Word: church
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Inside, Roman Catholic Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Alberto Gori carries an olive-wood Christ child, accompanied by priests and deacons with swinging censers, acolytes and choir boys with long, flickering candles. The procession makes its way down into the Cave of the Nativity beneath the church, and there the figure of the Child is laid on a heap of straw in the place where tradition says the manger stood...
...actually have been born is the center and model of numberless Nativity scenes all over the world. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox or sectarian, there are crèches today almost everywhere there are Christians. There are Nativities as sumptuous as the presepio (manger) in Rome's 11th century Church of Ara Coeli (Altar of Heaven) on Capitoline Hill, with its Christ child-legendarily carved by St. Luke himself-so bedecked with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls and gold that its form is barely discernible and the surplus treasure has to be kept in a safe behind the altar. And there...
...Gospel does not tell how many Wise Men there were; according to St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine there were twelve, but tradition soon narrowed them to three-presumably because of the three gifts they brought. As far back as the and century, the church assigned symbolical meaning to the gifts: gold for Christ's kingship, frankincense for his priesthood, and healing myrrh for his suffering and his role as physician to mankind. The Wise Men, or Magi, may have been members of an occult school in Media and Persia that specialized in astrology. No one knows how or when...
...Second Bethlehem. After the elements of the Nativity scene were established, the first recorded real crèche was made in 1223 by St. Francis of Assisi. Christmas had always been for him the "Feast of Feasts" when "God condescended to be fed by human love." In the church at the town of Greccio, three years before he died, St. Francis preached before a manger filled with hay, beside which stood an ox and an ass. Wrote an early biographer, Thomas of Celano: "Greccio was transformed almost into a second Bethlehem, and that wonderful night seemed like the fullest...
Soprano Nilsson's career has gathered slow momentum over the last decade. Born on a 'Swedish farm, she was still plowing fields when she was 18 ("My parents wanted I should be a good farmer") and singing in the local Lutheran church choir. Then a neighboring choirmaster started giving her vocal lessons, persuaded her to enter the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. Delayed by the war, she made her first real splash in 1947 with the Stockholm Opera singing Verdi's Lady Macbeth. Gradually she developed a repertory that now includes all the Wagnerian soprano parts...