Word: pontiff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mass, based on the document "Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past," is expected to be an entirely unprecedented action by a remarkable pontiff, urging the faithful and the clergy to honestly face up to those moments in its history when, he believes, the church was not true to its own teachings. The Holocaust may be the most commonly discussed of these moments, but the church's collective mea culpa is expected to cover everything from the Crusades and the Inquisition to its attitude toward Christians of other denominations. Not that each of these sins...
...confront a global reality absent from its core thinking at the start of the last millennium: That Catholicism will, for the foreseeable future, remain one faith among many, Christian and non-Christian, with which it must coexist. In many ways, it's an intensely personal mission of a pontiff nearing the end of his life as his church celebrates its Jubilee. "The pope has long promised to lead the church in coming to terms with some of its sins on the occasion of the Jubilee," says Van Biema. "For him, it's the culmination of many years of work...
...papal abdication? The commotion overshadowed the announcement that the Pope would travel to the Middle East in March as part of the Jubilee Year, a period for which he has been strenuously preparing. There has been some concern over the image of the Pontiff broadcast over the millennial weekend: one of a visibly weakened man. The vigorous 58-year-old elected in 1978 to challenge communism suffers from the onset of Parkinson's disease, limps and has terrible difficulty negotiating steps. His left arm shakes, at times uncontrollably. His face is rigid, and his speech is slurred...