Word: benedict
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...noon sharp, the light rain that has been falling on the village of Les Combes, high in the Italian Alps, gives way to golden sunshine. Equally punctually, the white-shocked man with an increasingly comfortable smile walks across a small meadow to greet about 8,000 believers. Pope Benedict XVI, officially on a summer "retreat," waves his two-handed wave, sits graciously through a local bishop's introduction and speaks. With three months' practice at this, he no longer steps on applause lines, such as references to his predecessor and a much anticipated trip to Germany. His initial remarks...
Much as they have wondered for the past three months. A papacy is not a presidency, with every day's progress tallied obsessively on the march through a limited term. Yet scholars had hoped by now for a sense of how Benedict's new station would affect his theology and whether his avid pursuit of heretics as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith meant that heads would roll. Would there be more like Thomas Reese, the open-minded editor of the Jesuit magazine America, whose departure was apparently sealed with Benedict's election? When would...
...gesture probably intended to mollify a press that had been portraying him as an unrelenting hard-liner, the newly chosen Benedict invited journalists as guests to his first public appearance in the Vatican's Paolo VI auditorium on April 23. But he was ill at ease, and the ever vigilant Italian scribes noted that the hemline of his robes was cut far too high, offering an unusually revealing look at his ruby papal slippers. It was the kind of gaffe his predecessor, as a former actor, would have been unlikely to commit...
...later the hem had fallen. And over time Benedict found his office's public aspect an increasingly comfortable fit. His smile offset the famous dark circles beneath his eyes. Eventually he was tolerating such photo ops as a public cell-phone conversation with an ailing nun and the donning of a fire fighter's hat. "He'll never be a celebrity," says a Vatican official who has worked closely with Ratzinger. "But he seems more joyful and sure of himself." Ratzinger's brother was once worried that the job might harm his health. On the contrary, asserts Walter Cardinal Kaspar...
...Austrian cardinal stirring up the evolution-vs.-creationism argument in the U.S.? In part, Christoph Cardinal Schönborn says, to spark debate in an increasingly secular Europe. Earlier this month, the influential Archbishop of Vienna - who is as close as any Cardinal to Pope Benedict XVI - wrote an editorial in the New York Times lambasting what he calls "Neo-Darwinian dogma," and suggesting that the Roman Catholic Church isn't necessarily convinced that evolution is true. "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the Neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided process of random variation...