Word: pius
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
JOHN PAUL II, 1978- 819 280 PIUS XI, 1922-39 380 34 PIUS IX, 1846-78 210 52 PIUS XII, 1939-58 148 33 LEO XIII...
...first Pope was Pius XII. Her parents found him "a bit sour." Growing up in Lebanon, Ky., Betty Spalding went to confession, heard Mass in Latin and wore a demure chapel veil. She prayed avidly: "I was adding it up, earning heaven." In junior high school the nuns told her that John XXIII, Pius' successor, was "opening the windows of the church, and that appealed to me." Not that she would dream of contradicting a Pontiff anyway. "If the Pope said it, that was fine with me," she recalls...
...Pius' story can be seen as the macro to Edith Stein's micro. Devout and ascetic in life, long a favorite of the church's conservative branch, the wartime Pontiff has been sharply criticized both by Jewish leaders and church liberals for his refusal to publicly condemn the Nazis, a "silence" that some suggest may have cost untold Jewish lives. Pius' defenders reply heatedly that his efforts to hide Jews in Italy and elsewhere saved thousands. More important, they insist that silence was the best policy--and here Pius' story intersects Stein's. According to Gumpel, Pius was about...
Many, not all of them Jewish, disagree. Some say the "evidence" on Pius is not all in, claiming that the Vatican has yet to open all pertinent archives. Others, like the Rev. Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame, feel they know enough to conclude that outrage on Pius' part "would have given pause to the Nazis and perhaps changed the complexion of what happened at the end of the war." McBrien contrasts Pius' silence with John Paul II's risky but successful support of Poland's Solidarity trade union in the 1980s. Some analysts speculate that valid...
...courageous, nonetheless says there are those who see Stein's canonization as part of a "strategy," that "if you show that everyone was a victim, then the church has no responsibility [and] no guilt in the Holocaust." Such conspiracy buffs might want to toss in the Stepinac beatification, Pius' prospects, parts of We Remember and the erection of crosses outside Auschwitz by right-wing Polish Catholics...