Word: vaticans
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...accommodation, Wojtyla managed to build a huge church for 100,000 Catholic citizens in the industrial city of Nova Huta and reach out to a wide cross section of workers, youths and intellectuals. Yet what turned a provincial prince into a rising church star was the churchwide reform of Vatican II. At the Second Vatican Council (1961-65), Wojtyla contributed to several key documents, most notably on the church in the modern world, at one point causing an observer to make note of his "magnetic power" and "prophetic strength." But Wojtyla declined to embrace change uncritically, prefiguring a lifelong love...
...ordination, he declared, was an official nonissue. Not only could women not become priests, but there was to be "no more discussion" of the topic. Many laypeople were appalled that in the throes of a priest shortage, the Pope could so conclusively spurn so many willing to help. The Vatican claimed the decision was infallible--an apparent extension of that status beyond its historical boundaries that startled even some of the Pontiff's ardent supporters. That stern patriarch was the Pope, just as much as the genial pilgrim on the plane...
...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...