Word: polander
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...shifted the center of gravity of the Catholic Church away from tradition, Europe, and Italy and into the developing world, elevating hundreds of new cardinals and welcoming hundreds of millions of new Catholics in Africa, Asia, and South America. This Pope stood up against communism in his native Poland and issued apologies for the Church’s actions during the Inquisition and inactions during the Holocaust. This was the Pope who authored progressive Encyclicals on labor and justice, fought AIDS, and opposed the Iraq War. This Pope led ecumenical Christian efforts around the world and was the first Pontiff...
...have wanted was an affirmation of its lifestyle. Though he had his detractors, without a doubt he earned a public reverence that had not previously been seen and may never be witnessed again. He was the conscience of our age. May the “son of Poland who became the bishop of Rome” rest in peace among the angels and saints whose company he now keeps, and may we be so lucky as to exhibit even a small measure of the humility, determination, conviction, and grace with which he lived his life on this Earth...
...stunning. Unlike generations of Italian Popes brought up to pronounce on the world's great events yet largely cloistered from them, Karol Wojtyla lived in the early 20th century world about as intensely as it was imaginable to do and still survive it. Born in 1920, as Poland, a once great power, was moving toward its postwar sovereignty after more than a century of bitter subjugation, the army officer's son planned to study the Polish language at Krakow's Jagiellonian University. That aspiration--along with Poland's short-lived autonomy--was dashed when Germany invaded in 1939 and Wojtyla...
Then John Paul's personal history, his duties as Pontiff and the late 20th century's greatest drama merged in a breathtaking manner. The election of a Polish Pope posed an implicit challenge to Poland's Soviet-backed regime, a challenge John Paul quickly made immediate with two visits home. His first, in 1979, drew enormous, bloc-shaking crowds. On the next trip, after he told the restive populace to "be not afraid" and declared in the holy town of Czestochowa that "man cannot remain with no way out," the new Solidarity free-trade-union movement made him its virtual...
...union's champion with his resolve that no Polish blood be spilled. When Jaruzelski, fearing a Soviet invasion, declared martial law in 1981, the Pope mystified the West by disagreeing with U.S. sanctions. But his forbearance allowed him to attain a position of near partnership with the communist regime. Poland rolled back martial law in 1983 and--with the acquiescence of Mikhail Gorbachev--communism itself in April 1989. The largely peaceful transition seems to have influenced Gorbachev's approach to the other seceding East bloc nations and forever linked John Paul's name with communism's demise. Wrote the former...