Word: sainthood
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Catholic Church's process of declaring saints is a complex and fascinating one. On Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI announced that several candidates for sainthood had reached the initial "venerable" status, having been shown by a Vatican committee to have lived heroically virtuous lives. If a scientifically inexplicable miracle is subsequently attributed to their post-mortem intercession, the second step of "beatification" takes place, followed by eventual canonization if a second miracle is proven. Two popes were among the new "venerables." The first was Benedict's still-mega-popular predecessor, John Paul II. The other, however, has doubts swirling around...
...quietly worked to provide shelter for some Jews in Rome, and avoided public denunciations of Hitler's Final Solution because it would have prompted a Nazi backlash. After the German-born Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger rose to the chair of St. Peter, he initially decided to shelve Pius' candidacy for sainthood for further study and an examination of documents in the Vatican archive. With debate still heated about the historical facts - and with Benedict, a German of that era, in the papacy - many observers believed it might just be better for his successors to make the call on Pius' virtues...
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...
...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 is just like the future German Pope himself. (See Pope Pius...
...watched a documentary about Portland, Ore., and in it there was a woman who drove her minivan 25 miles to a local farm to buy a few days' worth of produce. So that's a 50-mile round trip for maybe 10 lb. of groceries. Whatever sense of environmental sainthood she felt was vastly outweighed by the energy of using an entire minivan to collect a few days' worth of produce. (Read "The Clean-Energy Scam...