INGLÊS FORMAÇÃO
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AlQaeda - BEIRA – à b. do abismo: GENIE – (usually the edge) [sing.] the point at which sth, especially sth bad, may BEGIN to happen. –
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BRITISHPRIMEMINISTERSTONYBLAIR
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CHARLESLINDBERGH'S: DE – targeting –
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DALAI LAMA: A Monk's Struggle.Wednesday, Mar. 19, 2008 By PICO IYER
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EUTHANASIA - Death Sets French Euthanasia Debate
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FICAR maluco com o sucesso – go crazy… – 21YearsAgo
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ÍCAROBRASIL: ●1INGLÊSportuguêsINGLÊSi•1INGLÊSportuguêsINGLÊSp●
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JOHN PAUL II; JOHN XXIII; JOHN PAUL I;
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METÁFORA - AmetáforaEaLinguísticaTextual
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NIKITAKHRUSHCHEV: CORRER BEM – QUANDOASCOISASNÃOCORRERAMBEM - ." When things went wrong
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PAULOVI - SOME – PAULOVI (1); TER - bear – (1)
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RATZINGER - THETURNINGPOINT theologicalrebellion CLERICALCELIBACY
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21 YEARS AGO I N ROM (CONVERTER TABELAS EM TEXTO)
INGLÊS FORMAÇÃO
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SPIDER-MAN 2
Poor Peter Parker (the fantastic Tobey Maguire) struggles to balance his dual identities...A sequel that's bigger and better than the original; awesome special effects, an intelligent script and a psychological and emotional depth rarely seen in a blockbuster.
Watch the Spider-Man 2 trailer in our movie special
SHREK 2
It was never going to be easy following up the original, innovative and absolutely hilarious first film but this sequel is just as sharp and funny. Inspired casting sees Antonio Banderas stealing the show as Puss In Boots.
Watch the Shrek 2 trailer
COLLATERAL
Director Michael (Heat) Mann's taut thriller is a killer of an adrenaline rush and Tom Cruise is one of the reasons why. When he's good, he's very, very good - but when he's bad, he's electrifying; morally ambiguous roles suit him.
Watch the Collateral trailer in our movie special
THE AVIATOR
If this movie doesn't win Martin Scorsese his first ever Oscar, the Academy should hang its head in shame. The Aviator is a glamorous biopic of the legendary playboy, movie producer and director Howard Hughes. It's a genuine crowd-pleaser that the golden greats of Hollywood would be proud of.
Watch the trailer for The Aviator here
THE INCREDIBLES
From the Academy Award® winning creators of 'Toy Story' and 'Finding Nemo' comes this hilarious, action-packed, adventure. The visuals are absolutely stunning but beneath the computer-generated imagery lies a heart-warming film filled with superb characters.
Watch the trailer for The Incredibles in our movie special
ZATOICHI
Written, directed by and starring Takeshi Kitano, this is a clever retelling of the Zatoichi samurai epic. It almost sounds crass to say that there's a beauty to the stylised violence and gore on display - but there is. Essential viewing for martial arts fans.
Watch the trailer for Zatoichi
Posted Sunday, March 27, 2005Pat Robertson called the removal of her feeding tube "judicial murder," and House majority leader Tom DeLay described it as an "act of medical terrorism." Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, one of only five House Republicans to vote against Congress's emergency legislation throwing the Terri Schiavo case into the federal courts, declared that "this Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy." Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, acting as spokesman for the parents of the severely brain damaged woman and making even his counterparts on the conservative right wince in embarrassment, inveighed in a mass e-mailing that Florida State Circuit Court Judge George Greer, who approved the request by Schiavo's husband to let her die, "has shown more courage in trying to kill Terri Schiavo than Governor [Jeb] Bush has shown in trying to save her." Just a few days before Easter, Brother Paul O'Donnell, a Franciscan monk and spiritual adviser to Robert and Mary Schindler, Schiavo's parents, said, "We pray that this modern-day crucifixion will not happen."
With Schiavo's life hanging in the balance, and people on both sides of the case holding strong beliefs about her right to live or die, passions were understandably running high. But as the endless barrage of inflammatory rhetoric and sometimes blatant posturing continued, the Florida woman at the center of the bitterly fought case seemed to have become a sideshow. "This is not about Terri Schiavo," says George Annas, chairman of the health law department at Boston University School of Public Health. "I think this is about abortion and stem cells. Congress wants to say that we need pro-life judges because the judiciary is out of control and favors death over life."
Sep. 7, 1953
Princess Anne's pretty, high-arched feet were tired. The endless rounds of official visits required of royalty on tour had left her toes cramped and sore. Her face showed no sign of her trouble as she stood —aloof, beautiful and dignified in flowing white brocade—to receive the distinguished noblemen and diplomats who thronged the glittering reception hall in the great palazzo. Gravely smiling, she greeted, in half-a-dozen languages, each baron and ambassador, each banker's lady and minister of state with the correct slight nod and carefully chosen words. There seemed to be not a flaw in the well-ordered proceedings. Then the camera peeped impertinently beneath the princess' royal skirts. It revealed the awful fact that she had slipped off one of her high-heeled shoes and, standing in perfect balance on one foot, was happily, restfully wriggling the toes of the other.
Exquisitely blending queenly dignity and bubbling mischief, a stick-slim actress with huge, limpid eyes and a heart-shaped face was teaching U.S. moviegoers last week a lesson they already knew and loved —i.e., that the life of a princess is not a happy one. Balcony bobby-soxers for years have shed pleasant tears at the plight of trapped royalty, and breathed a happy sigh of relief when at last the royal one escapes into a commoner's arms (Olivia de Havilland and a handsome pilot in 1943's Princess O'Rourke; Vera-Ellen and a tap-dancing reporter in 1953's Call Me Madam). As the princess in Paramount's new picture, Roman Holiday, the newcomer named Audrey Hepburn gives the popular old romantic nonsense a reality it has seldom had before. Amid the rhinestone glitter of Roman Holiday's make-believe, Paramount's new star sparkles and glows with the fire of a finely cut diamond. Impertinence, hauteur, sudden repentance, happiness, rebellion and fatigue supplant each other with lightning speed on her mobile, adolescent face.
Pathos & Dignity. When the movie princess escapes, on impulse, from dull routine and is found, drunk on a sedative, by Reporter Gregory Peck on a bench in a Roman park, Audrey makes her helplessness absolutely winning by her quiet assumption that Peck will tend to her needs just as her personal maid might. "I've never been alone with a man before," she says severely a bit later in Peck's apartment, "even with my dress on," and her trusting innocence becomes a sure guarantee of safety. Audrey Hepburn's princess seems never to forget her exalted station, even when she is gulping an ice cream cone, getting her hair cut or whamming a cop over the head with a guitar in a nightclub dustup. Yet to scenes where she is playing the princess proper, she brings a wistfulness that seems completely unposed. She can be infinitely appealing with her hair snarled and her dress dripping wet. In the film's final moments, she becomes a lonely little figure of great pathos and dignity.
Bridging the Gap. The skies over Hollywood have exploded with new stars time and time again: heavily accented" femmes fatales like Pola Negri, sturdy peasants like Anna Sten, indestructible waifs like Luise Rainer or Elisabeth Bergner, calendar girls like Marilyn Monroe, dignified stars from London's West End like Deborah Kerr. Audrey Hepburn fits none of the clichés and none of the clichés fit her. Even hard-boiled Hollywood personages who have seen new dames come & go are hard put to find words to describe Audrey. Tough Guy Humphrey Bogart calls her "elfin" and "birdlike." Director John Huston frankly moons: "Those thin gams, those thin arms and that wonderful face ..." Director Billy Wilder, who is slated to direct Audrey's second picture (Sabrina Fair), contents himself with a prophecy: "This girl, singlehanded, may make bosoms a thing of the past."
The truth is that the quality Audrey brings to the screen is not dependent on her figure, her face, her accent (which is neither quite British nor quite foreign) or even her talent. Belgian-born (of a Dutch mother and an Anglo-Irish father), she has, like all great actresses from Maude Adams to Greta Garbo, the magic ability to bridge the gap between herself and her audience, and to make her innermost feelings instantly known and shared.
Hollywood's first inkling of this magic quality came when a screen test ordered by Director William Wyler was viewed by Paramount's brass. It showed Audrey playing the princess part a little nervously, a little self-consciously. But Wyler had played a sly trick on the newcomer by ordering the British director who made her test to keep his cameras turning after the scene was over. When the word "cut" rang out, Audrey sat up in her royal bed, suddenly natural as a puppy, hugging her knees and grinning the delighted grin of a well-behaved child who has earned a cookie.
"She was absolutely delicious," says Wyler. "We were fascinated," says Paramount's Production Boss Don Hartman. "It's no credit to anyone that we signed her immediately."
Monte Carlo Baby. Audrey's screen test clinched Wyler's decision to make the picture on which it was based. He had considered and rejected most of the obvious Hollywood beauties for the part. He picked Audrey not so much on the basis of her talent as on the fact that she was unknown, and could not therefore be spotted through the royal disguise. The only trouble was that Audrey refused to stay unknown.
As a London chorus girl, she had wangled some bit parts in British movies, e.g., the cigarette girl in the opening scene of Alec Guinness' Lavender Hill Mob. Then a Paramount scout in London spotted her. One picture, called Monte Carlo Baby, called for location shots in Monaco's Hotel de Paris. Just as Audrey stepped into the rays of the klieg lights in the lobby to run through her brief scene as a honeymooning bride, the door swung open and in rolled an old lady in a wheelchair. It was famed French Novelist Colette, one of whose many bestselling novels, Gigi, had just been dramatized in English by Anita (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) Loos. Colette held up an imperious finger to halt the wheelchair as Audrey did her bit before the camera. Then she turned to her husband. "Voila," she whispered, indicating Audrey, "there's your Gigi."
That afternoon a startled young actress listened in saucer-eyed wonder as M. Maurice Goudeket explained that his wife, the great Colette, had personally picked her to play the lead in a Broadway play. A few weeks later, after an expensive exchange of cablegrams and consultations with Broadway Producer Gilbert Miller, Author Loos herself flew to London to confirm Colette's judgment. "I tried to explain to all of them that I wasn't ready to do a lead," said Audrey in New York last week, "but they didn't agree, and I certainly wasn't going to argue with them."
A bit-playing actress who was virtually unknown thus signed up, almost simultaneously, to star in a Broadway play and a Hollywood movie.
Dolls Aren't Real. Audrey's mother belonged to an ancient family in the Dutch nobility; their home was once the Castle of Doom, in which the defeated German Kaiser spent his declining years. Audrey's grandfather, Baron Aernoud van Heemstra, onetime governor of the Dutch colony of Surinam, was a familiar figure at the court of Queen Wilhelmina.
Born in Brussels in 1929, Audrey herself was the product of a divorced mother's second marriage, an unhappy alliance that ended in another divorce when Audrey was ten. Her father, J. A. Hepburn-Ruston, was a high-pressure business promoter and rabid anti-Communist who, after leaving Audrey's mother, joined Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts (British Union of Fascists). Audrey's earliest companions were her two older half brothers, with whom she spent many hours in tomboy comradeship, climbing trees and racing across the green fields of their Belgian estate. Unlike most little girls, she did not care for dolls. "They never seemed real to me," she says. She preferred instead the company of dogs, cats, rabbits and other animals with as much vitality as herself. In her quiet moments, she would dress up in the make-believe that others kept for their dolls, and wherever a bush or a tree or a spare piece of furniture formed a secret corner, she would build herself an imaginary castle and sit happily for hours drawing pictures or dreaming dreams.
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Ballet in the Underground. When she was four, Audrey began spending her winters at school in England. In 1939, after her mother's divorce and Britain's declaration of war on Germany, she went to stay at Arnhem, where the Van Heemstra family had their home. There, one day in 1940, she was taken to see a performance of Britain's Sadler's Wells ballet company. She went home entranced and determined to be a ballet dancer herself.
Next day the Nazis invaded The Netherlands. It was a weird, unreal world in which Audrey, the gay-grave dreamer of fairy tales, found herself: a world where terror lurked in every shadow and neighbors could disappear overnight. Audrey's own uncle, a prominent lawyer in Arnhem, was one of the first victims of Nazi "discipline." He was shot as one of six hostages in retaliation for a plot to blow up a German train. Audrey's cousin, an adjutant at the royal court, was also executed.
