Word: benedict
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...incense and intrigue of another papal conclave is upon us again. Well, sort of. Pope Benedict XVI is alive and well and attending to his mission as absolute ruler of the Roman Catholic Church for the foreseeable future. But just down the block from St. Peter's Square, church elders - though not all so old, and without a Cardinal among them - have begun gathering for a closed-door meeting to elect the man dubbed the "black pope." That's the moniker historically assigned to the leader of the Jesuit order: for the color of the simple priestly vestments he keeps...
...Since the Second Vatican Council, many Jesuits have favored progressive reform in the Church, seeking to adapt Catholic traditions to modern life. Kolvenbach's request to Benedict to step down as he approached the age of 80, Vatican sources say, could have implications for the "white" papacy as well if a Pope were to consider retiring because of old age or ill health...
...warning against the rampant growth of reason, science and freedom without a commensurate growth of faith and morals. "The ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil - possibilities that formerly did not exist," Benedict writes. "We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth then it is not progress...
Cottier insists that this "is not an 'anti-encyclical.'" The papal letter is mostly about Christian hope, and in it, Benedict refers to the lives and ideas of various saints and martyrs to explain that hope: Most of all, Benedict leans on the teachings of St. Augustine, the Pope's personal intellectual and spiritual guide, to illuminate "all the contradictions and hopes" of human existence. "In some way we want life itself, true life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know the thing towards which we feel driven," the Pope writes. "This unknown 'thing...
...Benedict's message of old-fashioned faith in the modern world is itself a call to revolution - or counter-revolution. Only time will tell how many respond to the call...