Word: xii
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...Deputy, German Playwright Rolf Hochhuth earned instant international notoriety by indicting Pope Pius XII for his failure to speak out against Nazi persecution of the Jews. Hochhuth's second play, Soldiers, which had its world premiere in Berlin last week, casts an accusing glance at Sir Winston Churchill. In essence, Soldiers contends that Churchill was responsible for the mysterious death, in July 1943, of General Wladyslavv Sikorski, leader of Poland's exile government...
Hochhuth portrayed Pius XII as a Machiavellian "inverted mystic" who hoped to use Hitler to save Europe from Communism. The Churchill of Soldiers seems to be an equally callous caricature. According to the play, Britain's wartime Prime Minister (played by Otto Hasse) was a tragic figure who authorized immoral acts in hopes of saving his nation. Among them was the murder of Sikorski, a stiff-necked patriot who infuriated Stalin first by demanding the postwar return of Polish territories annexed by Russia, then by calling for an investigation of the Katyn massacre of 4,253 Polish military prisoners...
...exegetes were required to abide by the conservative judgments of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, set up at the beginning of the century; among its dicta was the ruling that Moses authored the Pentateuch-even though it contains an account of his death clearly penned centuries later. Not until Pius XII's 1943 encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu, were Catholic Biblicists able to study Scripture with the same freedom enjoyed by their Protestant counterparts...
...XII: Keep Current Standards
...also involuntarily, the opening in the larnyx (the glottis) closes and cuts off the flow of air, thus creating the audible hic. To most persons, it is merely annoying. But if it continues for days, it can be seriously weakening, as it was in 1954 for Pope Pius XII. More common and at least as worrisome is the effect on patients undergoing surgery, especially on the torso. The spasms complicate the surgeon's delicate maneuvers; during postoperative recovery, they may well rip open the wound...