Word: vi
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...council he made eight speeches, the most memorable in favor of religious liberty. Church honors followed: a Cardinal's red hat in 1967, election as one of three Europeans on the council of the world bishops' synod in 1974, an invitation to conduct the Lenten retreat for Pope Paul VI's household...
Indeed, Wojtyla is known as a staunch conservative on specific issues of doctrine, morality and church authority. On the birth-control question, Wojtyla was on record against all artificial methods in his book Love and Responsibility (1960) before Paul VI took the same position in his much attacked Humanae Vitae encyclical of 1968. But the book also emphasized sexual pleasure for married couples ?an advanced view for a pre-Vatican II archbishop. Wojtyla has also taken an uncompromising stand against liberalized abortion, yet another issue on which he opposes Poland's Communist regime...
...Italian Popes of the 15th century were both members of Spain's notorious Borgia family. Alonso de Borgia, elected as Callistus III (1455-58), made the papacy a family affair. So did his nephew Rodrigo, who became Alexander VI in 1492 and named four nephews, as well as his illegitimate son Cesare, Cardinals. In 1503, both father and son fell gravely ill. Alexander died after a week's illness; Cesare survived. It is widely thought that the two master poisoners accidentally partook of the poisoned beverage that they had intended for a rival Cardinal...
...learned that, contrary to the Vatican's first description of John Paul's last moments, what the Pope may have been reading when he died of a heart attack was not Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ but a document written by Pope Paul VI...
...papal autopsy, the Cardinals feel that Pope Paul VI's 1975 decree on procedures to be followed when a Pope dies implicitly rules it out. Presumably, the Cardinals reason, in the 20th century autopsies are undignified and unnecessary. That was not always true in the papacy's more turbulent past. As recently as the 19th century, a Roman nobleman, Prince Don Agostino Chigi, reported that an autopsy was performed on the body of Pius VIII in 1830 after his sudden death...