Word: vatican
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...After Vatican II, Ratzinger embarked on a more conservative path. The embrace of religious plurality, in his view, did not extend to an acceptance that all roads to salvation are equal or to a license for democracy within his church. During 24 years as the prefect of the CDF, Ratzinger earned the nickname "God's Rottweiler," savaging suspected heresies, mostly liberal ones, and ending the careers of several old Vatican II allies. Americans were not exempt...
...especially when it clashes with his nonnegotiable doctrinal stands. Without Roots had wonderful things to say about Protestantism as the genius of American religiosity and burnished the alliance between Catholic conservatives and American Evangelicals against abortion. But in 2000 and more acidly in 2007 (after he became Pope), the Vatican released documents describing Protestant churches as suffering from ecclesiastical "defects," adding that "it is difficult to see how the title of 'Church' could possibly be attributed to them." Some of Benedict's new allies were a bit stunned...
...proxies zap scientific atheists, he is actually engaging in cultural pluralism American-style, which resembles a political talk show more than a stately seminar on the Bill of Rights. The desire to keep talking while airing real differences may also be influencing his policy toward Islam (which, as the Vatican noted in March, has just replaced Catholicism as the world's most populous faith). After a startling 2006 speech in which he quoted a source calling Muhammad evil, prompting enraged extremists to burn churches and kill a nun in Somalia, Benedict entered into a dialogue with Islamic clerics who sent...
...Islam. The Pope has refused to accept pre-emptive war as just, and a confidant recalls him shaking his fists and shouting "Basta!"--Enough!--back in the early days of the Iraq war. He may be trying to model a clash of civilizations without bloodshed. As Roberto Fontolan, the Vatican-savvy spokesman of the lay group Communion and Liberation, puts it, "Let's not talk about dogma. Or whether my God is better than your God. Let's talk about reason that we both have as a gift from God. What does it tell...
Reason is a word that surfaces repeatedly in conversations about the Pope and the U.S. Benedict's critics regularly accuse him of Vatican II revisionism--of downplaying the idea that Catholics may legitimately balance church teaching against the demands of their conscience. More broadly, they accuse him of minimizing the degree to which the Holy Spirit led the council to make substantial changes in the faith. But he remains true to the Vatican II precept of complementing blind piety that prevailed in the church before the 1960s with the rationalism of the Enlightenment and thus with modernity...