Word: popes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Maybe religion isn't just the opiate of the masses. Supreme socialist FIDEL CASTRO certainly seemed dazzled by his visit to POPE JOHN PAUL II last week. Reporters weren't invited to a meeting that incensed many Cuban exiles, so we can only speculate what the atheist and the anti-Marxist talked about. The Catholic teachers that schooled each of them back in the '30s? Why Castro expelled all those priests? How the Pope helped bring about the demise of Marxist Europe? More likely, they touched on the trade embargoes against Cuba, which both oppose, and the possibility...
DIED. JOSEPH CARDINAL BERNARDIN, 68, Roman Catholic archbishop of Chicago who played a major role in shaping American Catholicism since the 1960s; of cancer; in Chicago. Once touted as the man who might be the first American Pope, Bernardin was a skilled yet humble conciliator, steering a course between social progressivism and traditional church doctrine. After he learned in June 1995 that he had pancreatic cancer, he began ministering to others who were dying. "As a person of faith," he said, "I see death as a friend...
...message to a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which had taken the origin of life as its theme, John Paul described the shift in the church's view of evolution that has taken place since Pope Pius XII issued his encyclical Humani Generis in 1950. "Humani Generis," John Paul wrote, "considered the doctrine of 'evolutionism' as a serious hypothesis, worthy of a more deeply studied investigation...Today...new knowledge leads us to recognize that the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis." Pius was skeptical of evolution but tolerated study and discussion of it; the statement...
...statement is unlikely to influence the curriculum of Catholic schools, where evolution has been taught since the 1950s. Indeed, reading the entire Bible literally has not been a dominant practice among Catholics through much of the 20th century. Asked about the Pope's statement, Father Peter Stravinskas, editor of the 1991 Catholic Encyclopedia, said, "It's essentially what Augustine was writing. He tells us that we should not interpret Genesis literally, and that it is poetic and theological language...
Creationists do not make the distinction between faith and science that John Paul does, and his statement will not discourage them in their battles against the teaching of evolution in states like Tennessee and Alabama. "The Pope is just an influential person; he's not a scientist," says Henry Morris, president emeritus at the Institute for Creation Research in Santee, California. "There is no scientific evidence for evolution. All the real solid evidence supports creation." Bill Hoesch, a spokesman for the institute, says, "[John Paul] would say that man's dignity does not suffer even if God used the process...