Word: vatican
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...time of John Paul's election, Catholicism was still trying to discern how expansively to interpret the modernizing reforms commenced at Vatican II. The Pope pledged that the council's resolutions would guide his agenda, and some Americans hoped he might promote ideas of greater lay autonomy (under the banner of individual conscience) and hierarchical openness (collegiality). He did not. As it turned out, he favored only the "most exact execution" of the council's directives, rebuffing not only traditionalists who derogated it but also those who saw it as a blueprint for church democracy. For all his support...
...much more open to greater collegial participation among his bishops. His papacy saw the centralization of church authority. He published a decree effectively requiring national bishops' conferences to get Vatican approval before making statements on doctrine and made episcopal appointments subject to seeming litmus tests on topics like abortion and homosexuality. Even conservatives like Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the interfaith journal First Things, feel that the result, at least in the U.S., has been the advancement of "team players, CEOs and managers. They have genuine piety, but they are not the kind of people who are very spiritually...
...religious leaders, from the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop of Canterbury to Sikh clerics and Zoroastrian priests, in the Italian town of Assisi, despite objections by Christian ultraconservatives. He was the first Pope to visit a mosque. But his most persistent and eloquent outreach was to Jews. At Vatican II, Wojtyla supported language clearing Jews of deicide and reaffirming Judaism's integrity. As Pope, he lived those words. He was the first modern Pontiff to enter a synagogue and the first to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. He referred to Jews as Christians' "elder brothers" in faith--an embrace that...
...church history, and they lay the groundwork for future changes that could well go beyond what this Pope foresaw or even wanted. In each case, John Paul II brought to completion a movement that was begun by his predecessors John XXIII and Paul VI, the Popes of the Second Vatican Council...
...Second Vatican Council issued Dignitatis Humanae, commonly referred to as a declaration on religious liberty. But what made this document revolutionary was its total renunciation of the use of coercion in defense of the truth. It overturned a tradition of sanctioned violence that went back to Constantine and St. Augustine. Paul VI made its meaning explicit by going before the U.N. General Assembly to declare, "No more war! War never again!" This was a reversal of Pope Urban II's 1095 call for the Crusades: "God wills...