Word: pontiff
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When Pope Benedict XVI travels to Turkey this week, most of the world's attention will be focused on the Christian-Muslim religious divide. But the pontiff is also crossing a political fault line: The gulf between Europe and the Near East has been much in the news lately because of Turkey's troubled attempts to join the European Union. Ankara is keen to become a full member, but Europeans are having second thoughts. Skeptics, including the Pope himself, are openly questioning whether a mostly Muslim nation of 70 million can ever really be part of Europe...
...much-anticipated voyage to Turkey that kicks off Tuesday, Benedict trades in his Pilgrim-in-Chief hat for his helmet as the Roman Catholic Church's Diplomat Maximus. It is largely new terrain for the 79-year-old Pontiff, a trained theologian who spent two decades in the Vatican working on doctrinal matters. The terrestrial exigencies of diplomacy will touch on both geopolitics and inter-religious relations during the four-day visit, as Turkey is both 98% Muslim and the historic home of a competing Eastern branch of Christianity. Everything, of course, will be amplified in the wake of Benedict...
...Though Williams has held his job twice as long as Benedict, it is the Anglican leader who has the much weaker grip and apparently more fractured flock than the pontiff. Since his 2003 appointment, the Archbishop has struggled to keep his church from splintering over the ordination of gay and women clergy. He was even grilled by the media on Friday over a controversy related to a British Airways ban on employees wearing crucifixes on planes. Meanwhile Benedict, though certainly facing dissent both inside and outside his own Church, faces no real challenges to his authority. "Whatever...
...Benedict's critics may be no fewer, but his lifetime appointment to be supreme pontiff helps shield him from the potential schisms facing Williams. While the 79-year-old pontiff has said he wants to give greater voice to bishops, his Church can count on the stability that comes in having one man with the authority to resolve any internal dispute. Democracy-in-Catholicism advocates, however, argue, that the Pope's absolute authority does not allow for truly honest and open debate of evolving issues facing the Church. Another downside - as was on display in Regensburg, Germany with Benedict...
After Regensburg, the mainstream Italian daily La Stampa ran the headline THE POPE AND BUSH ALLIED AGAINST TERROR. The association with the Iraq war and U.S. interrogation methods must have horrified the Pontiff, if only because it could undermine the church's honest-broker role in regional conflicts. "It's easy to say, 'Go Benedict! Hit the Muslims!'" says Gibson. "But that's not who he is. He is not a Crusader." Shortly before Regensburg, Benedict had endured Western criticism for repeatedly demanding a cease-fire after Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Angelo Cardinal Scola, a prot?...