Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Dismay and anger were the reactions of American Jews last June when Pope John Paul II welcomed Kurt Waldheim at the Vatican, despite accusations that the Austrian President had been involved in Nazi war crimes. The resulting controversy threatened to sour John Paul's nine-city trip to the U.S., which begins on Sept. 10. Jewish leaders in Los Angeles announced that they might boycott the Pope's scheduled interfaith celebrations. A more important Miami meeting between John Paul and American-Jewish leaders, intended to enhance relations, seemed doomed...
John Paul's statement, which makes no reference to the Waldheim audience, was a long-contemplated synthesis of his views on the Holocaust, said a Vatican official, "not a consequence of the Waldheim meeting." But it followed a July session in New York City between Vatican Secretary of State Agostino Cardinal Casaroli and representatives of American-Jewish organizations; they pressed for a statement as well as a meeting with John Paul before his visit to the U.S. That meeting is now set for next Tuesday with five or six Jewish leaders at the papal summer residence...
ARREST WARRANT NULLIFIED. For Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, 65, head of the Vatican Bank who had been charged by Italian authorities as an "accessory to fraudulent bankruptcy" in the 1982 collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's worst postwar banking scandal; by the country's highest tribunal, the Court of Cassation; in Rome. In voiding arrest warrants for the Cicero, Ill.-born prelate and two senior Vatican bank officials, the court ruled that the 1929 Lateran Treaty, which recognizes Vatican City as a sovereign state, protects "central bodies" of the church from "every interference" by the Italian government...
After weeks of earnest prodding from the Vatican, the Rev. Billy Graham has decided to accept an invitation for a joint September speaking appearance with Pope John Paul II in Columbia, S.C. The meeting, which will be attended by two dozen other ecumenical leaders, will mark the first time that Graham, the world's best-known Protestant, has preached alongside a Pope. It will also be John Paul's first important acknowledgment of the evangelical movement. Some conservative Protestants who are hostile to Roman Catholicism urged Graham to stay away; indeed, the president of Graham's denomination, the Southern Baptist...
...made no mention of the war-crimes allegations, referring only to Waldheim's devotion "to ensuring peace " while at the U.N. Later, Waldheim revealed that they had discussed the charges "in a marginal way." Israel condemned the visit, noting that it hurt already fragile ties between Jews and the Vatican. In the U.S., Jewish groups threatened to boycott a meeting with the Pope in Florida next September. Nonetheless, Waldheim could barely contain his satisfaction. Said he: "The fact alone that the Pope did receive me in such a cordial way speaks for itself...