Word: vaticans
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Saturday, April 9, 9pm, Vatican City The Mourning After A chilly rain is falling in Rome the day after John Paul II was buried in the crypt below St. Peter?s Basilica. The world leaders have come and gone. Most of the masses of pilgrims are going home too, boarding trains and buses: south to the Calabrian countryside, north to Milan, farther north and east to Krakow and Wadowice, Poland where Karol Jozef Wojtyla was born nearly 85 years ago. The Eternal City, of course, carries on. But these next two or three days-before the speculation over succession begins...
...forced to take into account the unprecedented reaction this past week to John Paul II's death, with pilgrims effectively demanding that the successor have at least some of the same kind of personal appeal as Wojtyla. "It diminishes the idea of a transitional Pope," a well-placed Vatican official told me, noting that such candidates as Camillo Ruini and Giovanni Batista Re, who are short on charisma, may be fading from contention. Meanwhile it remains to be seen just how much good (new) information is going to seep out before April 18th...
Friday, April 8, 9pm, Vatican City Seeking Clues in a Funeral Oration The funeral required some nimble footwork from journalists. Many of us wanted to take in the spectacle of millions turning out to bid the Pope farewell, but we also wanted to get a close look at the homily delivered by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - which would have been hard to do with the echoing sound system out in St. Peter's Square. As the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Ratzinger is widely expected to play a pivotal role in the coming conclave to choose a successor to John...
...watched Ratzinger's homily close-up on TV in a room rented by TIME at a hotel just outside the Vatican Walls. It was neither a theological tour de force nor a coded message on the future of the Church. Instead, Ratzinger delivered a simple testament to the life and papacy of John Paul II. Afterwards, we had to hustle through a number of security checkpoints to reach the colonnade alongside St. Peter's Basilica, where we watched as a dozen major duomos carried the simple wooden coffin up the steps of the Basilica. And as they reached...
Among those looking on was President Bush, the first American president to attend a papal funeral. I had been in the Vatican press pool during President Bush's last visit to the Pope in June, 2004 - he had listened intently as the Pope struggled to read a statement praising President Bush's stance on ?life? issues but restating the Vatican's opposition to the war in Iraq. John Paul II had a major impact on world affairs in the first two decades of his papacy, but its final chapter found him making a passionate, but ultimately futile call...