Word: pontiff
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...Mass, the first modern Pope ever to do so in a jail (Pope John XXIII visited the same prison in 1958, but did not say Mass). Four prisoners assisted Paul at the ceremony, and more than 600 inmates received Communion. Afterward, with the men pressing freely around him, the Pontiff was moved to tears, as he told them: "I have come to kindle in each of you a flame that may have gone out." When he left after 21 hours, he took with him a kneeling stand made for him at the prison-and an album containing brief declarations...
Even after the motorcade disappeared behind the Vatican walls, some 35,000 people clustered beneath the papal apartments of the Apostolic Palace. When the Pope finally appeared at his window, he spoke not as Catholicism's Supreme Pontiff but as a city's pastor, abandoning the magisterial "we" in his informal address. "I want to thank everyone who was in the crowd to welcome me," he said. "I bring you back blessings from Jerusalem where I celebrated Mass this morning. I have had the fortune to embrace, after centuries and centuries, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and to exchange...
...last week, on a precedent-breaking trip to the Holy Land, his impressive character emerged with clarity. Time and again the frail, 66-year-old Pontiff found himself engulfed by riotous mobs in an almost carnival mood that-in all innocence-threatened his life. It was a severe test. By meeting it with unfaltering patience and good humor, Paul VI appeared before the world as more than merely an intellectual pastor; he stood forth as a man of intense inward dedication, piety and exemplary courage...
...places of Jordan and Israel on a three-day trip next month. It will be the first papal voyage outside Italy since Napoleon forced the unhappy Pius VII to take up residence at Fontainebleau in 1812, and the first time since the days of St. Peter that a reigning pontiff has set foot in the Holy Land...
...Pope Pius XII refused to condemn openly the Nazi murder of European Jews because he saw Hitler as a necessary barrier between Soviet Communism and the Christian West, and hoped to negotiate a cease-fire between Germany and the Western Allies. Hochhuth believes that the Pope, as the Supreme Pontiff of the world's most powerful Christian church, was the only man whose formal protest might have deterred Hitler. But the Pope was silent, and in a 45-page historical appendix to the text of his play, Hochhuth charges: "Never perhaps in the whole of history have so many...