Word: pontiff
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...Pontiff was unfazed by the widespread opprobrium. His popular book and his unpopular diplomacy, he explained to TIME two weeks ago, share one philosophical core: "It always goes back to the sanctity of the human being." He added, "The Pope must be a moral force." In a year when so many people lamented the decline in moral values or made excuses for bad behavior, Pope John Paul II forcefully set forth his vision of the good life and urged the world to follow it. For such rectitude -- or recklessness, as his detractors would have it -- he is TIME...
...real trouble started after his death, when Giovanni Battista Montini, Archbishop of Milan, became Pope Paul VI. In theory, Paul was better qualified to be Pope, by training and experience, than any other 20th century Pontiff. In practice, he proved nervous, hesitant and indecisive. He simply could not make up his mind. John had foreseen this; he had a word for his successor: Amleto (Shakespeare's Hamlet). Under this wavering and unlucky Pope, the postconciliar church went off the rails. All over the world, but particularly in the Americas and Europe, discipline became shaky or even broke down. Thousands...
...wrote the Romantic-era Polish poet Juliusz Slowacki in 1848, lines so visionary and improbable -- a Pole as Supreme Pontiff! -- that few, even in long-suffering Poland, believed they would ever come true. In 1938, however, a Polish teenager would be singled out for what would eventually be an appointment with prophecy. In that year, Karol Wojtyla was a student -- and an actor of considerable promise -- at a secondary school in the grimy industrial town of Wadowice. As the school's prize orator, he was asked to deliver a speech welcoming a grand visitor, the princely Adam Sapieha, scion...
...years now, Karol Wojtyla -- once actor, then priest, then Archbishop and Cardinal -- has been Pope John Paul II, the Supreme Pontiff, Bishop of Rome, leader of a church of nearly 1 billion souls. "It's curious," an Italian Archbishop once said, "you'd think he had always been Pope." And yet to understand the man and his papacy, one must look not only to the Vatican, from which he issues spiritual guidelines, but also to the almost mystical Poland he holds in his heart. Indeed, though the Pope's corner bedroom on the third floor of the Vatican's Apostolic...
...image of someone who is suffering is important for the church." To the sick whom he visits, the Pope has a request: "Pray for me. Pray for me." Still, his friend and confidant, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger of Paris, advises the Pope's critics not to underestimate the aging Pontiff: "This is perhaps the most decisive moment of the whole pontificate...