Mensch holds the reader's chief interest and sympathy because it's the most coherent and human part of Letters; the other characters dance a contorted jig about it, A. B. Cook III and his descendant A. B. Cook VI send their unborn children endless genealogical accounts of the family's intrigues, centering around the War of 1812. Jerome Bonaparte Bray, part dictator, part human fly, part servant of a computer, plots a Second American Revolution. Todd Andrews--still alive, despite The Floating Opera's denouement--writes to his dead father contemplating a second suicide...
...breast as if it were a Bible; he was on his way to torch an abortion clinic. In 1972 the Xerox Corp. published a booklet directed at elementary and high school students called Population Control: Whose Right to Live? The authors, two independent university professors, implied that Pope Paul VI's teachings on birth control sanctioned the starvation of countless numbers ol people around the world and suggested that Roman Catholic students who disagree with the church on the birth control issue consider bringing charges before a world court against the Catholic Church for "crimes against humanity." It appears...