Word: xvi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After three days of rising protests from students and professors, Pope Benedict XVI has pulled out of a long-scheduled visit Thursday to Rome's historic La Sapienza University. The surprise announcement Tuesday afternoon caps a high-stakes academic firefight between fiercely secular scholars and the former professor Pontiff that included a letter from 67 faculty members calling for the cancellation of Benedict's speech...
...secular critics in Rome are all that interested in revisiting the debates of the past; there is plenty of fresh intellectual manna now to tussle over. And Benedict, with his rigorous academic background, is increasingly the focus of the attention. Indeed, the most highly charged moment of Benedict XVI's papacy thus far came in the gracious confines of a German university lecture hall. On that late afternoon of September 12, 2006, the Pope's discourse on faith, reason and violence at the University of Regensberg, where he'd once taught theology, was greeted with long and warm applause...
...wealth produces a signature style: call it crass class. The Kuwaiti Emir's residence, where President George W. Bush had dinner last Friday evening is, for example, a sprawling mix of gaudy contemporary art and expensive antiques. Loud paintings of harems and the ruling Sabah clan hang near Louis XVI enameled clocks and candlesticks in the long hallways. Enormous, overstuffed sofas squat on a collection of rare antique carpets in room after empty room. Behind the palace, two speedboats and a large yacht protected behind the Emir's man-made harbor obscure the otherwise lovely view of the Persian Gulf...
...incense and intrigue of another papal conclave is upon us again. Well, sort of. Pope Benedict XVI is alive and well and attending to his mission as absolute ruler of the Roman Catholic Church for the foreseeable future. But just down the block from St. Peter's Square, church elders - though not all so old, and without a Cardinal among them - have begun gathering for a closed-door meeting to elect the man dubbed the "black pope." That's the moniker historically assigned to the leader of the Jesuit order: for the color of the simple priestly vestments he keeps...
...been nearly two decades since the defeat of the Communist atheist-materialism that had long been Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the Catholic Church. But if Pope Benedict XVI's latest encyclical, "Spe Salvi," is any indication, the spirit of Karl Marx is still alive and well in the halls of the Vatican...