Word: pontiffs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...another attribute the Cardinals may seek. "Just as Bill Clinton was considered the first African-American President," he suggests, "John Paul could have been considered the first Third World Pope." With his wholehearted visits to Brazilian favelas and his efforts on behalf of debt forgiveness, says Gibson, the late Pontiff's evident Europeanness did not prevent him from becoming "a hero in the southern hemisphere...
...there are signs of what might be called a movement against the tyranny of charisma. "The people are voicing their opinion for another figure who can hold the spotlight like Karol Wojtyla," says Vittorio Messori, a church historian who helped focus that spotlight by editing the late Pontiff's best seller Crossing the Threshold of Hope. "But what the church needs now is structure, governance and patient service." That sentiment is echoed by a surprisingly wide cross section of clerics who think that the former Pope's flair for the symbolic gesture sometimes came at the expense of administrative housecleaning...
...that they loved him, the late Pontiff's bishops did not thrive under him. The language of the Second Vatican Council had seemed to promise greater "collegiality" between bishops and the Pope (whose office for centuries was less powerful than now). But John Paul did not see it that way. He applied theological litmus tests for bishops' appointments and required national bishops' conferences to clear statements on doctrine with the Vatican. "Even conservative Cardinals of large archdioceses have been unhappy with the way the Curia has interfered with their authority," says McBrien. "They want a Pope who will respect that...
...thus I struggled to reconcile those “outdated” ideas with the Pope’s more progressive leanings. After all, this Pope traveled to more than 120 countries, by far the most of any Pontiff. This was the Pope who shifted the center of gravity of the Catholic Church away from tradition, Europe, and Italy and into the developing world, elevating hundreds of new cardinals and welcoming hundreds of millions of new Catholics in Africa, Asia, and South America. This Pope stood up against communism in his native Poland and issued apologies for the Church?...
...moral matters, the Pontiff was not a man given to seeing complexities, fine distinctions, or shades of gray. His refusal to compromise on matters such as contraception, abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality seemed something out of another age. Many thought—and still think—him to be an out of touch relic: the leader of an old and superstitious faith who will soon be forgotten by a more sophisticated society...