Word: popes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Pope's youth wasn't happy," says Father Joseph Vandrisse, a former French missionary in the Middle East who now covers the Vatican for the French daily Le Figaro. Wojtyla lost his mother when he was nine, his father when he was 21, and his only brother, a doctor, died during a scarlet-fever epidemic. "He has meditated a lot on the meaning of suffering. Now that he is weakened in a world that is horrified by sickness and death, he thinks that the image of someone who is suffering is important for the church." To the sick whom...
...prints the letters AMDG (initials for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam -- To the Greater Glory of God). On the top right of the first page he inscribes Tuus Totus (All Thine), the opening words of a short prayer to the Virgin whose text he continues on subsequent pages. The Pope's literary output is staggering. His letters, sermons and speeches fill nearly 150 volumes. In addition to 10 encyclicals, two are in the works, on ecumenism and the sanctity of life...
...Marxism, structuralism, the atheistic ideas of the post-Enlightenment. "They were simply among the tools of the age. Wojtyla said no, we have something new, we don't have to copy. Let us humbly build a new sociology, a new anthropology, that is based on something genuinely Christian." The Pope, says his spokesman, believes he has at least laid the groundwork for this task...
Thus he writes and thinks as well as discusses and debates -- even through mealtimes. For the Pope, meals are occasions to bounce ideas off friends from Poland, bureaucrats and theologians who want to discuss policy and liturgy, young seminarians, ordinary people who are invited for his 7 a.m. Mass and breakfast. There is a kind of hierarchy of meals. Says Marek Skwarnicki, a Polish journalist and papal friend: "Lunch is for bishops, dinner is for friends...
...companions are Vatican aides, Sister Tobiana, one of the Pope's Polish nuns-in-waiting, will serve family-style. With guests from outside the city-state, Angelo Gugel, the chief papal valet, dons a waiter's jacket for formal service. The menu is Italian: pasta or antipasto, followed by a meat dish with vegetables and salad, and either fruit with cheese or a Polish pastry for dessert. Asked if the papal cuisine was any good, a French Cardinal once responded: "Coming from Lyons, that's hard for me to say -- but there are a sufficient number of calories...