Word: popes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sooner had cheering crowds welcomed Pope John Paul II to tiny Lesotho (pop. 1.6 million) last week than the cool night air erupted in explosions and flashes of light. But these were not fireworks welcoming the Pontiff. Blocks from the route the Pope's motorcade had taken through Maseru, the capital, South African commandos were storming a hijacked bus on which a band of antigovernment Lesotho guerrillas had been holding 71 Catholic pilgrims for 29 hours. When the gunfire ended, three of the four rebels lay dead. So did a 14-year-old girl, one of 31 children on board...
...hostilities. John Paul had arrived in Lesotho via a circuitous route. Bad weather forced his chartered Air Zimbabwe jet to veer from Maseru and land at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg. The unscheduled stop was a public relations windfall for South Africa, which had been pointedly excluded from the Pope's five-nation tour. While John Paul did not kiss the ground at the airport, as is his custom on first visiting a country, he spent two hours with Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha, who greeted him and led him through throngs of astonished passengers to the VIP lounge...
...When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his aide and preferred successor, Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini, was ineligible for the papacy because he was not a Cardinal. As a stopgap, the Cardinal-electors turned to the apparently innocuous Angelo Giuseppi Roncalli, 76. Roncalli, of course, became Pope John XXIII, whose Vatican Council set in motion epochal reforms in the church. But Montini, who was made a Cardinal by John, finally got his turn after John died in 1963, and it was his dogged bureaucratic talents, as Pope Paul VI, that made the sweeping new policies stick. Thus, writes Wilton Wynn...
...encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI strongly reaffirmed his church's traditional opposition to artificial means of birth control. That authoritative teaching left Roman Catholic couples with only two ways to limit the size of their families: 1) use the morally acceptable rhythm method, which was then so unreliable as to justify the sobriquet "Roman roulette"; or 2) follow their consciences rather than papal counsel and adopt such forbidden means of contraception as diaphragms, condoms or the Pill -- which millions...
...pope was in Botswana yesterday and was expected in Lesotho today as part of a five-nation tour of southern Africa...