Obituary: Pope John Paul II . He made more than 1. In 1. 98. 9, he went to Paraguay, where he publicly rebuked the long- serving dictator Alfredo Stroessner and greeted opposition leaders; months later, the regime fell. In 1. 99. 8, on one of his most highly publicised journeys to Cuba, he had Fidel Castro eating out of his hand, even as he publicly challenged the Cuban president to grant . After the visit there followed the release of political prisoners, the easing of restrictions on religious liberty, and a softening of the US economic embargo.
The Polish- born Karol Wojtyla had almost become an actor before he became a priest, and he always retained his talent for creating a rapport with crowds. A bishop at 3. 8, a cardinal at 4. Italian popes. On his first visit home as Pope, in June 1. Victory Square, Warsaw, where a 6.
Born: 18-May-1920 Birthplace: Wadowice, Poland Died: 2-Apr-2005 Location of death: Vatican City Cause of death: Heart Failure.
No communist country had seen anything like it before. In Poland, John Paul acted as a tribune of the people, a true populist, articulating the nation's deepest aspirations. He gave Poles the self- confidence they needed to found Solidarnosc as a unique alliance of workers and intellectuals. The dismantling of communism began there. Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that without John Paul the end of communism would not have come so swiftly; it was his greatest achievement, done without violence - history's first great . He was less sure about what followed.
Pope John Paul II made history and was considered a vocal advocate for human rights. Learn more at Biography.com. These statues capture all the characteristic features of Pope John Paul II. All original features are retained and captured from the molding process.
The replacement of communism in Poland by (as he saw it) a soggy liberalism which, under the guise of . Yet he could not restore the theocracy of which he might have dreamed. Elected in October 1. John Paul outlasted all other international figures of his era. True, he did not have the awkward business of submitting himself for re- election. The papacy is for life, and in his last years the strain began to show as he struggled with Parkinson's disease and intestinal problems.
- John Paul II (1920–2005) served as pope of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City from 1978 until his death almost 27 years later.
- The first attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II took place on Wednesday,, in St. Peter's Square at Vatican City. The Pope was shot and wounded by.
- The research and numerous interviews with the Vatican and Pope John Paul II's close associates, make for a humorous and insightful storyline.
- Pope John Paul II's notes to be printed after aide saved them from burning. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz says he was ordered to burn notes by late pope but kept them.
- Pope John Paul II has been credited with inspiring political change that not only led to the collapse of Communism in his native Poland and eventually all of Eastern.
But even in his physically reduced state - hands shaking, speech slurred and gait unsteady - he retained such an undiminished vision that the cardinals would no doubt have given him a vote of confidence, had he asked for one. Back in 1. 97. 8, they had chosen John Paul as a strong, fit pope who would define Catholic identity against all fuzziness. He was never very happy about the US, seeing in it a hotbed of subversion, where . The 1. 99. 0s scandal of paedophile clergy only confirmed his impression of a degenerate society in which Catholicism had lost its way. Certainly, a key to understanding John Paul's pontificate is to see it as the repudiation of the policies followed under Pope Paul VI (1.
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On his election, he took the name John Paul II because, he said, he wanted to stress his continuity with Paul VI and John Paul I, who died suddenly after just 3. Fine words, but Paul VI, although not widely regarded as a liberal, was the friend of liberals, and kept open some doors that John Paul quickly closed. Paul was ecumenically minded and sought genuinely to better relations with other Christians. John Paul made some rhetorical concessions early on, but soon showed that he regarded his office as an asset for Christian unity: all the problems would be resolved if only others would recognise the need for a return to his authority.
Yet, at first, he seemed to get on well with Robert Runcie, his first Archbishop of Canterbury. Together, as brother primates, they walked up the aisle in Canterbury cathedral during the papal visit of 1. Falklands war. Together, pope and archbishop venerated the ancient Canterbury gospel.
The official Roman response to the Anglican- Roman Catholic International Commission agreements showed no understanding of the method of the documents. Worse was to follow as the Church of England began ordaining women in March 1. John Paul issued a peremptory apostolic letter declaring . He forbade Catholics from discussing the matter further. Relations with the Russian Orthodox church reached a new low despite John Paul's natural sympathy for eastern Christianity.
So long as the Soviet Union lasted, theological dialogue was pursued in accordance with the Pope's theory that Europe should . He meant that it needed to combine the more rational, juridical, organisation- minded . But as the Soviet Union fell apart, Ukraine proved a tough battleground. Stalin had abolished the 4m- strong Ukrainian Catholic Church in 1. Gorbachev legalised it after visiting John Paul in December 1. In western Ukraine, the result was unseemly fighting over the possession of churches, and the Russian Orthodox lost out to Ukrainian nationalism, inevitably. John Paul annoyed the Moscow patriarch still more by creating Catholic dioceses on Russian territory.
