Word: wilfrid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Among the up-and-coming Cardinals from Africa, Vatican watchers cite Peter Turkson of Ghana, 60 and Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier, 67 of South Africa, as potential papal material. Archbishop John Onayiekan of Nigeria, who may soon be up for a Cardinal slot, is considered "strong here and back there," says one Rome insider, referring to Onayiekan's knowledge of the Third World and his skills navigating the ins and outs of the Holy...
...Monstrous parents, it seems, are what gifted children barely survive in order to write about them with inspired resentment. Loving memoirs tend to rank second only to corporate histories of tool-and-die companies as the kind of book any reader can put down. In the face of this, Wilfrid Sheed, a witty, acerbic critic and novelist (Office Politics, Transatlantic Blues), has managed to compose a mellow family chronicle that turns literary and psychological tradition on its head. This is more than a memoir; it is an occasion...
...Sheed household, including Wilfrid's older sister Rosemary, was the most movable of holy feasts. One or both parents were continually getting "mysterious marching orders." Maisie did not exaggerate when she titled a reminiscence To and Fro upon the Earth. In 1940, when Wilfrid was nine, the call took the family to the U.S. and kept them hopping from way station to way station. Young Wilfrid, the eternal transfer student, felt like a newspaper tossed on a lawn. Not even when he was struck by polio at the age of 1 3 did his parents slow down their perpetual motion...
When Sheed & Ward established a New York publishing branch, Frank used his circuit riding to recruit authors. In England, the "Pied Publishers" signed Monsignor Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh's favorite priest, and in America, the Rev. Fulton Sheen, for whom Wilfrid worked briefly and unenthusiastically after finishing his education at Oxford. Billing his proselytizing parents as "kings of the Catholic world from John o' Groats to Borneo," Sheed asserts they stirred up the forces that "would change the face of American Catholicism." But he never makes quite clear how; perhaps it was by sheer exuberance. In any case, the winds...