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Memores Domini (mentioned as members od the papal household) are consecrated laity who are members of Communion and Liberation (CL).
CL is a very worthwhile (and growing) movement in the Church.
I read several of Guareschi’s “Don Camillo” novels (a long time ago) and never thought of the priest as a “detective.”
I love how anti-Catholic loudmouths like Bill Maher claim that the Pope lives in splendor while children in Africa are starving. By all accounts, it seems that he has a pretty simple existence. John Paul II lived that way, too.
Does contrast quite a bit with popes of past centuries like Leo X, who famously said “God has given us the papacy; let us enjoy it.”
Very interesting post.
Ten years ago, my husband shared a meal with Peter O’Toole: a McDonald’s hamburger and a whiskey. Mr. O’Toole pronounced the dinner “wonderful!”
A lovely man.
The was a very interesting novel written in the 1970s by a French author, Jean Raspail, called Camp of the Saints. In the book Raspail describes how a pope was sleeping on straw mat in the Vatican apartments after he had stripped he Vatican bare of all its treasures and sold them to help the poor. Raspail comments that all this money was barely enough to fund the rural development budget of Bangladesh for one year.