Word: benedict
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...better to have the prelate go now rather than wait until after he was made Archbishop. Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said the Pope had accepted the resignation because the Polish bishop's previous "behavior... had seriously compromised his authority." The result is a clear embarrassment for Pope Benedict XVI, who personally selected Wielgus for the post. Lombardi sought to spread the blame. He cited a "strange alliance" between former Communist authorities and their then adveraries who, he claims, are working to undermine the Church. "More than a sincere search for transparency and truth, the current wave of attacks...
...West, the dominant form of Christianity was Fundamentalist Protestantism, gaining new converts and, fused with the Republican Party, flexing powerful political muscles. And in the Vatican, the conservatism of John Paul II found its natural successor in the austere and more thoroughgoing orthodoxy of the new Pope, Benedict XVI. There seemed no stopping this cultural surge, just various attempts to adjust to it, restrain it from violence and temper its extremes...
...then in 2006, there was an unmistakable pause, a moment of self-examination, even the hint of a great humbling. The most absolutist visionaries found a limit to their certitude. Benedict XVI went in a matter of months from proclaiming an irreducible gulf between Christianity and Islam to visiting a mosque in Turkey with white slippers on his feet. He publicly called for Turkey, a secular state but a Muslim country, to be integrated into the European Union. In the U.S., the religious right saw its most enthusiastic repre sentative in the Senate, Rick Santorum, go down to defeat...
...article on Pope Benedict XVI leaves one with the impression that the Pope is a moral leader of great stature. He is not. His stances on abortion, contraception and stem-cell research are deplorable and, because of his authority, extremely harmful to many innocent people. Since Islam shares many of his mistaken values, we should fear that he will use any successful contacts made during his visit to Turkey to expand the influence (and harm) of his moral mistakes. Gerald H. Paske Wichita, Kansas...
...Challenge to Islam Re Father Richard Neuhaus' viewpoint [Nov. 27], in which he explained that Pope Benedict XVI is challenging Muslims to confront hard truths: Islam indeed has a menacing aspect, and the Pope finally addressed it directly. Since the defeat of the Turks in Vienna in 1683 and the subsequent decline of Muslim power, jihadists have dreamed of reconquering the Christian West. Islam has an expansion policy, which is that every Muslim has a duty to spread the religion in the name of the Prophet. Criticized as a myopic hard-liner when elected, Benedict might become the Pope...