Word: vatican
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...replacement of formal audience speeches with chats disconcerted some. Commented Robert Sole, Vatican correspondent for France's leftist intellectual daily Le Monde: The audiences "attracted the immediate sympathy of the public but had disappointed and sometimes worried church officials. The Pope expressed a philosophy of existence that recalled on occasion the Reader's Digest: common sense, a little simple at that, which broke with the grand theological flights of oratory of Paul VI. Visibly, he did not have the culture and the intellectual training of his predecessor...
...asked if he loved the Pope and he said yes. He was asked why. 'Because I understand everything he says.'" As Albino Luciani, the Pope-to-be never studied on a campus outside his home area of northeastern Italy, nor did he gain the international sophistication of a Vatican bureaucrat or diplomat. In the town of Belluno, where he taught for several years, his old friend Archbishop Maffeo Ducoli said: "People are crying in the streets and in the shops as if someone in their family had died." He was a teacher with a remarkable gift for explaining things through...
There were a few memorable quotations from the fleeting days of John Paul, and the Vatican found some of them unsettling. At his first audience he quoted Pinocchio and compared the soul in the modern world to an automobile that breaks down because it runs on champagne and marmalade instead of gasoline and oil. Meeting with the Vatican press corps, he tossed off the notion that today St. Paul, who carried the news of Christ around the Mediterranean world, would probably be the head of a wire service. There were his sternly pastoral addresses deploring divorce to a group...
...that the Pope had been given a clean bill of health after a medical examination three weeks ago. He was frail in health as an infant and as a young priest, but there were no reports of heart trouble. Since taking office he had driven himself, and had expected Vatican officials to arrive at their desks promptly each morning. One veteran in the Curia, however, speculates on possible emotional strain: "It could have been something to do with passing from responsibility for a relatively small diocese of 600,000 Catholics in Venice to responsibility for the entire Catholic world...
...considered risky ? Genoa's Cardinal Siri may wind up with the largest single bloc of votes on the first ballot at the new conclave, though he will almost certainly go no further. The Genoese arch bishop is a known foe of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council ("They will never bind us," he once said loftily of its pronouncements), and traditionalists who sympathize with his position have apparently supported him only as a gesture of conservative opposition. But Siri can not hope to add the additional 50 or so votes needed for election. This time Siri's less...