A British subject who spoke both French and English much too fluently for comfort in the streets of Arnhem, Audrey was sent to school to learn the language of her mother's people. In the afternoons she took drawing lessons, and once a week she went to the local conservatory of music to learn ballet. Sometimes, on her way to school, she would carry messages for the underground in her shoes. Later, when her dancing had become fairly proficient, she and a friend who played the piano gave dance recitals in private houses to collect money for the resistance. It was against
Nazi regulations for more than a handful of people to gather in any one place, but the 100 or more who dropped in to watch Audrey were circumspect, and the Nazis never found out.
As time and the war went on, money and food became scarcer. At one time Audrey's family had nothing to eat for days but endive. "I swore I'd never eat it again as long as I lived," she says. The hungry days in Holland gave her a taste for rich pastries and chocolate that is still unsatisfied.
When British troops finally reached Arnhem, Audrey recalls, "I stood there night & day just watching. The joy of hearing English, the incredible relief of being free. It's something you just can't fathom."
Poise & Motion. After the war, Audrey went back to ballet school. She spent three years studying in Amsterdam and then moved on to London to continue her studies under Ballet Director Marie Rambert. "She was a wonderful learner," said Madame Rambert last week. "If she had wanted to persevere, she might have become an outstanding ballerina." But impatience and a feeling that she had lost too much time was already clawing at Audrey. Money was short for the Van Heemstras, and what little there was could not be sent out of Holland. Audrey had to make her own way in London. Starting the rounds of West End auditions, she got a job as a chorus girl in the London production of High Button Shoes.
She got other small jobs—in movies, revues and nightclubs. A commercial photographer spotted her in one show and put her picture in every drugstore in Britain advertising the benefits of Lacto-Calamine. Meanwhile she went on with her ballet lessons and filled in her spare time studying dramatics under British Character Actor Felix Aylmer. "A pretty girl is not necessarily qualified for the stage," says Aylmer (who used to coach Charles Laughton). "What's most important is poise and motion. She had that naturally."
In November 1951, Audrey opened at Manhattan's Fulton Theater in the title role of Gilbert Miller's production of Gigi, a sophisticated Gallic story of a 16-year-old French tomboy who dreams of bourgeois marriage while her female relatives train her to become a rich man's mistress. Next day the New York Times's Critic Brooks Atkinson wrote: "Miss Hepburn is the one fresh element in the performance. She is an actress; and, as Gigi, she develops a full-length character from artless gaucheries in the first act to a stirring emotional climax in the last scene. [She] is spontaneous, lucid and captivating." The rest of the New York critics heartily agreed. Paramount Pictures and William Wyler, who had decided to keep their $2,200,000 production waiting for Audrey on the hunch that her play would not run a month, were obliged to twiddle their thumbs for half a year while audiences packed the Fulton to sigh and smile at the enchantingly gawky Gigi.
Audience Authority. Despite all the glowing praise from critics and public, Audrey was still far from sure that it was deserved. Night after night, she worried and fretted over her Broadway part. "She was terribly frightened," says Veteran Actress Cathleen Nesbitt, who was assigned by Producer Miller to take the newcomer under her protective wing. "She didn't have much idea of phrasing. She had no idea how to project, and she would come bounding onto the stage like a gazelle. But she had that rare thing—audience authority, the thing that makes everybody look at you when you are on stage." When things went wrong, (QUANDOASCOISASNÃOCORRERAMBEM ) Audrey would make her final exit crestfallen and out of breath from trying too hard. "I didn't get my laugh," she would say in distress to a fellow actor. "What did I do wrong?" At the end of the first week, when her name went up in lights on the Fulton marquee, Audrey darted across the street like a schoolgirl to have a look. Then, in sudden solemnity, she sighed: "Oh dear, and I've still got to learn how to act."
As a Broadway celebrity, she cared little for café society. Five out of six nights, after the show was over, she would go home with Cathleen Nesbitt and gossip happily over yoghurt and milk. Seeming both more naive and more sophisticated than most girls of her age, Audrey Hepburn, at 23, was a piquante mixture of adolescent bounce and womanly dignity. She could convulse friends with a hilarious imitation of Jerry Lewis, or pay a duty call, with all the necessary grace and assurance, on visiting Queen Juliana of The Netherlands.
Roman Holiday. Audrey's born-to-the-manner poise, her years of hard work and the months of genuine privation that forced her to grow up before her time were all apparent last week in her first starring movie. Director Wyler has given the picture charm and authenticity by filming it against the beautiful backgrounds of ancient and modern Rome, and by using real Romans in the bit parts. Gregory Peck and Eddie Albert add relaxed portraits of a newspaperman and a photographer to help the fun along. But it is Audrey Hepburn alone who makes the story come true. "Hell," said one Hollywoodian after seeing the picture, "the princess going back to her platinum throne. That's not so bad when you come to think of it, but it broke my heart. Just the look of that girl. It's one of those magic things."
"That girl," William Wyler told a friend when the picture was done, "is going to be the biggest star in Hollywood."
Last week, after the first vacation she had in five years, Audrey was in New York being groomed to take her place in the Western constellation. The treatment involved endless interviews, cocktail parties and personal appearances on radio and TV. To protect Paramount's $3,000,000 investment, she was required to answer an endless series of silly questions. "How does it feel to be a star, Miss Hepburn?" "Do you think marriage and a career are compatible, Miss Hepburn?" Audrey sailed through the tiring ordeal with the grace of a princess born and the tact of a diplomat. She could speak gently of her own engagement (to James Hanson, a wealthy young British businessman), which had been broken off after Roman Holiday was finished. She could still charmingly squelch the brash reporter who tried to pry deeper. She could speak with disarming gaiety of her pleasingly irregular teeth and still not deny her obvious beauty. To the agonized gentlemen of the West Coast, whose business it often is to turn hatcheck girls into great ladies overnight with publicity gimmicks, Audrey's artless publicity technique was a revelation—just as her camera technique had been to the cameramen, and as her flair for dress was to the studio dressmakers. "Working with Audrey is fun," said one Hollywood expert last week. "When you're working with her, you're working with a fellow technician."
As for being a great star: "It takes years," Audrey Hepburn says simply, "to make a great star."
Apr. 26, 2004
His authority is unquestioned, his popularity overwhelming. Yet Russia's future under his stewardship is hazy. Four years ago, Putin's election was greeted as a symbol of renewal. Now Putin is increasingly seen, especially outside Russia, as personifying a restoration of the Soviet mentality, if not its menace.
Putin's image is that of an energetic, forceful reformer. He has restored Russia's self-confidence after a miserable decade of chaos and humiliation. Yet the buoyant economy is held up by oil and natural-gas prices--which once made the Soviet Union seem like the way of the future, until prices collapsed. Putin has not used the boom to diversify the country's economic base. He claims victory in Chechnya but has only devastated the tiny republic, not pacified it. Hard-line Chechen secessionists are waging a pitiless war of urban terrorism in Moscow and elsewhere. Russia is a much more dangerous place to live now than before Putin came to power. In politics, he speaks of democracy but opts for authoritarianism. The result is in all but name a one-party system in which suspicion of the West and the private sector is rising. Yet little of that is reflected in the Russian media, whose key outlets transmit only the Kremlin's rosy version of reality.
Meanwhile, truly menacing problems--one of the world's fastest-growing HIV/AIDS infection rates, negative population growth, pollution--are largely ignored. The overall picture is that of a risk-averse, cynical leader. Time is running out for Putin. If his second term goes the same way as his first, he will be remembered as the man who could have done great things but succeeded only in leading Russia down yet another historical blind alley. --By Paul Quinn-Judge
Apr. 26, 2004
It didn't take long after his election in 2002 for the new President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, to make his mark. In Cancun, Mexico, last September, a coalition of developing nations shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization. Led by Lula and Brazil, the developing world refused to negotiate new foreign-investment rules until powers like the U.S. and the European Union promised to cut the lavish agriculture subsidies that effectively keep developing-world farmers out of lucrative markets. Lula's stance may also derail or seriously dilute the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the hemisphere-wide pact that was meant to be a jewel of President George W. Bush's trade agenda.
Unlike antiglobalization radicals, Lula, 58, insists he's not out to destroy the new world order. He just wants it to work more fairly. Though corruption allegations against top aides and economic troubles have caused Lula problems at home, he has become the developing world's new spokesman, a pragmatic populist who matches his anti-Yankee bluster with economic sobriety. His successes with pension and tax reforms have made Wall Street want to samba. Lula is often cited as the first leader to apply the social activism cum fiscal realism of Europe's "third way" to places where it is more needed. Brazil, for example, has one of the world's most inequitable distributions of wealth. His message: only economic growth can fund antipoverty crusades like his Zero Hunger program. And only by playing hardball within the globalized economic system, he thinks, can developing nations grow.
Born to a poor family, Lula received merely an eighth-grade education. He rose to prominence in Sao Paulo as a fiery labor-union leader and head of Brazil's leftist Workers Party. After losing three presidential races, he finally won in 2002 with a more centrist vision that many development experts see as a model that can be applied elsewhere. Lula's challenges are daunting. Brazil's economy is wheezing again this year, and angry voters around Latin America are protesting a decade of capitalist reforms. But he has staked out a distinct role. Says Eduardo Gamarra, director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami: "It's striking how many leaders are looking to Lula right now." --By Tim Padgett
Apr. 26, 2004
If a computer were to design the perfect U.N. Secretary-General, he or she would look something like this: African born; European and American educated, with decades of service in the U.N. system; married to a European; and possessing a quiet charisma and calm authority as chaos swirls.
That the U.N. in 1996 found such a person to restore its sense of direction and purpose was a near miracle. But out of the U.N.'s failures in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda came Kofi Annan, the career international civil servant who had participated in these disasters yet somehow survived and learned from them. When the situation in Bosnia reached its low point in August 1995, Annan, as acting Secretary-General, authorized the NATO bombing of the Bosnian Serbs that paved the road to the Dayton Peace Agreement. That action, more than anything else, convinced American officials, including me, that he was the best possible person to lead the U.N.
Today Annan is in the middle of his second term. His task is not finished, and the U.N is still far from what it should be. But Annan has tested the limits of the job, accumulating more authority--one cannot use the word power, given the constraints the U.N. system places on him--than any of his predecessors.
His complex relationship with the U.S. government is little understood. When Annan takes positions in public that are not pleasing to the Bush Administration, it unleashes its attack dogs. Yet when Administration officials found their policies in Iraq floundering, they asked the U.N. to bail them out. Some observers told Annan that he should not help the U.S. out of its jam. But he knew that his larger responsibility was to the cause of stabilizing Iraq. He began to work toward the decisive date of June 30, when the U.S. will hand over control to Iraqi authorities and an uncertain, highly volatile situation will prevail. Whether Annan, or anyone else, can succeed in Iraq will be determined by factors way beyond his, or anyone else's, ability to control. But it is Annan's destiny to be handed the very worst problems, and then only after they have been unsuccessfully addressed by others. Anyone who knows him knows he wades into such problems with his usual blend of courage, self-control, modesty and optimism. --By Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in the Clinton Administration from 1999 to 2001
Apr. 26, 2004
First known to the CIA as one of the Arabs fighting on our side against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden became America's No. 1 nemesis a decade later. The malcontented son of a wealthy Saudi construction magnate, bin Laden found meaning in the Afghan war. When it was over, he organized its Arab veterans into a global network of terrorists seeking to overthrow governments to create fundamentalist theocracies. He named the movement the foundation, as in the base of a building--in Arabic, al-Qaeda. Bin Laden provided the seed money, the organizational ability and the charismatic personality necessary to catalyze the global movement. He galvanized disparate organizations in dozens of countries into one network, sharing a vision, logistics and Afghan training camps. In the early 1990s it started to become clear to me and others working in counterterrorism that a series of nuisance-level threats had become united, and now posed a major security challenge for countries throughout the world. And bin Laden, we gradually realized, was at the heart of this danger.
As the U.S. became the world's only remaining superpower, bin Laden made it his main target. He blamed the U.S. for propping up corrupt Arab governments, occupying Arab lands with infidel soldiers and backing Israel against the Palestinians. His ideology and boldness resonated with disaffected Muslims in many nations, prompting many wealthy Arabs to launder millions of dollars into al-Qaeda's coffers.
