Word: pope
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...charge head-on, making clear that he would not be required to answer to church authorities in Salt Lake City. But that is not even the pervasive concern for him that it was for John Kennedy when he was required to declare in his landmark 1960 speech that the Pope would not influence his presidency...
...been nearly two decades since the defeat of the Communist atheist-materialism that had long been Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the Catholic Church. But if Pope Benedict XVI's latest encyclical, "Spe Salvi," is any indication, the spirit of Karl Marx is still alive and well in the halls of the Vatican...
...become apparent since his election in April 2005 that this Pope, whether or not one agrees with him, stands out for his intellectual honesty and linguistic clarity. He believes what he says, and says what he believes in terms that are simple but thought-provoking. In this latest document, he uses Marxism - though no longer a clear and present danger to Catholic faith - as a warning against the rampant growth of reason, science and freedom without a commensurate growth of faith and morals. "The ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also...
Defeated, Marxism is no longer the incarnation of evil in our midst, but rather the perfect (vanquished) foil in Benedict's ongoing intellectually driven sermon that Christian faith is history's only true answer. But the Pope is not ready to declare victory. The Church's current foe, as he sees it, is still in the heart of Europe and still atheist in nature: a sort of post-Socialist, anything-goes brand of Utopia that Benedict calls "relativism" - and disparages as the root of everything from loose sexual mores to a breakdown of the traditional family to runaway capitalism...
Cottier insists that this "is not an 'anti-encyclical.'" The papal letter is mostly about Christian hope, and in it, Benedict refers to the lives and ideas of various saints and martyrs to explain that hope: Most of all, Benedict leans on the teachings of St. Augustine, the Pope's personal intellectual and spiritual guide, to illuminate "all the contradictions and hopes" of human existence. "In some way we want life itself, true life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know the thing towards which we feel driven," the Pope writes. "This unknown 'thing...