Word: vaticans
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JOHN PAUL II is the most traveled Pope in history, but apparently he likes to kick back in the Vatican with the remote every now and then. During a live panel discussion on Italian television celebrating his 20th papal year, the Pope unexpectedly called in to the program, catching everyone by surprise, including his own spokesman, who was among the guests on the show. "I would like to thank all those taking part for everything that they have said and done," the Pope told the show's shocked host, Bruno Vespa. Visibly moved and more than a little flummoxed, Vespa...
...church doesn't see it that way. "If she hadn't been 100% Jewish, she wouldn't have been killed," agrees Father Peter Gumpel, a senior Vatican saintmaker. But the roundup that doomed her was an explicitly announced reprisal for a brave Catholic stance: the Dutch bishops' denunciation of the German persecution of Jews in a pastoral letter days before. "It was revenge," says Gumpel, and were it not for the bishops' statement, "she wouldn't have been killed. So we have decided to say she is the victim of the persecution of the Catholic Church in Holland by Nazi...
...Jewish observers regard Stein's canonization--like John Paul II's beatification last week of wartime Croatian Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, who initially supported (but later denounced) his country's pro-Nazi puppet regime--as a small blemish on a sterling record. This is the Pope, after all, who established Vatican recognition of Israel, visited a synagogue and was host of a huge commemorative concert for the Shoah's victims. Yet there is concern that last Sunday's ceremony foreshadows another one: the pronouncement of Pope Pius XII as venerable, an act John Paul II reportedly hopes to accomplish...
Many, not all of them Jewish, disagree. Some say the "evidence" on Pius is not all in, claiming that the Vatican has yet to open all pertinent archives. Others, like the Rev. Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame, feel they know enough to conclude that outrage on Pius' part "would have given pause to the Nazis and perhaps changed the complexion of what happened at the end of the war." McBrien contrasts Pius' silence with John Paul II's risky but successful support of Poland's Solidarity trade union in the 1980s. Some analysts speculate that valid...
...probably died a virgin. Of course, such traits have never disqualified anyone from sainthood, and nobody would doubt that Gaudi was in a general way a more saintly character than, say, Frank Lloyd Wright or Philip Johnson. But there is a deeper problem: the absence of miracles, which the Vatican authorities need as "verification of godliness." Mere piety is not enough for sainthood. No worker, so far, has fallen from the Nativity Facade of the Sagrada Famolia and been caught by an angel; no Japanese tourist has burst out with stigmata in the ticket line. The best that Almuzara...