Word: popes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Pope's health visibly deteriorated. His left hand shakes, and he hobbles with a cane, the result of bone-replacement surgery. Asked about his health, he offered an "Oh, so-so" to TIME. It is thus with increased urgency that John Paul has presented himself, the defender of Roman Catholic doctrine, as a moral compass for believers and nonbelievers alike. He spread through every means at his disposal a message not of expedience or compromise but of right and wrong; amid so much fear of the future, John Paul dared to speak of hope. He did not say what everyone...
...Pope released an apostolic letter in which he set to rest, for the foreseeable future, the question of the ordination of women. His answer, in brief, was no. The document disappointed and outraged many Catholic women and men; even some sympathetic to the Pope felt that his peremptory tone, his strict argument from precedent, i.e., that Christ appointed only males as his Apostles, represented a missed opportunity to teach, to explain an exclusionary policy that contemporary believers find outmoded or beyond understanding...
...high or the low point of the Pope's year, depending on who did the reporting, came in September. The U.N. population conference convened in Cairo, with representatives from 185 nations and the Holy See in attendance. On the table was a 113-page plan calling on governments to commit $17 billion annually by the year 2000 to curb global population growth. About 90% of the draft document had been approved in advance by the participants, but the remaining 10% contained some bombshells John Paul had seen coming. The most explosive was Paragraph 8.25, which owed its inclusion in part...
John Paul was not in Cairo, but he kept in constant touch with his delegation. Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls recalls the Pope's reaction to Paragraph 8.25: "He feared that for the first time in the history of humanity, abortion was being proposed as a means of population control. He put all the prestige of his office at the service of this issue." For nine days the Vatican delegates, under his direction, lobbied and filibustered; they kept their Latin American bloc in line and struck up alliances with Islamic nations opposed to abortion. In the end, the Pope...
...public relations terms, it was a costly victory. There he goes again, the standard argument ran, imposing his sectarian morality on a world already hungry and facing billions of new mouths to feed in the coming decades. One Spanish critic said the Pope had "become a traveling salesman of demographic irrationality." Says dissident Swiss theologian Hans Kung: "This Pope is a disaster for our church. There's charm there, but he's closed-minded." The British Catholic weekly the Tablet summed up Cairo, "Never has the Vatican cared less about being unpopular than under Pope John Paul...