Word: churches
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...20th-century Europe, where Nazism, communism and the Holocaust had all left their bloody prints during his lifetime. A poet/philosopher/ditch digger/actor/downhill-skier pope whom the College of Cardinals evidently expected -- the man was only 58 years old, after all, and built like a rugby player -- would be leading their church into the 21st century...
...outward. "It is as if a Third World cardinal had won," remarked a Brazilian archbishop when Wojtyla was elected. The Catholics of that world, who often felt isolated and alienated by the Vatican?s high palace walls, were the ones John Paul II was determined to bring into his church. He proved to be a tireless traveler and a relentless evangelizer, taking his ready wit and common touch -- and a telegenic quality unlike any other pope?s -- to nearly every corner of the far-flung but fractured Catholic world. "He?s totally hot-wired the global aspect of the church...
...church?s hand is friendlier and its arm longer under the "foreign" pope, its embrace under this traveling salesman in his Popemobile is no less conditional. The enormous charisma of the man has made zealots of the converted and converts of the heathen, but John Paul II has brooked no heretics. There is some debate over the pope's adherence to or deconstruction of Vatican II, a reform council convened in the early '60s (at which young Bishop Wojtyla first made his mark by drafting a document declaring the primacy of religious freedom, even for non-Catholics...
...adoring crowds and all the political world-shaking, though, John Paul has not been able to solve all of the Catholic Church?s problems with modernity. Quite possibly, he has created some. John Paul II has appointed more than three quarters of the College of Cardinals that will choose his successor, as well as a great number of bishops worldwide who will one day become cardinals ?- ensuring that this pope?s strict conservatism will likely dominate church doctrine for generations to come...
...Membership in the Roman Catholic Church is at 1 billion and on the rise, but its market share of the world?s population is shrinking. In Africa and Asia, the church?s "workforce" ?- the number of priests and nuns -? is increasing, a sure sign of John Paul?s road-warrior evangelizing and media savvy. But in North America and Europe, the number of the truly committed is decreasing, which may be a sign that his staunch refusal to compromise is turning First World Catholics into something of a spectator church, professing faith but ignoring doctrine. Such developments lead to dilution...