Word: xiii
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Alexander Dumas would smile at his characters in this gem: they are all as he would have them, exceptionally good or horrendously evil. Vincent Price as Richelieu is oily and sinister, with just a dash of greed. Frank Morgan as Louis XIII is weak and vacillating. The heroine is June Allyson, who is totally incapable of portraying anyone not pure and naive. Lana Turner plays Lady de Winter, the cruel, unscrupulous femme fatale; she is grotesquely miscast, but retains a certain innate charm...
...machinery of such solemn decisions grinds slow and small. Some 200 years ago, a monk wrote to Pope Clement XIII begging him to define the bodily Assumption of Mary as "a most certain dogma of faith." Clement passed the matter on to the Holy Office. In 1863, Spain's Queen Elizabeth made the same request. Pius IX, though recognizing the Queen's good intentions, was somewhat annoyed at a temporal sovereign's interference in sacred matters. He replied: "I am not worthy to publish such a dogma. The wishes of Your Majesty, the holy wishes of Your...
Command performances were agony. Once, playing before Portugal's Queen Amalia, Bauer found the court piano in such bad shape that half the keys stuck. At the Spanish court he had to struggle through a Beethoven sonata while twelve-year-old Alfonso XIII romped about him, and the Infanta Isabella chattered all the way through the piece ("How like Wagner . . . This reminds me of Chopin...
...then that she heard of a wealthy lady who had founded a new Catholic order. Katharine Drexel, daughter of a Morgan partner, had been troubled by the squalor of Indian life she had seen on a trip through the West. In Rome later, she begged Pope Leo XIII to do something about it. "Why don't you become a missionary yourself?" the Pope replied. Katharine Drexel did, and gathered together in the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament a group of women who devoted their lives to teaching Indians and Negroes. Among them was Agatha Ryan...
...some Roman Catholic bishops, Washington, D.C. seemed like a hotbed of sin and political skulduggery-no fit place to start a school for priests. But when Pope Leo XIII polled the whole U.S. hierarchy to find out where to build a Catholic University of America, wicked Washington won in a walk...