Word: vatican
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...atmosphere of the session. So did speeches by two archbishops who asked that the church rethink its ban on Communion for divorced Catholics who remarry. Pope John Paul helped establish the synod's forthright mood with an opening homily that avoided touching on specific issues; it seemed clear to Vatican observers that the Pope was presenting the synod participants with a blank page on which to express their thoughts freely. Godfried Cardinal Danneels of Belgium, who was assigned to summarize official reports for the meeting, told journalists that the Pope "said nothing about the work of the coming synod, gave...
Danneels also took issue with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and a leading church conservative, who feels that Vatican II led to a lamentable confusion about what Catholic teaching truly is. Asked whether the synod would launch a "restoration" of the church, a term used by Ratzinger in a recent controversial book to describe the efforts to counteract supposed damage from liberal interpretations of Vatican II, Danneels snapped, "We are not having a synod about a book...
Late last week the meeting broke into small groups to discuss what sort of recommendations to send to the Pope. The bishops have already commissioned a five-member committee to draft a statement to the world's Christians on Vatican II. Nonetheless, it was unclear whether any concrete proposals for new interpretations of the council would emerge before the synod's close on Dec. 8. --By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Daniela Simpson and Wilton Wynn/Rome
...them U.S. Ambassador to Italy Maxwell Rabb and Archbishop Justin Rigali, representing Pope John Paul II, gathered in the chapel of Rome's North American College for the funeral of Natasha Simpson, 11, the American schoolgirl who was the youngest of the airport victims. The Rev. Diarmuid Martin, a Vatican official and family friend, summarized the shared sense of sorrow and shock. Noting that many of the mourners were journalists, including Natasha's father Victor, an editor for the Associated Press in Rome, Father Martin observed, "We've written or spoken about suffering, about anguish, about tragedy, about natural disasters...
...part of Pope John Paul II's determined campaign to enforce orthodoxy, the Vatican has taken action against a number of nonconformist theologians. First it ruled that Hans Küng of West Germany could no longer call himself a Catholic theologian; next Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx of the Netherlands was summoned to Rome for an inquiry into his theological writings; and Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff is undergoing enforced silence for advocating Marxist-tinged liberation theology...