Word: italianize
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...John Paul's early papacy and to his almost instantaneous rise to heroic status was the very aspect that made his election in 1978 so stunning. Unlike generations of Italian Popes brought up to pronounce on the world's great events yet largely cloistered from them, Karol Wojtyla lived in the early 20th century world about as intensely as it was imaginable to do and still survive it. Born in 1920, as Poland, a once great power, was moving toward its postwar sovereignty after more than a century of bitter subjugation, the army officer's son planned to study...
...successor John Paul I succumbed to a heart attack only 34 days into his papacy, Wojtyla was so oblivious to his impending fate that he spent the first day of the new papal conclave nonchalantly browsing through a quarterly review of Marxist theory. When the two leading Italian candidates, a Vatican power broker and an ultraconservative, deadlocked, the Cardinals began looking over the Alps for the first time since 1522. Elected on the eighth ballot, Wojtyla modestly chose to be called John Paul...
Agca's motives remain shrouded. Italian police believed he was working at the behest of a Bulgarian government trying to satisfy a Soviet wish to be rid of Solidarity's patron. Italian journalists recently claimed to have seen East German files on Soviet involvement in a plot to kill the Pope...
...ceased in his efforts to achieve some reconciliation with the Orthodox Christian tradition that parted with Roman Catholicism in the 11th century. In 1986 he gathered an extraordinary rainbow of religious leaders, from the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop of Canterbury to Sikh clerics and Zoroastrian priests, in the Italian town of Assisi, despite objections by Christian ultraconservatives. He was the first Pope to visit a mosque. But his most persistent and eloquent outreach was to Jews. At Vatican II, Wojtyla supported language clearing Jews of deicide and reaffirming Judaism's integrity. As Pope, he lived those words...
...without a clear favorite. Although John Paul personally selected all but three of the 117 voting Cardinals, don't expect a clone of the departed Pontiff. The outcome is often an expression of a pent-up desire to adjust the church's compass, however subtly. That said, the Italian members of the Sacred College had established, before the ascension of the Polish Karol Cardinal Wojtyla in 1978, a 456-year tradition of selecting from among themselves. Though the percentage of electors from Italy has plummeted from the 33% who helped elect John XXIII in 1958 to 17% today...