Word: vatican
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When he ran the Vatican's doctrinal office, one of the nicknames slapped on Joseph Ratzinger was "Cardinal No." As Pope John Paul II's enforcer of orthodoxy, he condemned errant personal behavior among the Catholic faithful, and reined in dissident Church theologians. Now, as pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI spends most of his time trying to convince his followers to say yes to the Christian gospel. Indeed his one Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love), surprised some of his longtime critics by the positive note on which he was beginning his now two-year-old papacy. There have, though...
...persist about just how and if welfare policy and religious piety should cohabitate. But after the specter of Marxism faded and John Paul proved to be a great champion of the poor, new alliances have formed. Liberation theologians still say and write things that are at odds with the Vatican hierarchy, but liberation theology as such is no longer at the center of the debate, although the issues it raised remain so - today, the Church is conducting a more broadly defined debate about how to fight for social justice. For example, a group of progressive bishops last week sent...
Conservative Christians don't much like the idea that the Bible is corrupted or that its truths could be updated. The conflicts run deep enough that in 2001 the Vatican ruled Mormon baptisms invalid, and even the more liberal Presbyterians and United Methodists require that Mormons looking to convert be rebaptized. Southern Baptists have called Utah "a stronghold of Satan," and there are many bookshelves' worth of anti-Mormon literature in circulation. The church's aggressive missionary work is a particular challenge to other professing churches, which believe that converts to Mormonism are not truly saved...
...Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi was quick to clarify that the Pope wasn't excommunicating anyone, and that he did not mean to contradict a recent Vatican document that left it to the conscience of individual politicians to leave the Church on their own if they vote against its teachings. Canon law states that people who participate in abortions - would-be mothers, doctors, nurses - are automatically excommunicated. There has been an ongoing debate about whether this also applies to politicians who vote for abortion legislation. But the Pope's remarks seemed to be a moment of personal candor, leaving...
...issue of politicians and abortion had also come to the attention of the current Pope in 2004 when John Kerry, a practicing Catholic and supporter of abortion rights, was the Democratic candidate for President, and then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was head of the Vatican's doctrinal office. At the time, in the heat of the campaign for the White House, several U.S. bishops had declared that pro-choice politicians like Kerry should be denied the rite of Holy Communion at Catholic Mass. When he was formally asked for doctrinal counsel on the matter, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a carefully worded letter...