The new patriarch, Alexis II, talked darkly about . The Russian bishops were constantly insulted by the evocation of their KGB past. Many will remember John Paul II for his pronouncements on sexual matters.
He endorsed everything that Paul VI had said, but sharpened it to an extraordinary degree. Catholics who practised artificial birth control, he said in 1. This illiberal doctrine surfaced again in the 1. Veritatis Splendor, and the moral absolutes it laid down shaped the intransigence of the Holy See at the 1.
UN conference on population and development in Cairo. There was no space for debate or dialogue. So, one by one, John Paul alienated the people he needed to have on his side in his grand project of a .
The Jesuits, with 2. When their leader, the much- loved Father Pedro Arrupe, was felled by a stroke in August 1. John Paul suspended constitutional procedures and imposed a .
An 8. 0- year old Jesuit, Paolo Dezza, was named and, by astute footwork, enabled the tension to subside. Two years later, the Jesuits calmly elected a new general, Peter- Hans Kolvenbach. The attempt to redirect the Jesuits failed, as did subsequent interferences with the Franciscans, and with the Carmelite nuns, who were ordered to return to their antiquated rule despite a majority vote for change. It was the new movements - such as Opus Dei and Comunione e Liberazione - that John Paul thought embodied the charisms once possessed by the established orders. The 1. 1 million members of the religious orders took this on the chin.
They had plenty of martyrs in this period, mostly at the hands of the Latin American military. The six Jesuits of the University of El Salvador, slain in 1. Yet John Paul barely noticed them. Meanwhile, Opus Dei had a privileged place and role. In 2. 00. 2, its founder, Josemar. Comunione e Liberazione, a more Italian than Spanish movement, was weakened by the general collapse of the Italian Christian Democrats, in 1.
In July 1. 99. 4, one of its members, Rocco Buttiglione, became the leader of the rump of the Christian Democrats. He is the author of a book on the Pope's philosophy, and, in 2. European commissioner.
On the whole, John Paul thoroughly and needlessly offended theologians. In the first year of the pontificate, the story was mooted that he would attack five . Within a short time, investigations were under way against the Swiss Hans K. All were incriminated in different ways and with varying success. All remained priests - except Boff, who left the Franciscans, he claimed, to become a . Later, the most severe attack was launched against a Sri Lankan liberation theologian, Tissa Balasuriya, who was declared in 1. Christ in a way less alienating for those of other faiths.
Balasuriya appealed to the Pope, only to be told that he had personally authorised every move. Such scandal was caused by the process against an aged and devoted priest that, more than a year later, six days of tough negotiation resulted in the lifting of the excommunication. Behind all these controversial cases lay a vast array of theologians who shared the views of their colleagues and waited for the tempest to pass.
They were not reassured by documents denouncing . John Paul's mistake, no doubt learned in communist Poland, was to confuse honest disagreement with unacceptable . As Pope, he also offended bishops. First, he appointed traditionalists, often linked with Opus Dei, to . This produced a crop of bishops appointed for their very unpopularity, who were left stranded in their palaces. In Chur, in Switzerland, the congregation lay down in protest in front of the cathedral during the consecration of the deeply conservative Bishop Wolfgang Haas, who had been foisted on them by Rome. Bishops were also disconcerted by John Paul's insistence that episcopal conferences (or national benches of bishops) had no mandate to teach and no theological status.
This undermined what the reforming Second Vatican Council of the 1. It was also insulting to the hard work which, say, the US bishops had done in their seminal pastoral letters on peace issues and economic justice - both the products of intensive consultation. The French were equally nonplussed to find their imaginative catechetical work, Pierres Vivantes, scrapped and replaced in 1. The Catechism Of The Catholic Church. The English translation of this bestseller - more than 2m copies sold in the US alone - was held up until 1.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (ex- Holy Office, ex- Holy Inquisition), was headed by the Bavarian Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as prefect from December 1. An excellent academic theologian before his appointment, he was much blamed for the papal hard line, perhaps unjustly. According to the reform of the Roman curia devised by John Paul, Ratzinger should have retired after two five- year terms in 1. His department produced a stream of intolerant documents condemning, among others, liberation theology and test- tube babies. In 1. 99. 7, it published an extraordinary attack (signed by eight Vatican departments) warning the . In 2. 00. 3, it described the recognition of gay partnerships as .