Word: avignon
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...veneration of the Virgin Mary almost put her on the level of a goddess, religious orders had produced powerful abbesses who held their own in intellectual exchanges with men, as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales pointedly witnesses. Indeed, St. Catherine of Siena earned her major fame by talking the Avignon pope into moving the papacy back to Rome. Partially in recognition of this, Pope Paul VI recently named her, along with the 16th century mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, "Doctor of the Church" -a title hitherto bestowed only upon...
...Inside, all is ornate -fine old chandeliers, green woodwork, delicately forged iron. The Louis XV décor in a synagogue seems as out of place as the large cross formed by the windows. The window arrangement, however, is entirely appropriate: for the synagogue of Carpentras, near Avignon, is a relic of a strange medieval relationship between the papacy and a Jewish community...
...Philip IV, banished Jews from the province in order to seize their property. Ironically, Philip had also helped provide a place of asylum. A quarrel between the king and Pope Boniface VIII had played a part in the election of a French Pope, who moved the papal court to Avignon in 1308. There it remained until 1377, and there the banished Jews found a home. The Avignon Popes, beginning with Clement V, welcomed them-at least partly as valued taxpayers-and guaranteed their safety...
...chronicle of war is the Bible of irony. The original victim of that mistaken-identity crisis was a B-25 bombardier named Joseph Heller during a World War II raid over Avignon. He was a dozen feet from the pilot; yet they were separated by layers of chaos and terror. It was not Heller who was hurt?it was his gunner who was bleeding copiously into his flight suit. It was Heller's 37th mission. From that instant of agony he grew petrified of flight. When his war ended, he took a ship home; it was some 15 years later...