Word: vaticans
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Needing some symbol of their status, the residents of Park Avenue have commissioned a largely symbolic guard. The Vatican has the Swiss Guard; Park Avenue has its doormen...
They were wrong, but their cause was not totally lost. Last week--457 years, several disastrous religious wars and dozens of denominational splits later--Edward Cardinal Cassidy announced Vatican approval, with some caveats, of a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, toward which Catholic and Lutheran theologians have been toiling since 1967. Some of the Vatican's fine print was shockingly critical of the text, but it let stand without objection the Declaration's grandest statement: "Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part...
...larger number of informed observers, however, happily disagree. The "painful exactitude" of the Vatican response, says Neuhaus, "demonstrates the seriousness with which the Declaration has been taken." This is appropriate, since "ultimate truths are involved." Noting that his church's critique implicates only three of the document's 44 points, Cardinal Cassidy allows that some "shadows" remain on the ecumenical horizon. "But it's not," he declares, "like they're blotting out the light...
...long been entangled in politics and diplomacy. Now the Pope is also exploring a visit to Iraq. ROGER CARDINAL ETCHEGARAY, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was recently in Baghdad to bemoan the "perverse" impact of the economic sanctions against Iraq. But Etchegaray--who is the Vatican's chief planner for the 2,000th-anniversary celebrations--was also laying groundwork for a papal visit. The thinking is that the Pope will visit biblical sites, including Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, in present-day Iraq. Other tantalizing events for 2000, in the talking stage, are a summit meeting...
DIED. AGOSTINO CARDINAL CASAROLI, 83, a tailor's son who became the Vatican's unflappable envoy to Soviet bloc nations in the 1960s; in Rome. Upon his election as Pope, John Paul II quickly named the omnicompetent prelate the Vatican's chief diplomat, a post he filled with skill and judgment from 1979 to 1990. In 1989, in perhaps his most dramatic moment, Casaroli helped broker the meeting between the Pope and Mikhail Gorbachev...