Word: pope
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...Tuesday's White House briefing whether the First Family is still searching for a local church to join, press secretary Robert Gibbs responded: "The President has attended fairly regularly up at Camp David a church that he's comfortable in and has enjoyed attending." (See pictures of Obama meeting Pope Benedict...
...guidelines are quite rigid for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to verify what qualifies as the necessary "heroic virtues" for the venerable. But ultimately it is the Pope who decides whether to sign the decree. And though his papacy can sometimes seem by-the-book, certain Benedict decisions must be mined for personal motivations. Joseph Ratzinger was a devout 12-year-old in the heavily Catholic region of Bavaria when Eugenio Pacelli became Pope in 1939. Through his early years as priest and theologian, Ratzinger remained devoted to Pius until the pontiff's death in 1958. A Vatican...
Being a German of that era may, in fact, have been part of what drove Benedict to ultimately declare Pius venerable, and on the road to sainthood. What if the archives didn't resolve the issue for historians? What if the next Pope doesn't have the personal memories of Pacelli? Benedict may have felt he needed to act to ensure that the record showed that his Pope was a man of saintly virtues. In other discourses, notably one delivered on a 2006 trip to Auschwitz, Benedict has spoken about how Catholics and Germans of good faith - like himself - were...
...Hitler's slaughter doesn't seem to be a topic really worth pursuing. Whether Pius' sheltering some Roman families was the best result he could have achieved, or whether he should have better and more courageously used his diplomatic channels and bully pulpit is not a question the current Pope is driven to answer. Benedict's decision to move Pius' cause for sainthood forward is a declaration that the wartime Pope was a Catholic in good faith, a victim of the historical events that did not afford him the means to stop the bloodshed around him. In a way, that...
...synagogue is officially still on, but Italy's Jewish leaders are upset by the news. It follows a string of perceived slights and slip-ups by Benedict, including his bringing back into the fold followers of the movement founded by arch-traditionalist French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. A speech the Pope gave in May at Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial also left many Jews disappointed at its vagueness about the German role in events and the numbers of people murdered. The strongest language in response to the Pius announcement came from Benedict's native Germany, where Stephan Kramer, who heads the country...