Word: pontiffs
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...challenge to their position as head of the church. The Emperor Henry IV knelt penitentially in the snows of Canossa before Pope Gregory VII; France's King Philip the Fair, a few centuries later, made a virtual prisoner of Boniface VIII. Both monarchs acknowledged alike that the Roman pontiff was their spiritual overlord. Popes seldom made major church decisions apart from consultation with general councils, which assumed special importance in preserving unity during the Great Western Schism (1378-1417), when there were as many as three rival claimants to the title of Pope...
...Pope was also heavily guarded. Not since feudal times, when several Popes were murdered and the papal food taster was a Vatican fixture, had there been such concern for a Pontiff's safety. As always on foreign trips, Paul was accompanied by his bodyguard, Colonel Spartaco Angelini, commander of the Pontifical Gendarmerie, the Vatican police force. Angelini carried a 7.65-mm. Beretta in a shoulder holster, and under his own standing orders was prepared to shoot to kill to defend the Pope. At least 1,000 white-gloved, white-helmeted Colombian military policemen patrolled the Campo Eucanstico with rifles...
...down by helicopter before 50,000 campesinos. Leaving his copter, Paul boarded a white Jeep and, for half an hour, drove through a multitude of awed faces. Present in the crowd were "typical" peasants from 21 Latin American coun tries, selected to attend the confrontation with the Pontiff. Bolivia sent the head of its National Peasants' Union...
Structural Reform? As the Pope jetted back to .Rome, his prescription for progress in Latin America probably satisfied neither the church's radicals nor its reactionaries. Conservative Latin Americans were pleased by the Pontiff's condemnation of violence. Gua temala's right-wing newspaper, El Im-parcial, praised Paul's words on the subject as "particularly opportune" and expressed the hope that they would "contribute to the Latin American people's growing resistance to ideological struggle." The attitude of the upper class to drastic social reform was best reflected in Bogota's leading "liberal...
...birth control, which condemns all methods of contraception, except rhythm, as against the will of God. The pronouncement caused perhaps the most serious outburst of dissent the Catholic Church has experienced in centuries. Innumerable Catholics made clear that they would refuse to heed the words of a reigning Pontiff. Theologians defied his authority to insist that the encyclical was not binding on married Catholics who have good reasons to practice birth control-and it was obvious that millions will continue...