Word: vaticans
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Underlying the rhetoric lay an important shift in Vatican policy that the new Pope has introduced. Popes John XXIII and Paul VI inaugurated Vatican Ostpolitik in contrast to the policies of Pius XII, the coldest of cold warriors, who even found Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, the venerable Primate of Poland, too soft on Communism. Their theory was that concessions for the Polish church could best be won by high-level negotiations between the Vatican and Warsaw. Now, just as he had done when he was a Polish bishop himself, John Paul was announcing that the Polish church leaders ought...
...Vatican's Wladyslaw Rubin, 61, secretary-general of the International Synod of Bishops, and Franciszek Macharski, 52, John Paul's scholarly protégé and successor as Archbishop of Cracow...
...other side of the ideological divide, Catholicism itself continues to change. Once it used its own secular power in order to frustrate the religious freedom of others. But the bishops of the Second Vatican Council formally incorporated freedom of conscience in modern society into their creed. The Catholic Church now flatly opposes all attempts to compel conformity to religious belief...
That may have been true in the past. But no longer. Last week, as Pope John Paul II made his triumphal progress through Poland, the watching world began to grasp what people in Rome and the highly conservative Vatican Curia have known for months: this Pope not only sings, but he sings out. He also kisses babies, cuts red tape, says what he thinks, has an actor's (or a politician's) delight in an audience, and a former laborer's gift for gauging the common touch of a crowd...
...treats the people around him, and indeed the whole Roman Catholic Church, with infectious optimism. As Wilton Wynn, TIME bureau chief in Rome, reports, John Paul's impact is electric, exceeding even that of another people's Pope, the beloved John XXIII. Pilgrims throng the Vatican at a rate normally seen only in once-a-generation Holy Years. Vendors have sold more photos of John Paul since October than they did of Paul VI during his 15 years as Pope. Priests who hear confessions in St. Peter's have encountered five times the number of penitents...