Word: wojtyla
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...John Paul's early papacy and to his almost instantaneous rise to heroic status was the very aspect that made his election in 1978 so stunning. Unlike generations of Italian Popes brought up to pronounce on the world's great events yet largely cloistered from them, Karol Wojtyla lived in the early 20th century world about as intensely as it was imaginable to do and still survive it. Born in 1920, as Poland, a once great power, was moving toward its postwar sovereignty after more than a century of bitter subjugation, the army officer's son planned to study...
After the war, in the late 1940s, as the communist government settled in, the young priest embarked on what would be a rapid rise through the still embattled church's hierarchy. By 1967 he was a Cardinal. Mixing aggressiveness with accommodation, Wojtyla managed to build a huge church for 100,000 Catholic citizens in the industrial city of Nova Huta and reach out to a wide cross section of workers, youths and intellectuals. Yet what turned a provincial prince into a rising church star was the churchwide reform of Vatican II. At the Second Vatican Council (1961-65), Wojtyla contributed...
...book came out against contraception, and Karol Wojtyla went on to draft much of the language in Pope Paul VI's controversial 1968 directive reiterating that church prohibition. (Although many U.S. Catholics have long ignored the ban, some found their anger reignited in the 1990s when the Pope opposed AIDS-containment programs because of their use of condoms.) As Pope, he irritated both abortion-rights and population activists at a 1994 U.N. conference in Cairo by insisting on passing language that stated, "In no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning." In 1988 the Pope, despite...
...leaders, from the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop of Canterbury to Sikh clerics and Zoroastrian priests, in the Italian town of Assisi, despite objections by Christian ultraconservatives. He was the first Pope to visit a mosque. But his most persistent and eloquent outreach was to Jews. At Vatican II, Wojtyla supported language clearing Jews of deicide and reaffirming Judaism's integrity. As Pope, he lived those words. He was the first modern Pontiff to enter a synagogue and the first to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. He referred to Jews as Christians' "elder brothers" in faith--an embrace that will...
...bells began tolling at 10:37 Saturday night, an hour after he breathed his last. Thus passed Karol Jozef Wojtyla, Vicar of Jesus Christ and head of the billion-member Roman Catholic Church, dead at 84 after a life spent walking in Christ's rugged path...