Word: pontiff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Papal politics, unlike presidential politics, is never a winner-takes-all scenario. And that makes the Vatican unlikely to abandon its effort to beatify Pope Pius IX, despite protests by liberal and Jewish groups. The latter are incensed that the current pontiff, so deeply committed to healing the church's relationship with the Jews, would propose sainthood for a man who in the mid-19th century forced Rome's Jews back into the ghetto and stripped them of their civil rights after having initially allowed them greater freedom. Further fueling the protests is the case of Edgardo Mortara...
...knelt and prayed in the adjoining Grotto of the Wise Men, where the child Jesus lay in the manger. Then the Pope stood and asked for a chair. This part was clearly not scripted. A couple of Franciscan priests scurried upstairs to get John Paul what he wanted. The Pontiff then waved everybody off, sat and prayed the Divine Office that priests are supposed to recite every day. The Pope remained alone for some 15 minutes before heading back to the steps. And then from a tiny grotto of peace, he climbed back into the middle of a political battleground...
...states, policies and causes. Moreover, he heads an entity with its own foreign policy goals: from a desire to protect the religious sites and fast-vanishing Christians of the Holy Land, to long-held support of a Palestinian homeland, to the recent rapprochement with Israel--goals that the Pontiff could not alter simply to wow an audience. The strictly spiritual stops on the trip were interspersed with so many loaded encounters, shifting on an almost hourly basis--If this is Thursday it must be...Barak? Holocaust survivors? The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem?--that the Pope seemed like an FBI trainee...
...next celebrated Mass in Manger Square where, by prior negotiation, the muezzin of the mosque next door shortened his call to midday prayers so as not to disrupt the Pope too much. Still, the Pontiff seemed a bit startled when, smack between his homily and the rest of the service, the amplified Allahu Akbar (God is great) rang out. He then enjoyed his brief respite in the grotto before accompanying Arafat, who sometimes held his hand, to the nearby Deheisha refugee camp...
...tears streaming down her face as that strapping young priest--now the frail, elderly Pontiff--laid his hand gently on her arm. After meeting Zierer and five other survivors in the memorial's Hall of Remembrance, John Paul opened his heart. Recalling "friends and neighbors" who perished, he said, "Men, women and children cry out to us from the depths of the horror that they knew. How can we fail to heed their cry?" He continued, "I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love and by no political considerations...