Word: polished
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...most traveled and most global of Popes, is, at the same time, a loyal son of Poland. He is ever mindful of its painful legacies -- repeated partition, Nazi occupation, communist oppression -- and that vision suffuses his view of the church and its mission in the world. As he told Polish journalist Jas Gawronski last year, "I have carried with me the history, culture, experience and language of Poland. Having lived in a country that had to fight for its existence in the face of the aggressions of its neighbors, I have understood what exploitation is. I put myself immediately...
...some dissident liberal Catholics, of course, John Paul's Polish heritage is a mixed blessing. They see him as the product of a conservative, patriarchal church, which helps explain his increasingly autocratic and negative pronouncements on such subjects as the ordination of women and artificial birth control. For all his manifest charisma and personal compassion, these critics charge, John Paul rules with an iron hand -- and there is no velvet glove to soften...
...past, John Paul has not hesitated to involve himself in Polish politics, albeit surreptitiously. His friend Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity intellectual who was Poland's first postcommunist Prime Minister, this month told TIME something that church officials in the past frequently denied. After the communist regime imposed martial law in 1981, the Pope wrote letters of counsel to Solidarity activists interned by the communists; priests and bishops served as couriers because they were not subject to body searches. Said Mazowiecki: "Their robes carried more mail than many workers in our postal service...
Today a fervent Polish fealty -- part feudal, fiercely loyal -- attends John Paul in the Vatican. The five black-robed nuns who cook his meals and do his laundry are members of the Servants of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is based in Cracow. More important, one of the Pope's two secretaries -- and the one who controls all access to his boss -- is Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, 55, also of Cracow. (The other secretary is not Italian, as one might expect, but ( Vietnamese, Monsignor Vincent Tran Ngoc...
Every morning, before his private and general audiences, John Paul devotes an hour or so to writing or -- increasingly, as age and injuries have taken their toll -- to dictation. When he can, he composes quickly, in Polish, with a neat, flowing hand, using a black felt-tipped pen. On the top left of every page he prints the letters AMDG (initials for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam -- To the Greater Glory of God). On the top right of the first page he inscribes Tuus Totus (All Thine), the opening words of a short prayer to the Virgin whose text he continues...