Word: churchful
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ELECTED With a vote of 508 to 169, Metropolitan Kirill, 62, was chosen as the new leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, the world's second largest, succeeding the long-serving leader Alexy II, who died in December...
With pressure mounting after his controversial reconciliation with a breakaway church group, Pope Benedict XVI has ordered one of the bishops of the arch-traditionalist Lefebvrite movement to publicly retract his statements denying the Holocaust. The Vatican issued a statement on Wednesday afternoon saying the Pope had not been aware of the claims by Richard Williamson - one of four Lefebvrite bishops brought back into the fold late last month after 20 years of excommunication - that Nazi gas chambers didn't exist and no more than 300,000 Jews died in concentration camps...
...Bishop Williamson, in order to be admitted to the episcopal [bishop] functions of the Church, must in an absolutely unequivocal and public way distance himself from his positions regarding the Shoah," the statement said, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. (See pictures of Holocaust survivors sharing their memories...
Vatican insiders know Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos well. The steely-eyed Colombian Cardinal, 79, served for nine years as head of the Congregation for Clergy, where in 2002 he drew the wrath of victims of American-priest sex abuse for denying that the Catholic Church had any particular problem with pedophiles in its ranks. But most of all, Castrillón is a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist. He was named by Pope John Paul II as the go-between in relations with fringe traditionalist groups like the Lefebvrites, whose official name is the Society...
According to the Vatican official, Castrillón was bound to forge ahead as he pleased. Born in Medellín, Colombia, he has displayed courage, tenacity and a willingness - even an eagerness - to mix church and state. He has gone deep into Colombian jungles to mediate between leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads, and once, while still a bishop, he showed up at the house of cocaine king Pablo Escobar disguised as a milkman. Revealing himself, Castrillón implored Escobar to confess his sins, which, presumably at some considerable length, the vicious gangster did. "Anyone who's had interaction...