Word: papal
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Unlike Premiers or Presidents, new Popes put their top aides in place only gradually, as jobs open up. John Paul II's first major appointment, two years ago, was Papal Loyalist Agostino Cardinal Casaroli as Secretary of State. Other changes slowly followed, including the selection last September of U.S. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus as chief administrator of Vatican City. Now, at the start of John Paul's fourth year, his lineup is virtually complete. The Pope has just named West Germany's Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, 54, to be his doctrinal watchdog as Prefect of the Congregation...
...proportion of malice, or envy, or some other defect that disables their personalities." By necessity, the severest criticisms of the Vatican come not by the design of the author, but rather by the little absurdities that creep through the narrative. Nichols, for example, dryly sets forth the procedure for papal selection; he hardly mentions the irony of a ballot system so full of verifications and double checks that the cardinals seem less like spiritual colleagues than paranoid poll-watchers. Similarly, when Nichols launches into a description of the new location of Pope John Paul II's weekly audiences, he scarcely...
...couches it all in a style that is less than classically literary. His short, direct sentences are unmistakably journalistic. Indeed, he is not above beginning a sentence, "The reason I believe this is because..." And the logic in those sentences often falls even below their style. Nichols describes the papal selection process as "carried out by a hundred or so members of the most exclusive caste to gather anywhere in the world to elect an international personality." No doubt this is the most exclusive caste to gather to pick an international celebrity--and probably the only...
Although the Church intended only to retain pagan forms, it had a difficult time restraining the pagan spirit. Despite clerical protests and papal anathemas, Christmas in the early days preserved many of the worst orgies, debaucheries and indecencies of the Bacchanalia and Saturnalia. The clergy itself was whirled into the vortex, instituting a Feast of Fools so that "the folly which is natural to and born with us might exhale . . . once a year...
...back doing what he does best. The Pontiffs trip to the Italian village of Todi was his first visit outside Rome since he was felled by a would-be assassin's bullet in St. Peter's Square. Security forces, the largest ever in Italy for a papal visit, tried to keep a distance between the Pontiff and a crowd of 10,000, but John Paul would have none of it. Disregarding his ring of security guards, the Pope suddenly slipped through to touch the hands of those who had come to see him. His bodyguards, walking off without...