Word: benedict
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Benedict pointedly called it a "scandal" that a majority of us favor even limited legalized abortion. Yet we're not the Da Vinci Code heretics the Vatican suspects. We look instead to the Boccaccio Code, especially in the wake of the abuse crisis. We've learned to conform to the Catholic faith instead of the Catholic hierarchy. And if the Pope's visit and its aftermath indicate anything, it's that we aren't likely to change that stance until the church, with deeper structural and doctrinal reform, changes its own. As the Pope returns to Rome, a common question...
Catholicism's rich intellectual tradition makes its faith tradition richer, because the point isn't just to believe but to know WHY you believe. Benedict the scholar, as Jeff Israely and David van Biema noted in their TIME cover story this month, admires America's blending of faith and reason. And yet it's this very facet of our religion that is itching powder to a church that insists that only it can be trusted in the end to exercise reason on moral questions - don't try theology at home, the Vatican always seems to tell us - because it inevitably...
Still, the love most U.S. Catholics have for their church may never again be unconditional. It has to be earned, and simply wearing a collar or a habit won't do the trick anymore. Pope Benedict XVI took some positive steps toward earning it last week. But he needs to realize that his American flock, as good Catholics like Boccaccio did before us, follows a religion more than it follows a church...
Healing has become the keyword of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United States. On Saturday, not only did the Pope speak again about the priest sex abuse crisis, but he also addressed festering Church divisions in the wake of the Second Vatican council and reflected on his native country's Nazi past...
...perhaps the most notable comfort that this cerebral pontiff offered his flock is his ever more pastoral persona. Entering a morning mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Benedict beamed as several thousand priests and nuns welcomed him with thunderous applause. As the mass ended, he spoke off-the-cuff, saying that the love expressed by the clergy helps him to overcome his own "spiritual poverty...