Word: paule
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That was 1979 and Pope John Paul II. But when Benedict XVI travels to Turkey next week on his first visit to a Muslim country since becoming Pope last year, he is unlikely to cloak himself in a downy banner of brotherhood, the way his predecessor did 27 years ago. Instead, Benedict, 79, will arrive carrying a different reputation: that of a hard-knuckle intellect with a taste for blunt talk and interreligious confrontation. Just 19 months into his tenure, the Pope has become as much a moral lightning rod as a theologian; suddenly, when he speaks, the whole world...
...people saw this coming. Nobody truly expected Benedict to be a mere caretaker Pope--his sometimes ferocious 24-year tenure as the Vatican's theological enforcer and John Paul's right hand suggested anything but passivity. But this same familiarity argued against surprises. The new Pontiff was expected to sustain John Paul's conservative line on morality and church discipline and focus most of his energies on trimming the Vatican bureaucracy and battling Western culture's "moral relativism." Although acknowledged as a brilliant conservative theologian, Benedict lacked the open-armed charisma of his predecessor. Moreover, what had initially propelled John...
...Pope John Paul convened a remarkable multifaith summit in the medieval Italian town of Assisi. Muslims and Sikhs, Zoroastrians and the Archbishop of Canterbury, among others, convened to celebrate their (distinct) spiritualities and pray for peace. It was a signature John Paul moment, but not everybody caught the vibe. "It was a disaster," sniffs an observer. "People were praying together, and nobody had any idea what they were praying to." The witness, whose view undoubtedly reflected that of his boss, was an aide to Cardinal Ratzinger...
Unlike John Paul, who had a big-tent approach, Ratzinger has always favored bright theological lines and correspondingly high walls between creeds he regards as unequally meritorious. His long-standing habit is to correct any aide who calls a religion other than Christianity or Judaism a "faith." Prior to his papacy, the culmination of this philosophy was his office's 1999 Vatican document Dominus Jesus, which described non-Catholics as being in a "gravely deficient situation" regarding salvation. The fact that this offended some of the deficient parties did not particularly bother him. Notes the same assistant: "To understand each...
...this led observers to expect him to eventually make a major statement about Islam, although most assumed that it wouldn't stray too far from John Paul's fraternal tone. Nobody anticipated what happened in southern Germany...