Word: pontiff
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...hierarchy -- beginning at the top. The Pope and Ratzinger are, says one mid-ranking Vatican official, "two pieces of a puzzle. Without one, the other is not complete." Others point out an obvious primacy. Asked whether the Cardinal in practice was the undisputed No. 2 under the Pontiff, one insider in the Holy See responds, "Intellectually and theologically...
...barbaric atheism and dehumanizing secularism: Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Cracow and the future John Paul II. Both were members of the worldwide Synod of Bishops -- an advisory council to the Pope. In 1980, two years after his accession, John Paul asked Ratzinger to join him in Rome. The Pontiff was turned down -- twice. Finally Ratzinger laid out his conditions. He would come only if he could continue to speak his mind on matters he felt strongly about. If John Paul was ever worried that he and Ratzinger would clash over ideas, that concern has dissipated. "In fact," says Ratzinger...
...want to know what the Pope does in the evenings?" asks a middle- ranking member of the Vatican bureaucracy. "This is what he does. He thinks about these things." Six years ago, the Pontiff announced his intention to set down in encyclical form his reflections on the nature of good and evil. Encyclicals are authoritative declarations of the church's teaching, warnings of new problems, and guides to parishes across the world. John Paul's task seemed so daunting to some and so useless to others that the Pope was the unwilling recipient of almost constant, contradictory advice from...
...years ago, a draft was circulated to a select group of theological philosophers for comment, with the understanding that the Pontiff thought his work was nearly completed. The draft caused so much internal -- and not always well-concealed -- debate that the Pope took it back and overhauled it. Of the final product, a Vatican insider says, "What he has written is a masterpiece. But it is far too dense to be transmitted to most people...
Indeed, encyclicals are never page turners, and the Pontiff, a philosopher and onetime professor, tosses around such celestial concepts as "fundamental option," "invincible ignorance," "teleology" and "consequentialism." John Paul also peppers his paper with 184 footnotes, citing for instance the Second Vatican Council, the new Catechism of the Catholic Church (as yet unavailable in English) and Thomas Aquinas, the medieval saint who defined the concept of natural law. The grand finale is a hymn to the Virgin Mary...