Word: xii
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...Vatican, and shipped off in cattle cars to Hitler's extermination camps. And within the papal apartments, according to German Playwright Rolf Hochhuth, sat a man who by a word might have stayed that mass murder. The Deputy is a hammerblow "J'accuse" hurled at Pope Pius XII...
...question of conscience that The Deputy raises is bound to survive the play and to condition any future judgment of Pius XII: Is it morally defensible for the Vicar of Christ on earth to remain silent in the face of such monstrous evil? And must not every man of good will or religious conscience bear witness to what he believes before and sometimes against the world? But Hochhuth does not stick to this lofty issue. As a German, he lives guiltily with guilt, the knowledge that the Nazi leaders and the people who brought them to power must bear...
With its crude, inept dramaturgy, The Deputy is no service to playwriting, and as a polemic, it might have been a far finer spur to conscience. Hochhuth affects to attack Pius XII for lacking the power of faith but really attacks him for lacking faith in power...
...E.N.I.'s leftist president, that he set out to drive Gulf Italia from Sicily. The Italian left, attacking foreign investors in general, jabbed especially at Gulf Italia's vice president and operating head, Prince Nicolo Pignatelli Aragona Cortes, scion of a noble family that claims Pope Innocent XII and Mexico's Conqueror Hernando Cortes in its lineage. Pignatelli seemed an easy target: he graces Roman society's lavish dinner tables, is a jet-set sportsman, and can be tough in business: when his Ragusa field was mechanized, he fired 700 of his 850 Sicilian workers...
...Pope Pius XII still warned against un-Christian hedonism, but reaffirmed it was right that "husband and wife shall find pleasure and happiness of mind and body." Today, says Father John Thomas, noted Roman Catholic sociologist, "what is needed is a whole new attitude by the church toward sexuality. There is in both Catholicism and Protestantism a relatively well-developed theology of sex on the negative side. Now more than prohibition is needed...