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Sitting at a writing-desk in the White House on December 11, 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt was an unhappy camper. In previous letters, he addressed his correspondent as “Dear Maria.” Now, it was “Mrs. Storer” who would be on the receiving end of the presidential wrath. Maria Longworth Storer was a busybody – and a highly placed one at that. Her husband, Bellamy Storer, was close to President William McKinley, and had helped get TR appointed assistant secretary of the Navy. Bellamy Storer then served McKinley as U.S. minister to Belgium and Spain; Roosevelt, succeeding McKinley after the latter’s assassination, appointed Mr. Storer U.S. minister to Austria-Hungary. But what prompted TR’s fury at an old friend’s wife had nothing to do with Washington-Vienna relations but with the Catholic Church: “Dear Maria” had morphed into “Mrs. Storer” because she was playing Vatican politics –