Word: wojtyla
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...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...
This was glasnost, 200 proof. The head of the communist world had bumped into the answer to Stalin's question: How many divisions has the Pope? And the Pope was engaging in spiritual geopolitics at summit level: he wanted human rights for the faithful in Russia. Karol Wojtyla's training was extensive, dating back to discreet studies for the priesthood under Nazi occupation in Poland. After that, parish work and academic studies under communist rule, leading in 1963 to the episcopacy in Cracow. Pity poor Gorbachev. Seventy-two years of formal national commitment to atheism, backed by the Gulag...
That was a subtle and learned line, and it is used in many contexts to fondle the difficulties John Paul II has frequently expressed about capitalism. In his long travails, Karol Wojtyla has spoken critically about Western economic arrangements, and it was this theme that caught the opportunistic eye of Gerasimov. Didn't communism, like early Christianity, seek to eliminate poverty? Was not the communist ideal an expression of Christian concern for the communal ownership of property...
...face value, it is difficult to understand why. Eighty percent of American Catholics, according to recent polls, disagree with the Pope's conservative stances on issues like abortion, homosexuality and the all-male celibate clergy. The unapologetic orthodoxy that Karol Wojtyla has made the hallmark of the church as it enters the next millenium does not play well to American Catholic audiences. Protestants and Jews, it would seem, disagree with his views that much more...
...John Paul approaches the twilight of his papacy, the question arises -- who will be the next Pope? For more than 450 years before Karol Wojtyla's elevation, the papacy was held by Italians. And when the present Polish experiment is over, some Vatican insiders insist that the Holy See will be returned to its traditional caretakers. "You can bet your last dollar that the next Pope will be one of ours," said one up-and-coming Roman prelate. "I don't know who it will be, but he'll be Italian...