Word: papally
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There was a poignant footnote to President Obama's historic July 10 meeting with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican. Behind closed doors in the papal library, Obama handed Benedict a letter that Senator Edward Kennedy had asked him to personally deliver to the Pontiff. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs later told reporters that nobody - not even the President - knew the contents of the sealed missive. Obama asked Benedict to pray for Kennedy and called the ailing Senator afterward to fill him in on his encounter with the 82-year-old Pope...
...letter, most likely already resealed and tucked away in the Vatican archives, was probably just a dying Catholic's request for a papal blessing. (UPDATE: At Kennedy's burial at Arlington on Saturday, retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick read excerpts from Kennedy's letter; he also provided portions of the Vatican's response to it.) In the eyes of the traditionalist wing of the Church, however, Kennedy should have been asking the Pope for forgiveness. The Vatican's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano reported Kennedy's death, praising his work on civil rights and fighting poverty, but noted that his record...
When President Barack Obama sat down in that same spot on Friday, July 10, for his first papal meeting, his posture was altogether different. Leaning forward from the front edge of the chair, his shoulders slightly hunched, his crossed hands resting softly on the edge of the Pope's desk, the leader of the free world looked more like a schoolboy who'd arrived to humbly plead his case to the principal. "You must be used to getting your picture taken," Obama commented to the Pope as a scrum of photographers clicked away, then continued, "I'm still getting used...
...skull, indicative of summary execution. "The intention was not to stop people fleeing, the intention was to kill," says Henrique Carlos Goncalves, the president of the São Paulo Regional Council of Medicine, the body that examined the death certificates. "It was a massacre." (See pictures of a papal visit to Brazil...
...Since papal conclaves have a cutoff age of 80 and tend to elect Popes from their own number, Benedict is likely to be the last Pontiff who can say, "We remember," and mean it literally. As the church's center of gravity moves southward, he may also be one of the last European Popes, and Jewish relations tend to be low on the radar of African and South American bishops. (One of the latter recently said the Jews own the media.) When Benedict is gone, says Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, "not only may Judaism...