Culture

April Monday 16 POPE’S 85th BIRTHDAY Bavarian bishops, the minister-president of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, and a 150-person regional government delegation visited Benedict XVI today in the Vatican’s Clementine Hall. They were accompanied by a small Bavarian band, three female singers and 10 children who danced the skirt-swirling, shoe-stomping, thigh-slapping Schuhplattler before the pontiff. The Pope’s 88-year-old [...]

“Of course they were,” Justus George Lawler responds to the question he poses in the title of this book. If we ask, however, whether the Popes were “disdainful, contemptuous and vengeful toward Jews and their beliefs” (as claimed in a flood of recent works by a gaggle of left-wing Catholics, nonbelievers, and Jews), the answer, Lawler [...]

Giorgio Vasari, the biographer of artists and an artist in his own right, called Raffaello Sanzio (or Santi), known to us as Raphael, “the prince of painters.” Raphael was born in Urbino, an important artistic center at that time, on Good Friday, April 6, 1483, and received his early training from his father, Giovanni Santi di [...]

Pope Benedict XVI has a special relationship with the campus of the German-speaking institution of Santa Maria dell’Anima, and with its sacristy. From the top of the sacristy, statues of six Popes from Deutschen Lande (German countries) look out over visitors with dignity and austerity. It’s a certainty of tradition that someday a statue of Pope [...]