Word: benedict
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...seen as fallout from an increasingly hard line against homosexuality taken by traditionalist Catholic Church leaders. Before rising to the papacy, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger signed a Vatican document that said gay people have a "disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent." Since his election, Pope Benedict XVI has repeatedly condemned gay marriage and said that no one should be admitted to the seminary who has deep-rooted homosexual tendencies...
...with contemporary reality. Traditionalists, instead, can mark it as the beginning of their return to favor, when the Vatican undertook to stand firm against the forces of secularism blowing through the West - and within the Church itself. Today, the traditionalists clearly have a Pope after their own hearts in Benedict XVI. But he's not one to take their positions for granted...
...Since becoming Pope, Benedict has stepped up his so-called "dialogue" with the secular-scientific world. Three months into his papacy he suggested a way to find moral common ground with non-believers, suggesting atheists behave "as if God existed." Benedict even praised Karl Marx in his last encyclical for his "incisive language and intellect ... precision and great analytic skill," before dissecting the errors of his ideology. Next year, the Vatican has slated special conferences to confront the ideas of Galileo and Darwin...
...that, there is no doubt that Benedict's critique of the West's spreading secularism is as sharp as ever. Just before his election, he provocatively warned against "the dictatorship of relativism," a let-it-all-slide mentality, particularly in the West, that he sees as promoting a lifestyle of loose morals. Yet the Pope seems to understand that hiding from or denying that trend is a losing strategy...
...Catholicism's point man on this shifting terrain is Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, 65, an erudite and affable Milanese bible scholar, whom Benedict plucked last year to head the Pontifical Council for Culture. Ravasi says the godless ideologies of the past century, for all their faults, at least forced man to confront hard choices about the destiny of humanity. Today's atheism, in contrast, is "weak and sick ... just as, in some ways, there is [also] a weak faith," Ravasi told TIME. "God isn't a relevant problem. The battle against religion isn't even necessary. In this way, there...