Word: moralisms
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...from-within smile, conducting his never-ending crusade. There was the mystic who, as an observer noted, "makes decisions on his knees." There was the subtle geopolitician who refuted Stalin's famous sneer "How many divisions has the Pope?" at the expense of the dictator's heirs. The moral philosopher who lectured at Harvard. And, finally, the suffering servant. "He was a thoroughly, radically committed Christian disciple who really believed, as he put it, that 'Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life,'" says George Weigel, a biographer of the Pope. "The rest followed from...
...against the Soviet behemoth and less welcome when he turned it on the victorious West. James Carroll, a former priest who has written frequently on the church and the Pope, says, "Americans clearly loved this man's goodness. But we were very, very uncomfortable with his absolute claims to moral certitude...
...growing numbers of Catholics constitute the church's long-term future. Along with an increasingly confident generation of conservatives in the West, they would affirm the assertion by Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, a former Vatican Foreign Minister under John Paul, that "in this crazy world, he is the only moral reference." Then, too, a remarkable number of fans came from other creeds. The Rev. Billy Graham said, "He'll go down in history as the greatest of our modern Popes. He has been the strong conscience of the whole Christian world." "We believe the world needs him because he speaks...
...divine laws best enunciated through the church. In his view, that dignity, which commenced at conception, was mortally affronted by contraception, abortion, euthanasia and the death penalty and wounded by war, anti-Semitism and the crushing debt repayments imposed upon poor nations. The pursuit of individual freedoms, untempered by moral teaching, meanwhile, would eventually lead to a "culture of death" corrosive to respect for family, for church and, eventually, for life. The West, he warned, was in the grip of that culture...
...Holocaust up close, and he grasped its radical significance for the church. Healing the ancient breach with Judaism became the most important project of his pontificate: rooting out anti-Semitic themes from Christian educational materials; visiting synagogues; lifting up the Holocaust as a permanent point of moral reckoning; affirming the right of Jews to be at home in Israel, which he formally recognized in 1994. In reverencing the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2000, the Pope reversed the ancient Christian denigration of the Temple of Israel, renouncing forever the idea that because Jesus is the "new Temple," Judaism is "replaced...