Bin Laden personally approved the details of major terrorist attacks such as those on the East African embassies, the U.S.S. Cole and on New York City and Washington in September 2001. After the U.S. placed forces in Afghanistan in 2001, bin Laden appeared to be cut off from his global network. Al-Qaeda then morphed from a highly hierarchical organization into a multi-headed hydra, with independently operating cells raining terror upon Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Russia, Indonesia and Spain.
President Clinton authorized the CIA to use lethal force against bin Laden and his deputies, but the U.S. was unable to kill him for two years before and for almost three years after the attacks of 2001. Even had he been killed by 1999, bin Laden's influence and accomplishments would have been enough by then to have launched
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the global, radical Islamist movement. In death he will become a martyr and further inspiration to radical Islamists--until someone offers an effective ideological or religious counterweight. --By RICHARD A. CLARKE, former head of counterterrorism in the National Security Council
Apr. 26, 2004
What do you get the man who has everything? Ask David Beckham. The British soccer star, now playing his club game for Real Madrid, is idolized by men for his athletic prowess and by women for his devilish good looks. He is not the first athlete to enhance his star status by playing the glamour card, but he is quite possibly the best. A bronze statue in Thailand is testament to his iconic powers--as is the crazed fan who reportedly licked every toilet seat she could access in a fashionable hotel in hopes of tasting one he had used.
Beckham, 29, is an icon of modern masculinity at a time when gender roles are changing faster than runway styles. He has been known to don sarongs and even his wife's panties, the better to set off his pink nail polish. It ain't easy being the metrosexual pinup boy, but Beckham doesn't flinch from the term. With seemingly a different hairstyle each week--he has gone from skinhead to fauxhawk to dreads to a ponytail--he keeps hair salons worldwide flooded with followers eager to mimic his style.
Though the British tabloids have been full of stories that the marriage is on the rocks, Beckham's star wattage is only enhanced by his glam wife Victoria (a.k.a. Posh Spice), a style icon in her own right. "We think that David Beckham is one of the contemporary icons, a reference point, internationally acknowledged by millions of men and women," say designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. "We are inspired by his positiveness, by his beauty, for being an excellent athlete." Now that's metrosexual. --By MARIAN SALZMAN, trend-spotting author and chief strategy officer for the ad agency Euro RSCG Worldwide
Apr. 26, 2004
It's the kind of phenomenon that non-Americans either laugh at or are baffled by. The rise of a steroid-munching, big-grinned, Austrian body builder into Hollywood stardom and then the governorship of the most populous state in the U.S. is an only-in-America story. Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't even born here. But he is as big a political and cultural presence as anyone.
If you do not understand Schwarzenegger's success, it's worth renting the 1977 film Pumping Iron, which featured his political and human skills in the body-building subculture. He outpsyched his opponents as well as out-trained them. He did a deeply American thing: he took a bohemian subculture and infused it with the hard-edged, competitive ethos of capitalism. He has played the popular culture with unerring skill ever since. He took Republican politics, married it to the glamour of the Kennedys and then exported that hybrid to California. This year he managed to rally the Republican base with an order to stop gay marriages in San Francisco while deftly saying on The Tonight Show that he had no problem with gays marrying. Think of any other Republican who could do these things, and you begin to understand the depth of Arnold's talent. He has become a crucial element in making the G.O.P. seem even faintly appealing to social liberals and moderates, and represents the lingering Cheshire smile of Reagan Republicanism in the new century: the optimism, the inclusiveness. Above all: the charm. --By Andrew Sullivan
Apr. 26, 2004
It's a Chinese maxim: Women bring disaster. But one of China's most beloved politicians today is its female Vice Premier and Health Minister. In a nation ruled by men who often seem disconnected from their 1.3 billion subjects, Wu has made it her job to care about people. Some peasants believe she is a reincarnation of the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Kwanyin.
The Politburo's only goddess in residence worked in the oil industry for years before serving as China's chief trade negotiator. She was appointed Health Minister during the SARS crisis last year, replacing Zhang Wenkang, who for weeks had steadfastly denied that there was an epidemic. Wu was committed to transparency. "She told me things she didn't have to because she values openness," says Henk Bekedam, the World Health Organization's China representative. Wu has turned her attention to a far deadlier plague. The Health Ministry reckons that China has 840,000 HIV-positive citizens, but the nation only recently admitted it had an epidemic. Last December, Wu descended from China's cloistered leadership compound and met one on one with the country's top AIDS activist, a retired country doctor named Gao Yaojie. "Wu Yi said to me, 'Now that everyone else is gone, you can tell me the truth,'" recalls Gao. Rather than bringing disaster, Wu is cleaning one up. --By Hannah Beech
Mar. 14, 2005
We can banish extreme poverty in our generation--yet 8 million people die each year because they are too poor to survive. The trag edy is that with a little help, they could even thrive. In a bold new book, Jeffrey D. Sachs shows how we can make it happen
It is still midmorning in Malawi when we arrive at a small village, Nthandire, about an hour outside of Lilongwe, the capital. We have come over dirt roads, passing women and children walking barefoot with water jugs, wood for fuel, and other bundles. The midmorning temperature is sweltering. In this subsistence maize-growing region of a poor, landlocked country in southern Africa, families cling to life on an unforgiving terrain. This year has been a lot more difficult than usual because the rains have failed. The crops are withering in the fields that we pass.
If the village were filled with able-bodied men, who could have built rainwater-collecting units on rooftops and in the fields, the situation would not be so dire. But as we arrive in the village, we see no able-bodied young men at all. In fact, older women and dozens of children greet us, but there is not a young man or woman in sight. Where, we ask, are the workers? Out in the fields? The aid worker who has led us to the village shakes his head sadly and says no. Nearly all are dead. The village has been devastated by AIDS.
The presence of death in Nthandire has been overwhelming in recent years. The grandmothers whom we meet are guardians for their orphaned grandchildren. The margin of survival is extraordinarily narrow; sometimes it closes entirely. One woman we meet in front of her mud hut has 15 orphaned grandchildren. Her small farm plot, a little more than an acre in all, would be too small to feed her family even if the rains had been plentiful. The soil nutrients have been depleted so significantly in this part of Malawi that crop yields reach only about a half-ton per acre, about one-third of normal. This year, because of the drought, she will get almost nothing. She reaches into her apron and pulls out a handful of semi-rotten, bug-infested millet, which will be the basis for the gruel she will prepare for the meal that evening. It will be the one meal the children have that day.
I ask her about the health of the children. She points to a child of about 4 and says that the girl contracted malaria the week before. The woman had carried her grandchild on her back for the six miles to the local hospital. When they got there, there was no quinine, the antimalarial medicine, available that day. With the child in high fever, the two were sent home and told to return the next day. In a small miracle, when they returned after another six-mile trek, the quinine had come in, and the child responded to treatment and survived. It was a close call though. More than 1 million African children, and perhaps as many as 3 million, succumb to malaria each year.
As we proceed through the village, I stoop down to ask one of the young girls her name and age. She looks about 7 or 8 but is actually 12, stunted from years of undernutrition. When I ask her what her dreams are for her own life, she says that she wants to be a teacher and that she is prepared to study and work hard to achieve that. I know that her chances of surviving to go on to secondary school and a teachers college are slim under the circumstances.
The plight of Malawi has been rightly described by Carol Bellamy, head of UNICEF, as the perfect storm of human deprivation, one that brings together climatic disaster, impoverishment, the AIDS pandemic and the long-standing burdens of malaria, schistosomiasis and other diseases. In the face of this horrific maelstrom, the world community has so far displayed a fair bit of hand-wringing and even some high-minded rhetoric, but precious little action. It is no good to lecture the dying that they should have done better with their lot in life. Rather it is our task to help them onto the ladder of development, to give them at least a foothold on the bottom rung, from which they can then proceed to climb on their own.
This is a story about ending poverty in our time. It is not a forecast. I am not predicting what will happen, only explaining what can happen. Currently, more than 8 million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. Every morning our newspapers could report, "More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty." How? The poor die in hospital wards that lack drugs, in villages that lack antimalarial bed nets, in houses that lack safe drinking water. They die namelessly, without public comment. Sadly, such stories rarely get written.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has launched a war on terrorism, but it has neglected the deeper causes of global instability. The nearly $500 billion that the U.S. will spend this year on the military will never buy lasting peace if the U.S. continues to spend only one-thirtieth of that, around $16 billion, to address the plight of the poorest of the poor, whose societies are destabilized by extreme poverty. The $16 billion represents 0.15% of U.S. income, just 15¢ on every $100 of our national income. The share devoted to helping the poor has declined for decades and is a tiny fraction of what the U.S. has repeatedly promised, and failed, to give.
Yet our generation, in the U.S. and abroad, can choose to end extreme poverty by the year 2025. To do it, we need to adopt a new method, which I call "clinical economics," to underscore the similarities between good development economics and good clinical medicine. In the past quarter-century, the development economics imposed by rich countries on the poorest countries has been too much like medicine in the 18th century, when doctors used leeches to draw blood from their patients, often killing them in the process. Development economics needs an overhaul in order to be much more like modern medicine, a profession of rigor, insight and practicality. The sources of poverty are multidimensional. So are the solutions. In my view, clean water, productive soils and a functioning health-care system are just as relevant to development as foreign exchange rates. The task of ending extreme poverty is a collective one--for you as well as for me. The end of poverty will require a global network of cooperation among people who have never met and who do not necessarily trust one another.
One part of the puzzle is relatively easy. Most people in the world, with a little bit of prodding, would accept the fact that schools, clinics, roads, electricity, ports, soil nutrients, clean water and sanitation are the basic necessities not only for a life of dignity and health but also to make an economy work. They would also accept the fact that the poor may need help to meet their basic needs. But they might be skeptical that the world could pull off any effective way to give that help. If the poor are poor because they are lazy or their governments are corrupt, how could global cooperation help?
Fortunately, these common beliefs are misconceptions--only a small part of the explanation of why the poor are poor. In all corners of the world, the poor face structural challenges that keep them from getting even their first foot on the ladder of development. Most societies with the right ingredients--good harbors, close contacts with the rich world, favorable climates, adequate energy sources and freedom from epidemic disease--have escaped extreme poverty. The world's remaining challenge is not mainly to overcome laziness and corruption, but rather to take on the solvable problems of geographic isolation, disease and natural hazards, and to do so with new arrangements of political responsibility that can get the job done. We need plans, systems, mutual accountability and financing mechanisms. But even before we have all of that apparatus in place--what I call the economic plumbing--we must first understand more concretely what such a strategy means to the people who can be helped.
Nearly half the 6 billion people in the world are poor. As a matter of definition, there are three degrees of poverty: extreme (or absolute) poverty, moderate poverty and relative poverty. Extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as getting by on an income of less than $1 a day, means that households cannot meet basic needs for survival. They are chronically hungry, unable to get health care, lack safe drinking water and sanitation, cannot afford education for their children and perhaps lack rudimentary shelter--a roof to keep rain out of the hut--and basic articles of clothing, like shoes. We can describe extreme poverty as "the poverty that kills." Unlike moderate or relative poverty, extreme poverty now exists only in developing countries. Moderate poverty, defined as living on $1 to $2 a day, refers to conditions in which basic needs are met, but just barely. Being in relative poverty, defined by a household income level below a given proportion of the national average, means lacking things that the middle class now takes for granted.
The total number of people living in extreme poverty, the World Bank estimates, is 1.1 billion, down from 1.5 billion in 1981. While that is progress, much of the one-sixth of humanity in extreme poverty suffers the ravages of AIDS, drought, isolation and civil wars, and is thereby trapped in a vicious cycle of deprivation and death. Moreover, while the economic boom in East Asia has helped reduce the proportion of the extreme poor in that region from 58% in 1981 to 15% in 2001, and in South Asia from 52% to 31%, the situation is deeply entrenched in Africa, where almost half of the continent's population lives in extreme poverty--a proportion that has actually grown worse over the past two decades as the rest of the world has grown more prosperous.
