Word: pontiff
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Throughout the day, Reagan was at his informal best. At the Elysée lunch, he told the old joke about a lawyer and a Pope who arrived simultaneously at the gates of heaven. St. Peter admitted the lawyer immediately, explaining to the waiting Pontiff that the attorney got special consideration because heaven was crowded with Popes, but no lawyer had ever made it before. That drew a laugh from present and former lawyers in his audience-including Mitterrand...
...unleashed, society's war machines today would make even the destruction of World War II pale in comparison. He spoke near the most renowned landmark in Coventry, England: the remnant of the bombed-out Anglican cathedral, left standing as a perpetual reminder of the horrors of war. The Pontiff painted a chilling picture of "people . . . under the shadow of a nuclear nightmare...
...Catholics. Mixed marriages create "special difficulties," he said, but "you live in your marriage the hopes and difficulties of the path to Christian unity." It was an arresting juxtaposition of elements; no one in the papal party, or in the British hierarchy, had ever before heard the Pontiff put the matter quite this...
...will only be the second such discussion since the Council of Florence in 1439. The always suspicious Church of Greece is wary, and the Russian Orthodox Church would never be able to unite with Rome unless the Kremlin agreed. The prospects for that have hardly been enhanced by a Pontiff who is by birth Polish and by public announcement a supporter of the Solidarity union...
...faith and morals. It also insisted on the Pope's direct jurisdiction over each and every believer on earth. This was, perhaps, an improvement on the papal bull of 1302 that declared, "It is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff." The 1870 decree caused dissension even within the ranks of Catholic bishops, some of whom pointedly returned to their sees in the U.S. and Northern Europe before the council had concluded its business. These dogmas, admits a liberal in John Paul's Vatican, "have made our job immensely more difficult...