Word: sainthood
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Catholic Church's process of declaring saints is a complex and fascinating one. On Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI announced that several candidates for sainthood had reached the initial "venerable" status, having been shown by a Vatican committee to have lived heroically virtuous lives. If a scientifically inexplicable miracle is subsequently attributed to their post-mortem intercession, the second step of "beatification" takes place, followed by eventual canonization if a second miracle is proven. Two popes were among the new "venerables." The first was Benedict's still-mega-popular predecessor, John Paul II. The other, however, has doubts swirling around...
...watched a documentary about Portland, Ore., and in it there was a woman who drove her minivan 25 miles to a local farm to buy a few days' worth of produce. So that's a 50-mile round trip for maybe 10 lb. of groceries. Whatever sense of environmental sainthood she felt was vastly outweighed by the energy of using an entire minivan to collect a few days' worth of produce. (Read "The Clean-Energy Scam...
...Corazon Aquino's life lent itself to maxims, but two hard-nosed ones seem particularly worth pointing out. First, political sainthood is a gift from heaven with a Cinderella deadline - once past midnight, you are a pumpkin. Second, personal virtues are never a guarantee of effective or successful governance. What was truly shocking about Aquino's tumultuous six-year term as President of the Philippines was that those maxims proved untrue. Midnight always threatened Aquino but never struck; and she was a good woman whose goodness alone, at the very end, was what proved enough, if only by an iota...
...Corazon Aquino's life lent itself to maxims, but two hard-nosed ones seem particularly worth pointing out. First, political sainthood is a gift from heaven with a Cinderella deadline - once past midnight, you are a pumpkin. Second, personal virtues are never a guarantee of effective or successful governance. What was truly shocking about Aquino's tumultuous six-year term as President of the Philippines was that those maxims proved untrue. Midnight always threatened Aquino but never struck; and she was a good woman whose goodness alone, at the very end, was what proved enough, if only by an iota...
...also shown a fundamental sympathy that not even written words can have." But the Williamson affair was only the most recent episode in a series of gaffes and sour notes by the Pope. He seems simply to have forgotten Jewish concerns on a range of decisions regarding liturgy, sainthood and historical interpretation. In the case of SSPX, there is a distinct possibility that he knew full well he might offend Jews but went ahead anyway...