Big Blessing: Rome’s Olympic Stadium, rebuilt for...

Big Blessing: Rome’s Olympic Stadium, rebuilt for the final of soccer’s World Cup, will get a blessing May 31 from a former goalie: Pope John Paul II. The stadium will be the site of the final match of the monthlong competition beginning June 9. John Paul’s biographers say he was an enthusiastic goalie as a teen-ager in his native Poland.

Penmanship: Author E. L. Doctorow is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for the best American fiction of 1989 for his novel “Billy Bathgate.” The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. made the announcement Thursday. Doctorow, 59, will receive a $7,500 check at an awards ceremony May 12 at the library, which administers the awards. Doctorow’s novel is about a young Bronx, N.Y., man who becomes the protege of the 1930s gangster Dutch Schultz.

On Display: What would Ernest Hemingway have thought of his granddaughter posing nude for Playboy? “I would hope he would have been thrilled,” said actress-model Margaux Hemingway. At an appearance in New York Wednesday, she said the pictorial is a chance “to show off my new body.” She attended the Betty Ford Clinic to quit drinking and lost 75 pounds before the shoot. “There’s nothing like putting my bottom dollar on this, so to speak,” she said.

Still Crafty: Jim Bakker is learning a new craft. He’s been sending out pictures of himself from prison, holding a ceramic mug of ceramic hot chocolate topped with a ceramic dollop of whipped cream. Bakker, who is serving a 45-year term for defrauding his PTL ministry, made the mug for his wife, Tammy Faye, who visited him at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minn. She has a large collection of ceramic food in her kitchen, including artificial pies, cakes and bread.