Word: xii
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Although the Vatican will not admit it, Pio Nono is a last-minute substitution for a controversial successor, Pius XII. The beatification of the later Pius was to have balanced that of Pope John XXIII, the liberal hero who called the Second Vatican Council. The past 40 years, however, have seen an unabating storm of complaint that Pius XII did not do enough to oppose the Holocaust. Postponing Pius XII's "cause" and replacing it with that of Pio Nono--also a conservative favorite--must have seemed a good idea at the time...
Pius, in fact, is one of the modern church's problematic giants. His papacy as a whole was far more controversial than Pius XII's. He was the longest-serving Pope since St. Peter, reigning 32 years from 1846 to his death. He lost the Papal States, the Vatican's worldly kingdom. He promulgated two of Catholicism's most triumphal doctrines--the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and papal infallibility. He pioneered the papal personality movement that John Paul embodies so brilliantly. Many historians believe he created the modern papacy...
...beginning in 1962 and inaugurated a modern, more liberal church. John XXIII, needless to say, is not a favorite of theological conservatives, who've spent much of John Paul II's papacy trying to undo his legacy. The liberal pope was to have been beatified in parallel with Pius XII, but with the controversy over that pontiff's record in relation to the Nazis having helped slow his beatification, Pius IX moved up in line to maintain the balance. Ironically, - or, perhaps, an acute reflection of the complex balancing act of Vatican power - one of the most active advocates...
...declare two of his predecessors blessed. The elevation of John XXIII, hero of the progressive Vatican II initiatives of the early 1960s, will raise no hackles, but that of Pius IX, an oppressor of Jews in the mid-1800s, will. (The march toward canonization of another Pius--XII--has stalled in the face of renewed charges that he stood by silently during the Holocaust.) John Paul also plans to bestow sainthood on two women this year--the Polish nun Faustina Kowalska, who died in a Nazi concentration camp; and Katharine Drexel, an American socialite turned educator who dedicated her life...
...Deheisha, the speech's effect depended on whether one listened to the Pope's music or his words. He made no mention of flash points such as the "silence" of Holocaust-era Pope Pius XII or the distinction between sins of misguided church members and the possible misguidance of the church as a whole. Some Jewish leaders later pointed this out. But most echoed the American Jewish Congress's Phil Baum, who admitted that "it was perhaps wishful thinking that the Pope would explicitly apologize in his visit to Yad Vashem today for the silence of Pope Pius XII...