A few centuries ago, vast divides in wealth and poverty around the world did not exist. Just about everybody was poor, with the exception of a very small minority of rulers and large landowners. Life was as difficult in much of Europe as it was in India or China. Your great-great-grandparents were, with very few exceptions, poor and living on a farm. The onset of the Industrial Revolution, supported by a rise in agricultural productivity, unleashed an explosive period of modern economic growth. Both population and per-capita income came unstuck, rising at rates never before imagined. The global population rose more than sixfold in just two centuries, while the world's average per-capita income rose even faster, increasing around ninefold between 1820 and 2000. In today's rich countries, the economic growth was even more astounding. The U.S. per-capita income increased almost 25-fold during this period. In beholding that success, many people embrace faulty social theories of those differences. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority--whether religious, racial, genetic, ethnic, cultural or institutional--rather than an accident of timing or geography.
Such theories justified brutal forms of exploitation of the poor during colonial rule, and they persist even today among those who lack an understanding of what happened and is still happening in the Third World. In fact, the failure of the Third World to grow as rapidly as the First World is the result of a complex mix of factors, some geographical, some historical and some political. Imperial rule often left the conquered regions bereft of education, health care, indigenous political leadership and adequate physical infrastructure. Often, newly independent countries in the post--World War II period made disastrous political choices, such as socialist economic models or a drive for self-sufficiency behind inefficient trade barriers. But perhaps most pertinent today, many regions that got left furthest behind have faced special obstacles and hardships: diseases such as malaria, drought-prone climates in locations not suitable for irrigation, extreme isolation in mountains and landlocked regions, an absence of energy resources such as coal, gas and oil, and other liabilities that have kept these areas outside of the mainstream of global economic growth. Countries ranging from Bolivia to Malawi to Afghanistan face challenges almost unknown in the rich world, challenges that are at first harrowing to contemplate, but on second thought encouraging in the sense that they also lend themselves to practical solutions. 15
In the past quarter-century, when poor countries have pleaded with the rich world for help, they have been sent to the world money doctor, the International Monetary Fund. For a quarter-century, and changing only very recently, the main IMF prescription has been budgetary belt-tightening for patients much too poor to own belts. IMF-led austerity has frequently resulted in riots, coups and the collapse of public services. Finally, however, that approach is beginning to change.
It has taken me 20 years to understand what good development economics should be, and I am still learning. In my role as director of the U.N. Millennium Project, which has the goal of helping to cut the world's extreme poverty in half by 2015, I spent several eye-opening days with colleagues last July in a group of eight Kenyan villages known as the Sauri sublocation in the Siaya district of Nyanza province. We visited farms, clinics, hospitals and schools. We found a region beset by hunger, AIDS and malaria. The situation is grim, but salvageable.
More than 200 members of the community came to meet with us one afternoon. Hungry, thin and ill, they stayed for 3 1/2 hours, speaking with dignity, eloquence and clarity about their predicament. They are impoverished, but they are capable and resourceful. Though struggling to survive, they are not dispirited but are determined to improve their situation. They know well how they could get back to high ground.
The meeting took place on the grounds of a school called the Bar Sauri Primary School, where headmistress Anne Marcelline Omolo shepherds hundreds of schoolchildren through primary education and the travails of daily life. Despite disease, orphanhood and hunger, all 33 of last year's eighth-grade class passed the Kenyan national secondary-school exams. On a Sunday last July, we saw why. On their "day off" from school, this year's class of eighth-graders sat at their desks from 6:30 a.m. until 6 p.m. preparing months in advance for this year's national examinations in November. Unfortunately, many who will pass the exams will be unable to take a position in a secondary school because of lack of money for tuition, uniforms and supplies. Nonetheless, to boost the fortitude of the eighth-graders during the critical examination year, the community provides them with a midday meal, cooked with wood and water the students bring from home. Alas, the community is currently unable to provide midday meals for the younger children, who must fend for themselves.
When our village meeting got under way, I canvassed the group and got very perceptive accounts of the grim situation. Only two of the 200 farmers at the meeting reported using fertilizer at present. Around 25% are using improved fallows with nitrogen-fixing trees, a scientific farming approach developed and introduced into Sauri by the World Agroforestry Center. With this novel technique, villagers grow trees that naturally return nitrogen to the soil by converting it from the atmosphere, thus dramatically improving yields. The new method could be used throughout the village if more money were available for planting the trees alongside their maize crops.
The rest of the community is farming on tiny plots, sometimes no more than one-quarter of an acre, with soils that are so depleted of nutrients and organic matter that even if the rains are good, the households still go hungry. If the rains fail, the households face the risk of death from severe undernutrition. Stunting, meaning low height for one's age, is widespread, a sign of pervasive and chronic undernutrition of the children.
The real shocker came with my follow-up question. How many farmers had used fertilizers in the past? Every hand in the room went up. Farmer after farmer described how the price of fertilizer was now out of reach, and how their current impoverishment left them unable to purchase what they had used in the past.
As the afternoon unfolded, the gravity of the community's predicament became more apparent. I asked how many households were home to one or more orphaned children left behind by the AIDS pandemic. Virtually every hand in the room shot up. I asked how many households were receiving remittances from family members living in Nairobi and other cities. The response was that the only things coming back from the cities were coffins and orphans, not remittances.
I asked how many households had somebody currently suffering from malaria. Around three-fourths of the hands shot up. How many use antimalarial bed nets? Two out of 200 hands went up. How many knew about bed nets? All hands. And how many would like to use bed nets? All hands remained up. The problem, many of the women explained, is that they cannot afford the bed nets, which sell for a few dollars per net, and are too expensive even when partially subsidized by international donor agencies.
A few years back, Sauri's residents cooked with locally collected wood, but the decline in the number of trees has left the area bereft of sufficient fuel. Villagers said that they now buy pieces of fuel wood in Yala or Muhanda, a bundle of seven sticks costing around 30¢. Not only are seven sticks barely enough to cook one meal, but for a lack of 30¢, many villagers had in fact reverted to cooking with cow dung or to eating uncooked meals.
The dying village's isolation is stunning. There are no cars or trucks owned or used within Sauri, and only a handful of villagers said they had ridden in any kind of motorized transport during the past year. Around half of the individuals at the meeting said that they had never made a phone call in their entire lives.
This village could be rescued, but not by itself. Survival depends on addressing a series of specific challenges, all of which can be met with known, proven, reliable and appropriate technologies and interventions. (Thanks to a grant from the Lenfest Foundation in the U.S., the Earth Institute at Columbia University will put some novel ideas to work in Sauri.) Sauri's villages, and impoverished villages like them all over the world, can be set on a path of development at a cost that is tiny for the world but too high for the villages themselves and for the Kenyan government on its own. African safari guides speak of the Big Five animals to watch for on the savannah. The world should speak of the Big Five development interventions that would spell the difference between life and death for the savannah's people. Sauri's Big Five are:
BOOSTING AGRICULTURE With fertilizers, cover crops, irrigation and improved seeds, Sauri's farmers could triple their food yields and quickly end chronic hunger. Grain could be protected in locally made storage bins using leaves from the improved fallow species tephrosia, which has insecticide properties.
IMPROVING BASIC HEALTH A village clinic with one doctor and nurse for the 5,000 residents would provide free antimalarial bed nets, effective antimalarial medicines and treatments for HIV/ AIDS opportunistic infections.
INVESTING IN EDUCATION Meals for all the children at the primary school could improve the health of the kids, the quality of education and the attendance at school. Expanded vocational training for the students could teach them the skills of modern farming, computer literacy, basic infrastructure maintenance and carpentry. The village is ready and eager to be empowered by increased information and technical knowledge.
BRINGING POWER Electricity could be made available to the villages either via a power line or an off-grid diesel generator. The electricity would power lights and perhaps a computer for the school; pumps for safe well water; power for milling grain, refrigeration and other needs. The villagers emphasized that the students would like to study after sunset but cannot do so without electric lighting.
PROVIDING CLEAN WATER AND SANITATION With enough water points and latrines for the safety of the entire village, women and children would save countless hours of toil each day fetching water. The water could be provided through a combination of protected springs, rainwater harvesting and other basic technologies.
The irony is that the cost of these services for Sauri's 5,000 residents would be very low. My Earth Institute colleagues and I estimated that the combined cost of these improvements, even including the cost of treatment for AIDS, would total only $70 per person per year, or around $350,000 for all of Sauri. The benefits would be astounding. Sooner rather than later, these investments would repay themselves not only in lives saved, children educated and communities preserved, but also in direct commercial returns to the villages and the chance for self-sustaining economic growth.
The international donor community should be thinking round-the-clock of one question: How can the Big Five interventions be done on a larger scale in rural areas similar to Sauri? With a population of some 33 million people, of whom two-thirds are in rural areas, Kenya would need annual investments on the order of $1.5 billion for its Sauris, with donors filling most of that financing gap, since the national government is already stretched beyond its means. Instead, donor support for investment in rural Kenya is perhaps $100 million, or a mere one-fifteenth of what is needed. And Kenya's debt service to the rich world is several hundred million dollars per year. Kenya's budget is still being drained by the international community, not bolstered by it. This is all the more remarkable since Kenya is a new and fragile democracy that should be receiving considerable help.
The outside world has pat answers concerning extremely impoverished countries, especially those in Africa. Everything comes back, again and again, to corruption and misrule. Western officials argue that Africa simply needs to behave itself better, to allow market forces to operate without interference by corrupt rulers. Yet the critics of African governance have it wrong. Politics simply can't explain Africa's prolonged economic crisis. The claim that Africa's corruption is the basic source of the problem does not withstand serious scrutiny. During the past decade I witnessed how relatively well-governed countries in Africa, such as Ghana, Malawi, Mali and Senegal, failed to prosper, whereas societies in Asia perceived to have extensive corruption, such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and Pakistan, enjoyed rapid economic growth.
What is the explanation? Every situation of extreme poverty around the world contains some of its own unique causes, which need to be diagnosed just as a doctor would a patient. For example, Africa is burdened with malaria like no other part of the world, simply because it is unlucky in providing the perfect conditions for that disease: high temperatures, plenty of breeding sites and particular species of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes that prefer to bite humans rather than cattle.
Another myth is that the developed world already gives plenty of aid to the world's poor. Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill expressed a common frustration when he remarked about aid for Africa: "We've spent trillions of dollars on these problems and we have damn near nothing to show for it." O'Neill was no foe of foreign aid. Indeed, he wanted to fix the system so that more U.S. aid could be justified. But he was wrong to believe that vast flows of aid to Africa had been squandered. President Bush said in a press conference in April 2004 that as "the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom. We have an obligation to feed the hungry." Yet how does the U.S. fulfill its obligation? U.S. aid to farmers in poor countries to help them grow more food runs at around $200 million per year, far less than $1 per person per year for the hundreds of millions of people living in subsistence farm households.
From the world as a whole, the amount of aid per African per year is really very small, just $30 per sub-Saharan African in 2002. Of that modest amount, almost $5 was actually for consultants from the donor countries, more than $3 was for emergency aid, about $4 went for servicing Africa's debts and $5 was for debt-relief operations. The rest, about $12, went to Africa. Since the "money down the drain" argument is heard most frequently in the U.S., it's worth looking at the same calculations for U.S. aid alone. In 2002, the U.S. gave $3 per sub-Saharan African. Taking out the parts for U.S. consultants and technical cooperation, food and other emergency aid, administrative costs and debt relief, the aid per African came to the grand total of perhaps 6¢.
The U.S. has promised repeatedly over the decades, as a signatory to global agreements like the Monterrey Consensus of 2002, to give a much larger proportion of its annual output, specifically up to 0.7% of GNP, to official development assistance. The U.S.'s failure to follow through has no political fallout domestically, of course, because not one in a million U.S. citizens even knows of statements like the Monterrey Consensus. But we should not underestimate the salience that it has abroad. Spin as we might in the U.S. about our generosity, the poor countries are fully aware of what we are not doing.
The costs of action are a tiny fraction of the costs of inaction. And yet we must carry out these tasks in a context of global inertia, proclivities to war and prejudice, and understandable skepticism around the world that this time can be different from the past. Here are nine steps to the goal:
COMMIT TO THE TASK. Oxfam and many other leaders in civil society have embraced the goal of Making Poverty History. The world as a whole needs now to embrace the goal.
ADOPT A PLAN OF ACTION. The U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals, approved by all of the world's governments at the start of the millennium, are the down payment on ending poverty. The MDGs set out specific targets for cutting poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation by 2015 and thereby laid the foundation for eliminating extreme poverty by 2025. The rich and poor countries have solemnly agreed to work toward fulfilling the MDGs. The key is to follow through.
