Word: vaticaners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Benedict is the inspiration behind the move, few inside the Vatican doubt who is its executor. A few days after the surprise signing of the Jan. 21 papal decree that overturned the excommunication, one well-placed Vatican official noted, "It has every appearance of being the work of Castrill...
With pressure mounting after his controversial reconciliation with a breakaway church group, Pope Benedict XVI has ordered one of the bishops of the arch-traditionalist Lefebvrite movement to publicly retract his statements denying the Holocaust. The Vatican issued a statement on Wednesday afternoon saying the Pope had not been aware of the claims by Richard Williamson - one of four Lefebvrite bishops brought back into the fold late last month after 20 years of excommunication - that Nazi gas chambers didn't exist and no more than 300,000 Jews died in concentration camps...
...Merkel, raises more questions than it answers. Why did it take so long? How will Williamson specifically and the Lefebvrites in general react? Could this scuttle the Pope's high-stakes gambit to end the excommunication of the breakaway bishops, leaving him permanently damaged both inside and outside the Vatican walls? But perhaps the starting point would be to ask: Who is steering the ship for Benedict during what is turning into the most turbulent crisis of his papacy...
...Latin-rite Mass and shuns any attempt to have dialogue with other religions. Although he doesn't agree with all their views - and certainly not Williamson's Holocaust-denying - Benedict had hoped that by undoing the excommunication, the Lefebvrites would eventually accept the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council and become a new force for contemporary conservative Catholicism in the West. (Read "Germany Confronts Its Dark Past...
...Vatican insiders know Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos well. The steely-eyed Colombian Cardinal, 79, served for nine years as head of the Congregation for Clergy, where in 2002 he drew the wrath of victims of American-priest sex abuse for denying that the Catholic Church had any particular problem with pedophiles in its ranks. But most of all, Castrillón is a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist. He was named by Pope John Paul II as the go-between in relations with fringe traditionalist groups like the Lefebvrites, whose official name is the Society...