Word: pius
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...blemish on a sterling record. This is the Pope, after all, who established Vatican recognition of Israel, visited a synagogue and was host of a huge commemorative concert for the Shoah's victims. Yet there is concern that last Sunday's ceremony foreshadows another one: the pronouncement of Pope Pius XII as venerable, an act John Paul II reportedly hopes to accomplish by 2000. Such a pronouncement and beatification are the two steps preceding canonization...
...Pius' story can be seen as the macro to Edith Stein's micro. Devout and ascetic in life, long a favorite of the church's conservative branch, the wartime Pontiff has been sharply criticized both by Jewish leaders and church liberals for his refusal to publicly condemn the Nazis, a "silence" that some suggest may have cost untold Jewish lives. Pius' defenders reply heatedly that his efforts to hide Jews in Italy and elsewhere saved thousands. More important, they insist that silence was the best policy--and here Pius' story intersects Stein's. According to Gumpel, Pius was about...
Many, not all of them Jewish, disagree. Some say the "evidence" on Pius is not all in, claiming that the Vatican has yet to open all pertinent archives. Others, like the Rev. Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame, feel they know enough to conclude that outrage on Pius' part "would have given pause to the Nazis and perhaps changed the complexion of what happened at the end of the war." McBrien contrasts Pius' silence with John Paul II's risky but successful support of Poland's Solidarity trade union in the 1980s. Some analysts speculate that valid...
...message to a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which had taken the origin of life as its theme, John Paul described the shift in the church's view of evolution that has taken place since Pope Pius XII issued his encyclical Humani Generis in 1950. "Humani Generis," John Paul wrote, "considered the doctrine of 'evolutionism' as a serious hypothesis, worthy of a more deeply studied investigation...Today...new knowledge leads us to recognize that the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis." Pius was skeptical of evolution but tolerated study and discussion of it; the statement...
John Paul stopped short of addressing a point on which Pius was emphatic: that a particular man named Adam must have been our ancestor. Any other theory, Pius maintained, was inconsistent with the doctrine of original sin. But the teaching about Adam has also been superseded, says Father Richard P. McBrien, a liberal theologian at the University of Notre Dame. "No Scripture scholar today would say we are literally descended from two people." To such scholars, and John Paul, the evolution of our bodies matters much less than the evolution of our souls...