Word: pope
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Pope Benedict XVI's triumphant return to his Bavarian hometown of Marktl am Inn four years ago - his first since becoming Pontiff - was made all the more poignant by the presence of his older brother, Georg Ratzinger. Five decades after they'd entered seminary together, the new Pontiff and the retired church-choir director stepped with the same soft gait and wavy white hair into the town's tiny riverside chapel. Praying silently side by side, they might just as well have been an aging pair of humble village priests...
...priests since the 1950s. Though the retired Ratzinger, 86, denies any knowledge of sexual abuse during his time with the choir, he has admitted to slapping several singers and apologized for not having intervened to limit the crueler beatings that have been alleged by others. (See pictures of the Pope in the Holy Land...
...compelled to respond directly to the abuse allegations - a task that is typically handled by someone on the diocesan level. The spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said on Tuesday that German church authorities acted "promptly and decisively" to investigate the allegations after they emerged. Neither Lombardi nor the Pope himself, however, has commented on Ratzinger's admissions of slapping young people or failing to address wider suspicions of violence. The head of the German Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, who made a public apology last week, is slated to meet with the Pope on Friday to further discuss the widening...
...hiding behind a 2001 Vatican directive that called for cases of abuse to be investigated internally before going to state authorities. "This directive makes clear that even serious abuse allegations fall under papal confidentiality and thus should not be forwarded on outside the church," she said. (See "The Pope's Sex Abuse Challenge...
...pictures of Obama meeting Pope Benedict...