Word: rome
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...brothers, sisters and nuns (in technical usage, nuns are a distinct category of sisters who take solemn vows). Explains one Vatican staff member: "You wonder why a man would bother to take holy orders if he is going to do the same job he could do as a layman." Rome has ordered a study of all U.S. seminaries, and a principal reason for this, says the Vatican source, is to guarantee that these institutions "are not turning out psychiatrists and social workers in collars." For similar reasons Rome, concerned that women's orders could vanish if sisters appear little different...
...John Paul is concerned, liberation theology in its most militant form has come to embody a struggle over the fundamental values and even the institutional nature of the church. Says Monsignor Carlo Caffarra, a theologian at Rome's Pontifical Lateran University: "It is a contest that now aims at the very truth of the Christian creed and hence the truth of the church itself...
...Brazil, a mild-mannered Franciscan friar awaits a ruling from Rome over possible "theological errors" in his latest book, Church: Charism and Power, published in 1981. In the book, Theologian Leonardo Boff attacks the "monarchic and pyramidic" structure of the Catholic Church, which, he says, inevitably aligns the church with the rich. Father Boff wants the pyramid of power turned upside down, so that "the church would be, not for the poor, but by the poor...
...faith of the poor." Boff's views provide a theological underpinning for the so-called Church of the People, a grass-roots vision of Catholicism that sees the base communities as a separate source of spiritual inspiration for the faithful--an alternative, in other words, to the inspiration of Rome...
Last September Boff was invited to Rome for a discussion with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's watchdog Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Boff recalls the four-hour meeting as "cordial--Ratzinger mainly just sat and listened." The cordiality may have been influenced by the presence at the Vatican of two of Brazil's most influential Cardinals, Paulo Evaristo Arns, Archbishop of Sao Paulo, and Aloisio Lorscheider, Archbishop of Fortaleza, who accompanied Boff on his trip...