RAISE THE VOICE OF THE POOR. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. did not wait for the rich and powerful to come to their rescue. They asserted their call to justice and made their stand in the face of official arrogance and neglect. It is time for the democracies in the poor world--Brazil, India, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and dozens of others--to join together to issue the call to action.
REDEEM THE U.S. ROLE IN THE WORLD. The richest and most powerful country, long the leader and inspiration in democratic ideals, is barely participating in global efforts to end poverty and protect the environment, thus undermining its own security. It's time to honor the commitment to give 0.7% of our national income to these crucial goals.
RESCUE THE IMF AND WORLD BANK. They have the experience and technical sophistication to play an important role. They have the internal motivation of a highly professional staff. Yet they have been used like debt-collection agencies for the big creditor countries. It's time to restore their role in helping all 182 of their member countries, not just the rich ones, in the pursuit of enlightened globalization.
STRENGTHEN THE U.N. It is no use blaming the U.N. for the missteps of recent years. Why are U.N. agencies less operational than they should be? Not because of "U.N. bureaucracy," though that exists, but because the powerful countries fear ceding more authority. Yet U.N. specialized agencies have a core role to play in the ending of poverty. It is time to empower the likes of the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and many others to do the job--on the ground, country by country.
HARNESS GLOBAL SCIENCE. New technology has led directly to improved standards of living, yet science tends to follow market forces as well as to lead them. It is not surprising that the rich get richer in a continuing cycle of growth while the poorest are often left behind. A special effort should be made by the powerhouses of world science to address the unmet challenges of the poor.
PROMOTE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT. Ending extreme poverty can relieve many of the pressures on the environment. When impoverished households are more productive on their farms, for example, they face less pressure to cut down neighboring forests in search of new farmland. Still, even as extreme poverty ends, we must not fuel prosperity with a lack of concern for industrial pollution and the unchecked burning of fossil fuels.
MAKE A PERSONAL COMMITMENT. It all comes back to us. Individuals, working in unison, form and shape societies. The final myth I will debunk here is that politicians are punished by their constituents for supporting actions to help the poor. There is plenty of experience to show that the broad public will accept such measures, especially if they see that the rich within their own societies are asked to meet their fair share of the burden. Great social forces are the mere accumulation of individual actions. Let the future say of our generation that we sent forth mighty currents of hope, and that we worked together to heal the world.
Nation20
EISENHOWER: SOLDIER OF PEACEApr. 04, 1969 HE was a soldier who loathed war. He was a politician who abhorred politics. He was a hero who despised heroics. Yet there was nothing inconsistent about Dwight David Eisenhower. As much as any other American of today or yesterday, he was the storybook American. A man of luminous integrity and decency, of steadfast courage ...4592 words Cover/D-DAYCover/D-DayJun. 06, 1994 By Bruce W. Nelan IKE'S INVASION "Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. . ." -- FROM EISENHOWER'S ORDER OF THE ...4629 words Nation/REPUBLICANSMan of ExperienceNov. 03, 1952 (See Cover) At Springfield, Mass, last week, Dwight Eisenhower told one of the few jokes of his campaign. 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The faces belonged to the thousands of thousands who massed along the streets of Ankara, Karachi, Kabul and New Delhi, of Athens, ...4168 words Nation/THE REPUBLICAN SPLITIt Is Deep & Real But ike Can Still Repair ItMay. 20, 1957 In Washington, the biennial election of the League of Republican Women came close to hair-pulling when the Old Guard girls snatched away and tore up the sample ballots of the Eisenhower Republican faction . . . To Republican Dwight Eisenhower from Michigan Republican William Doerfner, a General Motors steering-gear executive, came an angry letter: "I ...1569 words Nation/THE PRESIDENCY"This Is What I Want to Do"Sep. 07, 1959 (See Cover) Down the Great West Road from London Airport, on 417 through Hounslow, Chiswick, Hammersmith and South Kensington, the dove-grey, open-top Rolls-Royce rolled into the heart of the great grey city. A small Stars and Stripes fluttered from the left fender; the license plate read "U.S.A. 1." From hundreds of thousands of Londoners thronging ...3825 words EssayDreaming of the Eisenhower YearsJul. 28, 1980 By LANCE MORROW Ronald Reagan preaches "a New Beginning," but Americans trying to envision his Administration sometimes find their minds drifting back to the 1950s. Ike, they tell themselves. Maybe, if he won, Ronald Reagan would turn into a kind of Eisenhower. Or at any rate, maybe the effect would be the same: a long quiescence, an essentially ...1944 words Nation/THE PRESIDENCYThe Return of ConfidenceJul. 04, 1955 (See Cover) Only patience, determination, optimism and a very deep faith can carry America forward. —Dwight D. Eisenhower, May 28, 1953 From Franconia Notch, N.H. to San Francisco, Calif, this week, there was clear and convincing evidence of patience, determination, optimism and faith among the people of the U.S. In the 29 months since Dwight ...3974 words Nation/THE WHITE HOUSEAuthentic VoiceJan. 27, 1958 THE WHITE HOUSE Authentic Voice (See Cover) James Campbell Hagerty left his pale green office, walked 30 brisk steps down the hall, opened a door and took seven more paces to the desk of the President of the U.S. He had a case to make: Dwight Eisenhower had not held a news conference in eleven ...4335 words War & TerrorismIke & MenNov. 16, 1942 (See Cover) One day last spring General George C. Marshall summoned Dwight David ("Ike") Eisenhower to his office and said to him: "You're going over to command the European divisions. When can you leave?" Eisenhower's blue eyes widened. "Tomorrow morning," he gulped. U.S. troops were already arriving in the United Kingdom in a stream that ...1665 words NationWHERE THEY STAND: A TAFT-IKE COUNTDec. 17, 1951 Although the Republican National Convention is seven months away, its 1,200 delegates are already being lined up by state party leaders. At the convention the ranks may break; but now they are forming. The campaign has already narrowed to a fight between Taft and Eisenhower; withdrawal of either would almost certainly result in victory for ...1645 words Nation/POLITICSHarnessing a WaveDec. 17, 1951 (See Cover) Last summer, a Republican Congressman sat across a desk from General Dwight Eisenhower and spoke some unsentimental facts. Said he: "I believe you have the qualities that can hold the Republican Party and the country together. But if you think there's going to be an Eisenhower draft at the convention coming from the ...3118 words EISENHOWER'S DECISIONMar. 12, 1956 WASHINGTON POST AND TIMES HERALD: THE decision has now been transferred from Mr. Eisenhower to the people. If it were merely a question of personal popularity, Mr. Eisenhower might now be elected by acclamation. But it is far more than that. Many persons who have the kindliest feelings toward him may experience misgivings about the ...1135 words Nation/REPUBLICANSBack to NormalFeb. 02, 1948 Ike said no. The renunciation was almost without precedent in U.S. political history. For months the Eisenhower star had risen steadily in the public-opinion polls. As a potential Republican nominee, he was the only candidate in sight who seemed to have a sure chance of beating President Harry Truman. But last week General Ike abruptly ...875 words Arts & EntertainmentThe View From Supreme Command Eisenhower: At War 1943-1945 by David Eisenhower Random House; 977 pages; $29.95Sep. 15, 1986 By Paul Gray The public first noticed him as Ike's apple-cheeked grandson and occasional fishing partner, the boy whose name was given to the presidential retreat in Maryland. Years later, David Eisenhower surfaced as the husband of Julie Nixon and a member of the tight family circle that drew around his father-in-law during the siege of Watergate. Given ...793 words War & Terrorism/BATTLE OF ITALYIke's WaySep. 13, 1943 (See Cover) General Dwight David Eisenhower of the U.S. Army went to Messina last week and decorated the commander of one of the U.S., British and French armies serving under him. That commander was General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. On Sept. 2 Montgomery went to bed at his usual time, 10 p.m., having already written ...2299 words MCCARTHY v. EISENHOWER: VIEWS OF FIVE...Dec. 20, 1954 MCCARTHY v. EISENHOWER: VIEWS OF FIVE PAPERS Long Island's NEWSDAY : IT would be impossible for a sane man to attack President Eisenhower for being soft to Communism. The inescapable conclusion must be that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy is deranged—the end of the trail for a mind that could once have been considered shrewd and ...1127 words Nation/THE PRESIDENCYThe Camp David ConferenceOct. 05, 1959 Midway in the second day of their man-to-man talks at Camp David on Maryland's Catoctin Mountain, President Eisenhower turned to Nikita Khrushchev with a personal appeal. Said he: "You have the opportunity to make a great contribution to history by making it possible to ease tensions. It is within your hands." Nikita Khrushchev, unchallenged ruler ...879 words War & Terrorism/BATTLE OF FRANCESupreme CommanderJun. 19, 1944 (See Cover) On D-day plus one—Wednesday—General Dwight David Eisenhower felt justified in leaving his advanced command post in England long enough for his first close look at how the invasion was going. Boarding a British cruiser, he steamed along the invasion coast for four and a half hours, held conferences with his operational commanders. He ...2282 words
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Results 1 - 20 out of 390 articles25War & TerrorismInto the FunnelJul. 13, 1942 Battle of Egypt After so many evil tidings, the news looked a little better. Germany's Rommel had chased the broken, retreating British 325 miles in eleven days, had rammed his armored spearheads down the coastal desert from Matrûh, taking the flyspeck towns on the railroad to Alexandria like peas ripped from a pod. Now for ...2814 words War & TerrorismRommel AfricanusJul. 13, 1942 One early morning long ago, before Hitler was master of Germany, the late Hangman Reinhard Heydrich rushed to see his Führer on a matter of desperate urgency. He tramped through an anteroom to the Führer's bedroom and. with his usual disregard of anything that stood in his way, drove his heavy boot into the body ...1914 words Arts & EntertainmentArmored KnightJan. 22, 1951 ROMMEL, THE DESERT FOX (264 pp.) Desmond Young Harper ($3.50). One of the few World War II battle commanders to become a legendary figure while the fight was still on was the Germans' stocky, colorful tank expert, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. At home he was idolized. In the field his Afrika Korps fought for ...865 words Arts & EntertainmentThe FoxMay. 18, 1953 THE ROMMEL PAPERS (545 pp.)—Edlfed by. B. H. Liddell Harf—Harcourf, Brace ($6). In the grim winter of 1942, while the Afrika Korps and the British Eighth Army were slugging it out in Cyrenaica, Winston Churchill rose in the House of Commons and said: "We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may ...1256 words War & Terrorism/BATTLE OF EGYPTBetween Two WallsSep. 14, 1942 (See Cover) Britain's soldiers stood in their classic and indomitable position: with their backs against the wall. West of Suez there was no other place to make a stand. Behind them was Cairo, capital of Egypt; the delta of the Nile, a great plain as large as Vermont, crisscrossed with irrigation canals; Alexandria, last major ...1955 words War & Terrorism/BATTLE OF EGYPTOn the One-Yard LineJul. 20, 1942 Field Marshal Rommel had called for time out on the one-yard line. After marching nearly the length of the field in an unbroken series of power plays, he needed to pull his team together for the last effort. His players needed to sponge their faces and have their ankles taped. He also hoped his coach ...620 words War & Terrorism/BATTLE OF FRANCEThe Fox In the OrchardJun. 26, 1944 Enough dust swirled over the tank-churned roads of Normandy to remind ex-Desert Fox Erwin Rommel of Africa. But there the resemblance ended. There was no room among the copses, apple orchards, and hedge-crossed fields of Calvados for the great sweeps of "land battleships" that Rommel had used in the wastes of Libya. Perhaps Rommel was ...1086 words War & Terrorism/BATTLE OF EGYPTRommel RollsJul. 06, 1942 Around fallen Tobruk the man-made sandstorms, kicked up by tanks scouring the desert, died down in little dunes beside the gridded tracks. Torn barbed wire marked the silent graves of Knightsbridge, El Adem, Acroma. Germany's Erwin Rommel was 200 miles to the east, rolling into Matrûh. Tobruk was full of grinning, jabbering Italians. Rommel was ...825 words Arts & EntertainmentThe New PicturesOct. 