Word: pontiffs
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...rule, old popes don't retire; they sit upon St. Peter's throne until called to their reward. John Paul is of the mold. Though he turns 80 in May and suffers from Parkinson's disease and a bad hip, the frail Pontiff has given no hint that he will be the first in six centuries to resign. Certainly John Paul will at least finish out Jubilee Year 2000 as Pope--God willing...
...pontiff's moving expression of solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust, denunciation of anti-Semitism and call for mutual respect among Christians and Jews fell short of Israeli expectations of some form of apology for the Vatican's conduct during World War II, but that won't diminish the fact that - as Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak noted in his salutary response - John Paul II has done more in his 22-year papacy than centuries of predecessors to repair Rome's relationship with the Jews, whom the Church had until only too recently vilified as Christ-killers...
...Whatever his personal convictions, the pontiff remains the head of a massive, thousand-year-old global theological bureaucracy that isn't particularly prone to self-criticism or changes of direction. His millennial efforts to force the church to confront its failings - not only in respect to Jews, but also in relation to Muslims, Christians of other denominations and even sometimes its own flock - are the exception rather than the norm in papal history. But a specific apology for the actions of a predecessor currently in the process of beatification (Pius XII) may have been beyond his reach, given the complex...
...little trivial compared to Jerusalem - a city cohabited uneasily by the three faiths that consider it holy, and claimed as a capital by two nations who've yet to conclude a final peace agreement to end a half century of war. While the Palestinians are chagrined that the pontiff's hosts in the Holy City will be the Israelis, Israel is unhappy that he'll meet with the Palestinian Authority-appointed Grand Mufti on the Temple Mount, a site on which the third-holiest site in Islam - the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock - is built atop...
...visit to the Holy Land, Israel's Internal Security Minister Shlomo Ben Ami predicted it would be "almost of eschatological magnitude." Eschatology is a term used to describe ultimate things such as judgment, heaven and hell. Since Ben Ami is not Christian, his use of it regarding a Catholic pontiff was probably figurative. In political and police terms, the word fits admirably: the Pope's trip is a remarkable culmination, and its stakes will--for better or worse--be high...