Word: vaticans
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Today a fervent Polish fealty -- part feudal, fiercely loyal -- attends John Paul in the Vatican. The five black-robed nuns who cook his meals and do his laundry are members of the Servants of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is based in Cracow. More important, one of the Pope's two secretaries -- and the one who controls all access to his boss -- is Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, 55, also of Cracow. (The other secretary is not Italian, as one might expect, but ( Vietnamese, Monsignor Vincent Tran Ngoc...
...testimony is universal that prayer, more than food or liquid, is the sustaining force of this Pope's life. He makes decisions "on his knees," says Monsignor Diarmuid Martin, secretary of the Vatican's Justice and Peace Commission. Sometimes John Paul will prostrate himself before the altar. At other times he will sit or kneel with eyes closed, his forehead cradled in his left hand, his face contorted intensely, as if in pain. At this time, too, he brings to his God the prayer requests of others. His prie-dieu, at the front center of the chapel, has a padded...
...Pope's youth wasn't happy," says Father Joseph Vandrisse, a former French missionary in the Middle East who now covers the Vatican for the French daily Le Figaro. Wojtyla lost his mother when he was nine, his father when he was 21, and his only brother, a doctor, died during a scarlet-fever epidemic. "He has meditated a lot on the meaning of suffering. Now that he is weakened in a world that is horrified by sickness and death, he thinks that the image of someone who is suffering is important for the church." To the sick whom...
...companions are Vatican aides, Sister Tobiana, one of the Pope's Polish nuns-in-waiting, will serve family-style. With guests from outside the city-state, Angelo Gugel, the chief papal valet, dons a waiter's jacket for formal service. The menu is Italian: pasta or antipasto, followed by a meat dish with vegetables and salad, and either fruit with cheese or a Polish pastry for dessert. Asked if the papal cuisine was any good, a French Cardinal once responded: "Coming from Lyons, that's hard for me to say -- but there are a sufficient number of calories...
Fluent in eight languages, the Pope chooses his idiom to suit his dinner companions. Says a Vatican aide: "He listens, talks directly, asks questions, puts you at ease. After five minutes you forget you are talking to the Pope." For visiting bishops with problems to share, he can turn on the charm, singing and joking -- although his humor runs more to irony and good-natured kidding. After the dissident Swiss theologian Hans Kung was censured for a book questioning papal infallibility, John Paul commented, without malice, "And I'm sure Kung wrote that infallibly...