15, 1951 The Desert Fox (20th Century-Fox), a sympathetic film study of the Afrika Korps' General Erwin Rommel, will surprise those moviegoers who have come to accept all Hollywood Nazis as guttural, sadistic villains. Rommel, as played by James Mason, speaks flawless English, is kind to his troops, makes a generous foe and a faithful friend. Based ...1125 words War & Terrorism/THE ENEMYDeath on the DowngradeOct. 23, 1944 Trim, broad-faced Erwin Eugen Johannes Rommel rose with Hitler from the street brawls of pre-Nazi Germany. He rocketed upward with the National Socialists through the conquest of Germany, the conquest of Europe, the conquest of North Africa, almost to the conquest of Egypt. Then both he and Hitler's Nazi war machine began their slow, bitter ...505 words War & TerrorismThe Fight Against the ChampApr. 12, 1943 (See Cover) The General was restless. George Smith Patton Jr., who had long ago boasted that nothing would please him so much as to get in a tank and joust, medievally and to the death, with a single tank commanded by Erwin Rommel, was now confined to a single room behind the lines by his ...2816 words War & Terrorism/BATTLE OF AFRICAPilgrimage to MarethFeb. 01, 1943 (See Cover) The Road is a ribbon along the fair, azure sea. It wanders past graves inscribed "This is hallowed ground. They died in the service of their country." It twists up arid escarpments. It streaks, hot and straight, for miles across the desert sands. The Road is long. It would zigzag from Cape Henry, ...2619 words WorldClosing TrapNov. 30, 1942 Rommel's African days were growing shorter. The strung-out columns of his army unraveled, steadily shredded away as he frantically dragged westward along the Libyan coast. Ahead lay the El Aghéila bottleneck, the most logical place for Rommel to try to make a stand (TIME, Nov. 23). Beyond that lay the long (600 mi.) and weary ...341 words War & Terrorism/BATTLE OF FRANCERommel Out?Aug. 07, 1944 U.S. staff officers in Normandy last week heard reports they would have liked to believe: that Marshal Erwin Rommel was out of action. One report was that he had been seriously wounded, another that he was dead. Except for the end result, German prisoners' statements jibed with reports of French civilians: that Rommel's car had ...92 words WorldElected by RommelJul. 06, 1942 Before Tobruk fell, no one gave even an outside chance to the Independent candidate in the by-election at Maldon, near London. Middle-class Maldon was considered a sure Conservative district. Independent Candidate Tom Driberg, 37, although England's most widely read columnist ("William Hickey" of the London Daily Express), was a breezy leftist, so unconventional that in ...131 words War & Terrorism/BATTLE OF THE DESERTRommel Marches OnJun. 29, 1942 For the British it was utter, humiliating defeat. Tobruk, the same battle-scarred port that last year held out for eight months against Axis besiegers, succumbed to one day's attack. Tobruk fell quickly, squashily, to the planes, tanks and guns of Germany's Erwin Rommel. The Axis announced that it took 28,000 Allied prisoners in the garrison, ...455 words WorldKeyes v. RommelJan. 12, 1942 A standing military maxim since Alex ander the Great (356-323 B.C.) has been "Destroy the enemy's leadership." In his principal campaigns Alexander's strategy was based on capturing the enemy's leader. General Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck probably had both man and maxim in mind when he opened the Western Desert campaign against the Axis in ...520 words War & Terrorism/BATTLE OF AFRICAIn the Dust of the KhamsinApr. 05, 1943 General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery had been thrown back at the northern end of the Mareth Line. In a 15-mile-wide gap between the Matmata Mountains and the seashore, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had stopped him cold and he had backed up, leaving the plain strewn with British dead around the hell of the Wadi Zigzau ...1006 words War & Terrorism/BATTLE OF AFRICAYoicks!Dec. 28, 1942 The fox lost his tail last week. Rommel let Montgomery overtake him and, before he knew it, Montgomery had bitten off his brush. Erwin Rommel's retreat from El Aghéila had begun with an orderliness that was almost sedate. There was the suspicion that he had already withdrawn the bulk of his army, leaving only enough ...477 words WorldGood HuntingNov. 23, 1942 "The Germans are out of Egypt, but there still are some left in North Africa. There is some good hunting to be had farther to the west in Libya." That exultant message General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery* sent to his troops last week. Erwin Rommel, crippled if not yet destroyed, continued to flee. The victorious ...747 words
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Arts & EntertainmentClcopatriotDec. 13, 1937 CLEOPATRA—Emil Ludwig—Viking ($3-50). According to popular legend, Cleopatra nearly vamped the Roman Empire to death. But if Cleopatra had been half as lucky in historians as she was in love, her reputation would now be very different. Such, at least, is the thesis of Biographer Ludwig's Cleopatra. A by-product of Ludwig's The Nile (TIME, Feb. ...631 words Arts & EntertainmentDeMille's 6othAug. 27, 1934 DeMille's 60th (See front cover) When William Shakespeare was ready to write the story of Cleopatra, he needed nothing more than pen, ink, paper and his own lively genius. Three centuries later George Bernard Shaw required no more equipment for the same task. But when Paramount put Cecil Blount DeMille to work on this well-worn ...2436 words Arts & EntertainmentThe EgyptianDec. 31, 1951 When Laurence Olivier & Vivien Leigh decided to do Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra for last summer's Festival of Britain, Stage Designer Roger Furse jokingly suggested that they do Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra as well. They smiled at the idea but were quickly haunted by it; and in due time the two Cleopatras became the sensation ...957 words Arts & Entertainment/Short Takes/TelevisionCleopatraMay. 24, 1999 By William Tynan Compared with the tab for the Liz Taylor movie--$240 million in today's dollars--the $30 million-plus cost of this mini-series is piddling. But for TV, it's colossal. So what do those big bucks buy? Lavish spectacle, a Dynasty-style version of Cleopatra's romances with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, and just about zero chemistry between Leonor Varela's ...94 words Arts & Entertainment/ON LOCATIONLittle CleopatraMay. 06, 1966 London last week, Director John Huston gave the go-ahead. The clapstick snapped: The David Niven Story. The cameras began rolling, and there, logically enough, was Niven, clad in an Edwardian velvet dinner jacket, lolling around the banqueting hall of a Scottish castle. Yet, illogically enough, at numerous other sound stages and locations around Great Britain, ...630 words World/THE NATIONSA Blush for CleopatraMay. 07, 1951 In the eighth deadlocked week of the Big Four deputies' meeting, Andrei Gromyko surpassed his churlish best. Said he: "There will not be room enough in Korea for the white crosses over the graves of the interventionist troops . . . Churchill's statement [that the U.S. Mediterranean Fleet is a deterrent to aggression] was the ...92 words EducationSoon: CleopatraMay. 01, 1950 The big news was the civil war raging between Pompey and Caesar. There was a sharp cartoon about Cicero, whose indecision in the crisis was lampooned in a caption, "Otium Cum Dignitate" (inaction with dignity). There had been strange doings at the Circus Maximus: two gladiators got tangled up with the umpires and decapitated one ...448 words ReligionCleopatra, Joah, PompadourSep. 10, 1934 The band swung into the "Marseillaise" and the master of ceremonies bellowed: "Now we come to that great patriot of France!" Across the stage marched a slightly nervous miss wearing a plumed helmet and a cuirass above a skimpy bath-suit, carrying a sword and shield. The band played "Onward, Christian Soldiers." The young lady, a ...404 words Arts & EntertainmentCleopatraJul. 04, 1927 CLEOPATRA'S PRIVATE DIARY—Henry Thomas—Stratford ($2). This imaginary Cleopatra, who goes to Rome with Caesar, certain that "the world needs its Cleopatras as well as it needs its vestal virgins," is made out to be one of the frankest hussies ever to expose her private doings to print. Rome she finds "a dirty little anthill of ...358 words Letters/LETTERSCleopatra SeleneApr. 27, 1925 Herewith are excerpts from letters come to the desks of the editors during the past week. They are selected primarily for the information they contain either supplementary to, or corrective of, news previously published in TIME. Pure Food TIME Woodhaven, N. Y., New York, N. Y. Apr. 8, 1925. Gentlemen: In TIME of Apr. 6, ...1133 words Arts & EntertainmentJust One of Those "Things"Jun. 21, 1963 Cleopatra. In scarlet letters volted with excitement the notorious name hung throbbing and enormous in the night sky over Broadway. Beneath it 10,000 rubberneckers milled on the macadam and roared at the famous faces in the glare. One by one, smiles popping like flashbulbs, they disappeared in the direction of the screen. What did it ...975 words Arts & Entertainment/HOLLYWOODShoot Only When CoveredDec. 12, 1960 Cleopatra was once rendered unto Caesar in a rug, but today she is wrapped up in an insurance policy. Before 20th Century-Fox began filming Cleopatra early this fall, the studio spent an estimated $390,000 in premiums for a Lloyd's of London standard policy covering possible delays. Then production got under way in a spectacular, 8½-acre, ...783 words Arts & EntertainmentOld Play in ManhattanDec. 08, 1947 Antony and Cleopatra (by William Shakespeare; produced by Katharine Cornell) is one of the world's greatest plays and the theater's greatest problems. It does far more than celebrate one of the most famous of all love affairs; more even than trace the downfall of one of the most powerful figures of history through his dalliance ...393 words Arts & EntertainmentPlatonic ExerciseMar. 07, 1977 By Gerald Clarke CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA by GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Caesar and Cleopatra is afflicted by the mummy's curse. Despite two or three of the best scenes in the Shavian canon, the play itself may be unworkable: lines by Shaw but construction by Rube Goldberg. Offstage there are battles, mob scenes and the endless clumping of Roman legions. ...243 words Arts & EntertainmentCanada's Dramatic LodestarJun. 21, 1976 By T. E. Kalem If variety is the spice of repertory life, the Stratford Festival in Ontario is the place to savor it. Crowning this season's six initial offerings are two intrepidly ventured rarities: THE WAY OF THE WORLD by WILLIAM CONGREVE ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Restoration drama takes us into a licentious world of high style, ...1059 words Arts & EntertainmentOld Play in ManhattanJan. 02, 1950 Caesar and Cleopatra (by George Bernard Shaw; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers in association with Julius Fleischmann) remains after half a century one of Shaw's, and hence the modern theater's, most vigorous plays. Shaw has often been more amusing, and sometimes more electrifying or profound. But in Caesar, using comedy with little flippancy, ...917 words Arts & Entertainment/The New PicturesThe New PicturesAug. 19, 1946 Caesar and Cleopatra (J. Arthur Rank-United Artists) cost the British $3 to $5 million (by pressagent accounting), and will be peddled in the U.S. as a spectacle. As spectacle, this Gabriel Pascal production does itself proud—from stupendous Technicolor replicas of Ptolemaic Egypt down to intimate studies of the young Queen's décolletage. But all the munificent ...721 words NotebookNoah's O.K., but We Need BabesMay. 17, 1999 By Harriet Barovick, Michelle Derrow, Tam Gray, Daniel Levy, Lina Lofaro, David Spitz, Flora Tartakovsky and Chris Taylor To capture audiences, networks are turning out lavish historical spectacles. The problem with history is that what really happened doesn't always make good TV. We asked a few experts to appraise the historical integrity of Noah's Ark, which appeared last week on NBC, Joan of Arc (CBS, May 16, 18) and Cleopatra (ABC, May 23, ...329 words Arts & EntertainmentPutting the Earth on WheelsOct. 23, 1978 By Martha Duffy ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA by William Shakespeare During a pitching, drunken revel aboard Pompey's ship, an infantry officer watches the rulers of the ancient world reeling around the deck and yearns that the earth were "on wheels." That is very nearly what Director Peter Brook has achieved in his whirling, boisterous version of Shakespeare's long, intractable ...551 words WorldA Proud PtolemyOct. 13, 1924 THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CLEOPATRA, QUEEN OF EGYPT—Arthur Weigall—Putnam ($5.00). The story of Anthony and Cleopatra, immortalized by Shakespeare, would seem so well known as to make repetitions unnecessary. Yet Egyptologist Weigall has created a book that all will delight in reading. His characters live again in the pageant of the past. He has ...101 words
