Word: pauling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Roman Catholicism as practiced in America is not a consistent phenomenon. The day after John Paul left Missouri, Governor Mel Carnahan commuted the sentence of a convicted triple murderer from death to life without parole. Carnahan, a Baptist, announced that "I continue to support capital punishment," but after the Pontiff's "direct and personal appeal...I decided to grant his request." The irony is that while the Pope's argument that "the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil" may have swayed Carnahan, if only temporarily, Gallup...
...revised that stance. Thanks to John's Second Vatican Council, Mass was now in English and the priest and congregation interacted. In retrospect, she thinks this may have kept her in the church. But in that year John's successor and the council's inheritor, Paul VI, loosed a thunderbolt: Catholics could not use artificial means of birth control and remain in good graces. "No way," says Betty. "No how. Period...
Suddenly the Pope was neither remote nor abstract; he was in Betty's bedroom. "For the first year and a half after Ed and I were married in 1970, we were not in a position to have any children," she says. "I saw Paul VI as representative of a very conservative Vatican. Obviously these people weren't out in the trenches." Like many American Catholics, Betty and Ed embraced a concept extolled by liberal American clerics: "We heard, 'a matter of conscience,'" she says, "and we declared birth control to be one. We would decide it according...
White bulbs on a hot baby-blue background: the message board in the St. Louis Trans World Dome scrolls WELCOME TO THE EUCHARISTIC CELEBRATION WITH HIS HOLINESS JOHN PAUL II. The Dome's 70,000 capacity is stretched to 100,000. Betty and Ed, after hours on a chartered yellow school bus and in line for metal detectors, have drawn spectacular second-row seats: they can almost touch the stream of priests flowing across the floor toward the great papal seal. A jumbo screen shows the approaching Popemobile, just half an hour away. She twists a silver ring again...
They stop, however, when talk turns to John Paul's apostolic letter ruling out the ordination of women priests. "I wouldn't mind seeing some," says Betty. "But I think a lot of people would fall away. I think the church is not ready...