Word: pontiff
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...traced the sign of the Cross on their brows, he sometimes seemed at a loss for words. When a woman cried out in Bengali, he asked his guide, Mother Teresa, to translate. "She's saying she's very, very alone, and she's telling you, 'Come back again.' " The Pontiff, his eyes misting, grasped the woman's head and gently kissed her forehead. Emerging later into the teeming streets, he seemed emotionally drained. "I cannot fully answer all your questions," John Paul told the gathered crowd. "I cannot take away all your pain...
...neighborhood of Kalighat was the high point of the first phase of the Pope's ten-day, 14- city tour of India, which ends this week. Although John Paul was treated with respect and courtesy at every turn, the reception was often unmistakably cool. Tight security measures cramped the Pontiff's usual hand-pressing style, but police cordons could not wholly explain the disappointing turnout at stops along his route. Indian political and non-Christian religious leaders sometimes strained to put a distance between themselves and the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church, whose travel plans had stirred...
...Pontiff, however, was braced for one of the greatest challenges of his seven-year papacy. India's Catholic population accounts for only 12 million, or just 1.7%, of the country's 746 million people. Moreover, in recent weeks conservative Hindus had been warning that the Pope planned to use his trip to convert 200,000 Hindus to Christianity. The agitation peaked on Jan. 12, when 22 Hindu organizations rallied 50,000 demonstrators in Trivandrum, India's southernmost city. Last week's protest activities were kept tightly in check by police...
...that of its estimated 106 million followers in the Soviet satellites, Pope John Paul II has often bluntly denounced antireligious acts. Last week the Pope issued a 47-page encyclical honoring Cyril and Methodius, two 9th century saints who were missionaries to the Slavs. In it the first Slavic Pontiff made a plea for freedom of worship in Eastern Europe. Praying to God on behalf of the Slavs, he declared, "May they follow, in conformity with their own conscience, the voice of your call." John Paul noted, however, that the church posed no threat to any state. Continuing his prayer...
...Pontiff's circumspect language, said Czechoslovak Josef Cardinal Tomko, a member of the Pope's inner circle in Rome, was dictated by the "hope of receiving from the other side a response equally conciliatory, human and constructive." Lately there have been small but significant signs of change. Last year the Czechoslovak weekly newspaper Tribuna called John Paul "one of the most reactionary Popes of this century." But last May, another state- controlled paper, Katolicke Noviny, lauded John Paul as the "untiring hero of international detente." The seeming thaw in East bloc-Vatican relations was not in evidence last year when...