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Notebook/MILESTONESMILESTONESFeb. 03, 1997 ACQUITTED. BRIGITTE BARDOT, 62, 1950s sex kitten turned animal-rights crusader; of charges of inciting racism; in Paris. The accusation stemmed from a Bardot letter published last year in a French newspaper decrying Muslim sacrificial slaughter of sheep, likening it to pagan rituals. RECOVERING. DESMOND TUTU, 65, Nobel Peace Laureate, retired Archbishop and chairman of South ...440 words WorldA New Look -- Once AgainJul. 09, 1990 By EMILY MITCHELL Rewind a generation for Brigitte Bardot's tousled hair, pouty mouth and sensual allure. Then fast-forward -- and surprise! -- blond tendrils again, lips in a pout and more curves than a scenic railroad. It's CLAUDIA SCHIFFER, the newest top star on the international fashion runway. Discovered in a Dusseldorf disco, Schiffer, 19, is being called ...97 words NationThe Madame Defarge Rabbit's FootMay. 21, 1990 By DAVID ELLIS/ BRIGITTE BARDOT The actress turned animal-rights crusader is angry about the indifference of French officials: "If we don't get an answer, we will, strengthened by the support we receive, try to overthrow the government." ...34 words PeoplePeopleMay. 18, 1987 By Guy D. Garcia Thirty years ago, Roger Vadim created And God Created Woman and created Brigitte Bardot. Now the French director has seen fit to update his classic handiwork. The man who made stars -- and conquests -- of such leading ladies as Bardot, Catherine Deneuve and Jane Fonda has just finished an identically titled 1980s version that ...158 words PeoplePeopleJun. 10, 1985 By Guy D. Garcia She is the Statue of Liberty's spirited older sister, and the time has come for her too to get a new look. Lissome, dauntless Marianne has aroused French patriotic passions since she became the symbol of the Republic in the 1850s. For the past 20 years, '60s Siren Brigitte Bardot has served as the real-life ...146 words BusinessMoney MachineDec. 18, 1978 The Jeep's macho image Brigitte Bardot adores hers. Pete Rose just bought ten of them, kept one for himself and gave nine as gifts. Object of their affections: the Jeep. World War II's workhorse has been transformed into a macho-chic machine that is leading the boom in the four-wheel-drive auto market. The biggest fan is ...575 words PeopleLess is more has usually been Brigitte...Oct. 10, 1977 Less is more has usually been Brigitte Bardot's attitude toward threads. Last year BB lent her ideas—and signature —to a collection of short shorts, dresses, blouses and shirts created by her friend, Designer Arlette Nastat. Their collection this year tends to be ampler as Bardot demonstrated by modeling one of her striped angora sweater-tunics and ...1035 words PeopleHis amours with Actresses Brigitte...May. 05, 1975 His amours with Actresses Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve and Jane Fonda are behind him now, and French Film Director Roger Vadim has been pursuing other muses. "To be a director is to be a painter in a way," he says by way of explaining his new interest. "You train your sense of aesthetics, of color, ...1097 words PeopleBrigitte Bardot as Don Juan? Why not? La...Feb. 12, 1973 Brigitte Bardot as Don Juan? Why not? La Bardot, 38, in one of the most eye-raising pieces of casting since Sarah Bernhardt took on Hamlet, plays Don Juan as a dancer-turned-impresario whose chief occupation is ruining men of all ages. For the soon-to-be-released film, Director Roger Vadim did quite a job on his former wife: ...616 words PeopleEverybody has his own definition of...Nov. 20, 1972 Everybody has his own definition of getting old. To Brigitte Bardot, now a hardly senescent 38, it will be "the day I can no longer have the man I'd like." The Vogue magazine interviewer seemed a little shocked. What was Brigitte looking for in a man? "That he attract me physically." What about intellect and ...879 words MilestonesMarried. Arlo Guthrie, 22, ....Oct. 17, 1969 Married. Arlo Guthrie, 22, . balladeering son of Folk Singer Woody Guthrie; and Jacklyn Hyde, 24 (see Music). Divorced. Brigitte Bardot, 35, durable cinema sex kitten; from Günter Sachs, 36, wealthy West German playboy; on grounds of incompatibility; in Lenzerheide, Switzerland. Divorced. Dr. Sam Sheppard, 45, Cleveland osteopath who spent almost ten years in prison ...415 words WorldFRANCE'S MELANCHOLY MOODJan. 03, 1969 FRANCE last week seemed all too normal. In keeping with his holiday habits, President Charles de Gaulle was at his country home in the quiet village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises in eastern France. His Premier, Maurice Couve de Murville, was on the Riviera, trying to extract some warmth from the pale Mediterranean sun. Brigitte Bardot was in ...1508 words Arts & EntertainmentUnhappy Hunting GroundsDec. 06, 1968 To the Apache, Shalalco means Bringer of Rain. In movie parlance it merely means Stupefier of Audience. In this wildly improbable western, Bringer of Rain (Sean Connery) is a rugged cavalry scout dispatched to the unhappy hunting grounds of the Apaches. There, he discovers a troupe of junketing European aristocrats, including Brigitte Bardot, Jack Hawkins ...258 words PeopleRumors flitted through Germany that...Oct. 11, 1968 Rumors flitted through Germany that despite their three-month separation, Brigitte Bardot and Third Husband Günter Sachs were still madly in love, If so, they were having the devil's own time letting each other know about it. First the German playboy descended on Munich, where Bardot was on hand for the premiere of her new western, ...810 words Arts & EntertainmentSomething NueJan. 13, 1967 The Game Is Over. Some people (including Roger Vadim) consider Roger Vadim an artist. Some don't. What is certain is that he won fame and fortune by displaying his wives on the screen without any clothes on. He got his start by exhibiting Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman, and he now presents his ...206 words PeopleIn London to film a quickie called Two...Sep. 30, 1966 In London to film a quickie called Two Weeks in September, Brigitte Bardot explained that the theme was "love —the greatest illusion. It is ecstatic, painful and hopeless at the same time." Well, maybe, but following her around, B.B.'s new husband and Great Love No. 3, German Playboy Gunter Sachs, hardly seemed hopeless. And he ...858 words MilestonesMarried. Romy Schneider, 27,...Jul. 22, 1966 Married. Romy Schneider, 27, Austria's sugar-and-ice gift to the movies (Boccaccio 70); and Harry Haubenstock, 44, German actor-director; he for the second time; in St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France. Married. Brigitte Bardot, 31, prototype cat for Europe's sex kittens; and Gunter Sachs von Opel, 33, heir to a West German ball-bearing fortune and one of the Continent's best-known ...625 words Arts & Entertainment/FESTIVALSFine Art & FlapdoodleMay. 20, 1966 Eighteen-year-old Brigitte Bardot made her first splash there in a bikini, wiggling her way into the hearts of photographers; Simone Signoret's smoldering stare set the place afire back in 1949; Sophia Loren jumped from bulging starlet to blossoming actress when she made the scene in 1955. Ever since it began, the Cannes Film Festival has ...591 words PressThe Value of PrivacyApr. 01, 1966 French photographers may not be quite as notorious as Italy's pugnacious paparazzi, but they are no less unscrupulous about invading people's privacy. When they are not wading out into the Mediterranean to sneak pictures of Brigitte Bardot semi-nude on her private beach, they are risking their necks schussing down the ski slopes of the Alps ...303 words Arts & EntertainmentCarnival in BrioDec. 31, 1965 Viva Maria! gives Brigitte Bardot one of the best roles of her career and Jeanne Moreau one of her worst. Fortunately, Moreau treats the handicap lightly, as if she were taking up tent-show theatricals just for the hell of it. Together, the two co-stars perform miracles of wit, charm and camera-wise witchery in this jaunty ...333 words
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What is it about the Academy Awards that elevates it above all others? Quite simply, it's the biggest. So when anything extraordinary happens, that one moment in time is magnified before a viewing audience of 1 billion worldwide.We're not just watching to see who wins 'Best Sound' - we're waiting for that great, unscripted moment that people will talk about for years to come. Check out our list of the 10 best moments from The Oscars. Do you agree or disagree with our choices? Share your views here!
10 Great Oscar Moments
· 72nd Academy Awards - In 2000, South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker arrived in drag. Stone aped the pink dress Gwyneth Paltrow wore the previous year and Parker mimicked the one worn by both Jennifer Lopez and Geri Halliwell. Classic Oscar moment!
· 12th Academy Awards - In a series of firsts, Hattie McDaniel is the first black person to ever be nominated for an Academy Award, the first to win (Best Supporting Actress, 1939, for her role as mammy in 'Gone With The Wind') and the first to sit at an Academy banquet.
· 72nd Academy Awards - Michael Caine makes one of the best Oscar acceptance speeches ever after winning Best Supporting Actor, 1999, for his role in 'The Cider House Rules'. Caine was visibly moved, gracious and funny. He joked with fellow nominee Tom Cruise that if he'd won, his price would have gone down.
· 36th Academy Awards - At a time when black Americans were demanding Civil Rights, Sidney Poitier makes history. For his role in 'Lillies Of The Field', Poitier wins the 1963 Best Actor award; the first black man to do so.
· 64th Academy Awards - In the 1940s and 50s, the late Bob Hope reigned as Oscar host; the late Johnny Carson was king in the 1970s but in the modern era, Billy Crystal has proved virtually irreplaceable. The 1992 ceremony was dominated by 'Silence Of The Lambs' and in a nod to the movie, Oscar host Billy Crystal made a hilarious entrance strapped to a stretcher and wearing a muzzled mask à la Hannibal Lecter. Other great Crystal moments centre around his treatment of the Best Picture nominees; in the past, he's opened the ceremony by editing himself into them or singing a medley of all their plots.
· 68th Academy Awards - Jon Blair's documentary 'Anne Frank Remembered' wins the 1995 Best Documentary Feature award. On accepting his award, he brings a very special guest onstage and announces that she is Miep Gies, the woman who saved Anne Frank's diary from the Nazis so that the world could read it. The audience gave her a heartfelt standing ovation which went on for a long time. It was a very moving Oscar moment.
· 74th Academy Awards - On the night that Sidney Poitier received the 2001 Honorary Award, he witnessed another black man win Best Actor; Denzel Washington for Training Day. However the night belonged to Halle Berry. Not only was she wearing the best dress, she became the first black woman to take home the Best Actress award (her weepy speech is showcased here).
· 75th Academy Awards - Presenter Halle Berry announced Adrien Brody, the star of 'The Pianist', as the Best Actor for 2002. Shocked at his win, Brody seized the married woman (as she wasthen) and kissed her very, very passionately. Halle was clearly stunned (who wasn't?!) but what a fantastic Oscar moment! It was the highlight of the night and was much parodied at subsequent award ceremonies.
· 66th Academy Awards - 11-year-old Anna Paquin causes a shock by winning Best Supporting Actress for 1993 thanks to her role in 'The Piano' (Winona Ryder was widely expected to win for 'The Age Of Innocence'). Clearly amazed at her win, she stood on the podium with her Oscar, wide-eyed after taking in her star-studded audience. For over 20 seconds, all she could do was gasp and gulp and her childlike awe induced laughter of the 'Ah! Ain't it cute!' kind.
· 63rd Academy Awards - "Here she is - the NC-17 portion of our show!" joked host Billy Crystal as a curvy, Marilyn Monroe-esque Madonna performed the 1990 Best Original Song winner from 'Dick Tracy'. The song was 'Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)' and the performance was a scorcher.
May 2, 2005 Vol. 165 No. 18
C O V E RViva il Papa!: In selecting a new Pontiff, the conclave of Cardinals has opted for conservatism over change. What Pope Benedict XVI will mean for the Catholic ChurchPapal Politics: Inside the push to elect Ratzinger
RATZINGER RATZINGER TATSZINGER RATZINGER RATZINGER TATSZINGER RATZINGER RATZINGER TATSZINGER RATZINGER RATZINGER TATSZINGER
The Conquest of Rome
The stealth campaign for Ratzinger began 18 months ago. An inside look at how he won
By JEFF ISRAELY
Posted Sunday, April 24, 2005
In the days before the conclave, almost every Cardinal who deigned to speak to the press declared that he was praying to the Holy Spirit for guidance in choosing the successor to John Paul II. The Holy Spirit's efforts in this particular case began 18 months ago, with a stealth campaign that in the end transfigured an unpalatable candidate into the inevitable Pontiff, turning Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany into Pope Benedict XVI. The momentum, orchestrated by key Curia Cardinals, was such that a last-ditch attempt by liberals to derail it petered out after the first round of voting. "They didn't realize how strong Ratzinger was," says an aide to a Cardinal who almost certainly did not vote for the German. "The reformers have been out of touch with this growing tide around Ratzinger."
