Word: wojtyla
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been more than two decades since the Italians did their collective double take. Cardinal Karol Wojtyla? "Chi e?" they said -- who?s he? The first pope from Eastern Europe. The first non-Italian pope since 1522. A consensus pope, born and forged not in one of the Renaissance cities of Italy but in Poland, the cauldron of 20th-century Europe, where Nazism, communism and the Holocaust had all left their bloody prints during his lifetime. A poet/philosopher/ditch digger/actor/downhill-skier pope whom the College of Cardinals evidently expected -- the man was only 58 years old, after all, and built like a rugby...
...lead it he has, not just forward but outward. "It is as if a Third World cardinal had won," remarked a Brazilian archbishop when Wojtyla was elected. The Catholics of that world, who often felt isolated and alienated by the Vatican?s high palace walls, were the ones John Paul II was determined to bring into his church. He proved to be a tireless traveler and a relentless evangelizer, taking his ready wit and common touch -- and a telegenic quality unlike any other pope?s -- to nearly every corner of the far-flung but fractured Catholic world. "He?s totally...
...made zealots of the converted and converts of the heathen, but John Paul II has brooked no heretics. There is some debate over the pope's adherence to or deconstruction of Vatican II, a reform council convened in the early '60s (at which young Bishop Wojtyla first made his mark by drafting a document declaring the primacy of religious freedom, even for non-Catholics). But it is impossible to call John Paul II anything other than a conservative. He does not take to new currents in Catholicism, and has displayed a ready pen for excommunication. He is stoutly against birth...
...first day of the new millennium ?- and you don?t hear John Paul, the first celebrity pope, splitting holy hairs about January 1, 2000, not technically being the millennium ?- is the kickoff of the Jubilee, a celebration that might have been just another musty Vatican ceremonial if Karol Wojtyla hadn?t come along. Under John Paul II, thanks to countless hours and countless lire, it?s more like a worldwide, millennium?s-end sales event. "He?s determined to make it a time for conversion, diocese by diocese," says Burke. "To him, it?s an incredible historical opportunity to spread...
...hands, feet and side. Suspicious about the stigmata as well as his reputation for seeing visions and being in two places at once, the Vatican investigated the friar and curtailed his activities. But he was sought out by believers, including, in 1947, a Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla, who reportedly was told he'd someday be Pope. As Cracow's auxiliary bishop, Wojtyla asked Padre Pio to pray for a friend with cancer; she recovered, and is still alive. In 1983 the Pontiff put him on the path to sainthood, and the final step of canonization could come within...