Word: pontiffs
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Then John Paul's personal history, his duties as Pontiff and the late 20th century's greatest drama merged in a breathtaking manner. The election of a Polish Pope posed an implicit challenge to Poland's Soviet-backed regime, a challenge John Paul quickly made immediate with two visits home. His first, in 1979, drew enormous, bloc-shaking crowds. On the next trip, after he told the restive populace to "be not afraid" and declared in the holy town of Czestochowa that "man cannot remain with no way out," the new Solidarity free-trade-union movement made him its virtual...
...intense mystical spirituality. In his youth, he applied to join the Discalced Carmelites, a monastic order, only to be gently rebuffed by superiors who saw in him another sort of potential. But he had maintained a contemplative practice. (Rocco Buttiglione, a friend and an author, once described the Pontiff's reverie: "The faith is like a strike of lightning, illuminating everything.") His devotion to the Virgin Mary, to whom his personal motto--Totus tuus (All yours)--referred, was lifelong, and he was known to prostrate himself before her statues. Since the shooting occurred on the anniversary of the 1917 apparition...
...arbitrarily assign a tipping point in the American perception of the Pontiff, it might be 1994. The year began with plans for an ambitious tour, including a visit to the U.S. But the trip was postponed for health reasons, and in the interim, the Pope sent a pastoral letter to his bishops. The issue of female ordination, he declared, was an official nonissue. Not only could women not become priests, but there was to be "no more discussion" of the topic. Many laypeople were appalled that in the throes of a priest shortage, the Pope could so conclusively spurn...
...objections by Christian ultraconservatives. He was the first Pope to visit a mosque. But his most persistent and eloquent outreach was to Jews. At Vatican II, Wojtyla supported language clearing Jews of deicide and reaffirming Judaism's integrity. As Pope, he lived those words. He was the first modern Pontiff to enter a synagogue and the first to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. He referred to Jews as Christians' "elder brothers" in faith--an embrace that will make it harder for any future Pope to return to the old position that Christianity fulfilled and superseded Judaism...
RECOVERING. POPE JOHN PAUL II, 84, from an emergency tracheotomy done to alleviate breathing difficulties after a relapse of the flu that hospitalized him for nine days in early February; in Rome. After the procedure, the Pontiff was said to be breathing normally and eating, but he would be unable to speak for several days...