Word: benedicts
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...rate things are going, Pope Benedict XVI may find his next trip to the U.S. dogged by airplanes overhead trailing banners with images of aborted fetuses. O.K., that's a bit of hyperbole. But while several prominent conservative Catholics in this country are apoplectic over the University of Notre Dame's invitation of the pro-choice Barack Obama to give the school's commencement address on May 17, the Vatican has stayed completely silent on the matter...
...unusual appearance. Benedict XVI arrived in the back of the papal plane just after it took off for the return trip to Italy. Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi introduced him with a smile, calling this "the longest, most complicated and maybe most tiring" of the Pontiff's 12 foreign voyages. Benedict, his face toasty bronze from a week of public appearances under consistently sunny skies, repeated his call to seek signs of hope in an otherwise bleak Middle East landscape. Having just come from deep prayer at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the traditional site of Jesus' death...
...press tends to gauge papal trips on more concrete terms. (It's hard to confirm, for example, whether the Pope's prayers are answered.) On the way to board the papal plane, I began a quick - and necessarily insufficient - "grading" of Benedict's trip. There was not a vast range of marks, with the Italian press generally being more positive, a German reporter giving the Pontiff a C-minus for his much criticized remarks at the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem), and one veteran concluding that John Paul would have been much more inspiring at these events. (See pictures...
Over eight days, Benedict delivered 28 different sermons and speeches, more than 15,000 words that carried his message of peace and reconciliation - and his reading of the Christian gospel - to a religiously charged and troubled land. But the jury is still out on whether this theologian Pontiff has the geopolitical wherewithal to matter in these complicated times. With the Obama Administration gearing up to try to jump-start Middle East negotiations - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Washington next week - the Pope's presence in the region could have offered an extra jolt of momentum. Instead, the conflicts...
...Benedict seems to see that he must follow in John Paul II's footsteps as a champion of interreligious dialogue. He delivered several speeches and attended ceremonies focused on relations with Jewish, Muslim, Druse, Orthodox and other men of the cloth. Once believed to have been reticent about focusing too much on relations with other religions, the man with the world's largest flock (1.1 billion Catholics worldwide) seems to now grasp the importance of this role. Vatican spokesman Lombardi said the Pope's physical presence "is itself a bridge" for improved relations among all religions. "He listened...