Back in October 2003, as a litany of papabili, or potential candidates, was intoned by the press amid one of John Paul II's health crises, Ratzinger wasn't mentioned at all. The favorite was an Italian, Dionigi Cardinal Tettamanzi of Milan. Even though Ratzinger was dean of the College of Cardinals, many saw him as past his prime. Moreover, his work as John Paul's ideological enforcer had made him a divisive figure in the church. "He had fallen off the radar," says a Curia official. But something was afoot that October. A Cardinal in the Curia, in conversation with another Vatican official, suddenly said, "I like Ratzinger's chances." Surprised at the time, the official now says, "Getting elected Pope is more a question of how many enemies you have than friends. And I thought Ratzinger still had too many enemies."
But John Paul, in spite of his ailments, was attending to that problem. In October 2003 he would not only persevere to celebrate his 25th anniversary as Pope but also forge ahead with an exhausting ceremony to install a new batch of Cardinals. By the time of his death, he had appointed 115 of the 117 Cardinals eligible to vote, stacking the college with men who were more likely to want to continue his conservative policies. Just as important, in the ensuing months most of the influential Cardinals of liberal stripe would pass the voting age limit of 80. The only one of stature left to rally wavering Cardinals to the liberal cause was Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini. But his clout was limited. In 2002 the Pope had allowed the ailing Martini to leave his power base in Milan to pursue his love of biblical scholarship in faraway Jerusalem. The Pope, on the other hand, refused to let Ratzinger give up his bureaucratic jobs in the Curia.
By the end of 2003, instead of being exhausted by work, Ratzinger appeared to have been rejuvenated. Not only did he keep on publishing books and papers, but he also became more audible as a conservative voice in European and global affairs. He became particularly visible in Italy, which was expressing some nostalgia for an Italian papacy after years of a Polish Pope. Ratzinger wrote several articles for major Italian papers. "All of a sudden last year," said a senior Vatican official, "he had become the darling of the [conservative] Italian intelligentsia."
In the first week of January 2005, hints that Ratzinger was a front runner hit the press. "The Ratzinger solution is definitely on," TIME quoted a well-placed Vatican insider. "There was a stigma. He rises above that now." But even then, many others found the idea unbelievable. "I thought the window was closing because of his age," says a Vatican official. If John Paul had lived two more years, says the official, Ratzinger "would have disappeared from the horizon." In February, John Paul was admitted to the hospital. And as the church focused once again on potential successors, something close to a papal campaign debate took place. Ratzinger and Tettamanzi attended a funeral in Milan for the founder of Communion and Liberation, a powerful conservative Catholic lay movement. Without notes, Ratzinger delivered an inspiring eulogy and received enthusiastic applause. Tettamanzi, who presided over the service as the local Cardinal, read his remarks and, according to a supporter of the Milanese prelate, left the crowd cold.
For Ratzinger, it was a critical time to appear strong and confident—and he got several opportunities to bolster such an image. For Good Friday, with John Paul near death, Ratzinger wrote the text for the closely watched reading of the Stations of the Cross. His daring language on the need to cleanse the church of "filth"—an apparent reference to the sex-abuse scandals plaguing the priesthood—startled some but was applauded by many looking for strength as John Paul's ebbed. Without having to claim as much, Ratzinger appeared to be the man in charge.
When the Cardinals arrived from around the world for John Paul's funeral, they naturally turned to the Cardinals of the Curia for advice and intelligence on who should replace him. "It's a fact that most Cardinals don't know most other Cardinals—not well, anyway, and not personally," says a priest close to Ratzinger. "The way they get to know each other is in Rome. And how do they get to know each other? They tend to ask the Curia Cardinals." And the person everyone wanted to meet was Ratzinger.
He made himself available to share his views. "My voice is tired because I've been talking all week," Ratzinger said on April 16, the Saturday before the conclave, as he stopped by his office so his staff could celebrate his 78th birthday. (They sang Ave Maria in rondo to mark the anniversary.) "His voice was almost gone," said Monsignor Gerald Cadieres, a Venezuelan who worked for him. For days, Ratzinger had been impressing visiting Cardinals by speaking in German, French, English, Italian and Spanish. It was like nonstop town-hall meetings in a U.S. political campaign—with this caveat: no one is allowed to campaign. One observer describes the pro-Ratzinger maneuvers not as politics but as attempts to change the "mood" of the conclave.
Still, like any good campaigner, he was center stage at every turn—at John Paul's funeral; at the first of the novemdiales Masses, held on the nine days after the Pope's funeral; as chairman of the Cardinals' daily congregation meetings; at the preconclave Mass. Were they all required appearances? Apparently, the novemdiales Mass did not necessarily have to be celebrated by Ratzinger. He was also under no obligation to deliver such substantial homilies. "Ratzinger seems to have grabbed the ball and run with it for two weeks," remarked an experienced Vaticanologist. A Ratzinger supporter put it in more pious terms: "Some inner fire was lit, like God had chosen him."
And then, on the Monday of the conclave, he delivered a homily that effectively acknowledged his candidacy, making it plain that he would not compromise his ideals to gain votes. It was a gauntlet thrown down before would-be challengers and a rallying cry for supporters. "What was he doing issuing a whole program for the future of the church?" asked an aide to a liberal Cardinal. "That should have been a moment for the dean of Cardinals to reflect on the spiritual process they were about to enter, not lay out his visions."
Ratzinger's supporters saw it otherwise. "It's not that he wanted the job. He didn't," said one. "But his brother Cardinals saw him leading an important Mass. Watching him, there was something that had changed, almost like he had already ascended to a new level." If the liberals arrived in Rome not truly believing Ratzinger was a viable candidate, they did now. Cardinal Martini had tried to organize a countermovement, and as the electors entered the conclave on Monday afternoon, the consensus was that two camps would be pitted against each other: the conservatives around Ratzinger and a group behind Martini. But Martini, who is suffering from Parkinson's disease, was hoping only to blunt Ratzinger's momentum to give other less conservative Cardinals a chance to gather support.
The biblical scholar managed a good showing in the first round of balloting, but Ratzinger was already solidly ahead. The rest of the votes were spread among several Italians and, according to one voting Cardinal, several ballots were left blank. By evening, it was clear that no one was going to be able to step in for Martini.
Not even Ratzinger's younger conservative rivals could put up a fight. Tettamanzi, bested in eloquence on his home turf, reportedly managed only two votes. And the Italians never coalesced around another countryman. Indeed, while analysts at the time focused on the bloc-voting potential of the 20 eligible Italian Cardinals and how it might portend an Italian Pope, few noticed that the bloc had a fissure and that nine of those Cardinals were members of the Curia—well within Ratzinger's sphere of influence. A senior Vatican official notes, "What lifted him over the threshold were the Italians. If he got it in four ballots, it means the Italians were on board." An Italian member of the Curia, Camillo Cardinal Ruini, the vicar of Rome, is believed to have ridden herd on the pro-Ratzinger Cardinals as they gathered. One Cardinal elector said many of the 20-member Latin American bloc closely aligned with the German's traditionalist stance arrived intent on getting Ratzinger elected. By Tuesday, Martini, who does not dislike Ratzinger personally, withdrew his candidacy and might have even thrown his support to him.
Liberals who could not stomach that option reportedly swung over to Buenos Aires' Jesuit Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio in an anyone-but-Ratzinger move, though several sources said the Argentine was himself aligned with the German. But the second balloting saw Ratzinger reach 60 votes. By the third, he was just shy of the 77 required for the papacy. By the fourth, he had won 95 out of 115. Liberal stalwarts left grumbling. "A good conclave is one where there are at least two candidates deadlocked," says a liberal supporter disappointed by the process. "A bad conclave is where there's one dominant figure. That was the case this time."
The liberals were simply outorganized by the Curia. "The ease of Ratzinger's victory was proof of just how compact and well prepared the Roman nucleus was," a Cardinal elector told TIME. The conservatives could also say it was answered prayer and proof of the intervention of the Holy Spirit. In the Sistine Chapel, as the tally went over the required two-thirds, "there was a gasp all around," Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor of Britain recalled in a press conference. Ratzinger, he said, "had his head down. He must have been saying a prayer." When Jorge Cardinal Arturo Medina Estevez—who would announce the election to the world from the balcony of St. Peter's—asked Ratzinger what name he would assume, the Pontiff-elect did not hesitate. "In the past, there's been a wait while the new Pope pondered the question for 10 minutes or so," says an informed source. "Not so this time. Ratzinger replied right away, 'Benedict XVI.' He was prepared."
—With reporting by Jordan Bonfante and Giancarlo Zizola/Rome and Howard Chua-Eoan/New York
Rome's Next Choice? [Jan 2, 2005] Arch-conservative Cardinal Ratzinger emerges as a possible successor to Pope John Paul II
Throwing Their Red Hats into the Ring [Mar 26, 2001] The highly subtle contest to succeed the Pope is under way
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Cover StoryThe Truth Of The MatterBUSH'S EX--COUNTERTERRORISM CHIEF SAYS THE ADMINISTRATION HAS MISHANDLED THE WAR ON AL-QAEDA. SHOULD WE BELIEVE HIM?By MASSIMO CALABRESI, JOHN F. DICKERSON AND DAREN FONDA
Apr. 5, 2004
How does a civil servant who has launched a major attack on the Bush presidency protect himself from what he has unleashed? Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush--who saw al-Qaeda expand under his watch, attack U.S. interests abroad and produce the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history--knew he couldn't pin the blame on his bosses if he didn't start by apologizing himself. So he prepared his words carefully. At 3 a.m. on the day of his testimony, "I got up and went down to my study and actually typed the words out so I wouldn't forget," he told TIME. When it came time to deliver them in a hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building, he addressed not just his interrogators, the 10 members of the bipartisan commission charged with investigating the events of 9/11, but also the victims of Osama bin Laden. "Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you," he said, in language that struck some people as melodramatic. After he spoke, some of the victims' loved ones, seated behind him, put down pictures of their dead to applaud; some hugged him when he was done testifying. Said Stephen Push, whose wife Lisa Raines died aboard American Airlines Flight 77: "I've been waiting for an apology from the government for two and a half years."
Clarke, who quit his job at the National Security Council a year ago, would not have survived Washington's brutal ways in the service of three Presidents if he had not been a good politician. And last week he needed all the political skills he could muster for what he was about to do--direct a missile at the very fortress that so far has protected Bush's presidential advantage in this campaign season: the perception that, for all his faults, Bush has done everything he could to keep the country safe and managed the war on terrorism well. In an early March Gallup poll, the President's approval rating on the issue of terrorism was nearly 30 points higher than that of Democratic challenger John Kerry. Suddenly it looked to some Democrats as if Bush's main argument for re-election--that the world is too dangerous to change horses in midstream--could at least be neutralized.
If Clarke's assault was effective, it was partly because he used the tools of an old warrior, surprise and preparation. First he produced a closely guarded book more than a year in the making, Against All Enemies, whose revelations he unveiled on 60 Minutes three days before his testimony, broadcast live on the cable networks. His case was devastating: the Bush Administration, he claimed, had dillydallied in its approach to terrorism, ignoring warnings and shelving counterstrategies, getting serious only after the tragedy of 9/11 and then bungling its efforts by launching a diversionary war in Iraq. The day after Clarke's testimony, a survey released by the Pew Research Center found that a remarkable 89% of those polled had heard about his charges. Clarke's book shot to No. 1 on Amazon's best-seller list.
It is perhaps a measure of the force of the assault on the Administration record that, in an exclusive interview with TIME last week, Vice President Dick Cheney came close to acknowledging that his team might have been more attentive to the terrorist threat before 9/11. "There are clearly some things that could have been done to be more effective," he allowed.
That uncharacteristically humble statement, however, came only after Cheney had used the opportunity to blast Clarke. "He's taken advantage of the circumstances this week to promote himself and his book." Cheney added, "I don't know the guy that well ... but judging based on what I've seen, I don't hold him in high regard." Other Bush figures accused Clarke, who is a friend of Kerry's chief foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers, of being partisan. Describing Clarke's apology for 9/11, a Bush adviser remarked, "It's political bulls___. It's great political bulls___, but it's political." The lead charge against Clarke was that he had changed his story over time (see box). Clarke had anticipated the assault, telling 60 Minutes, "They'll launch their dogs on me."
In the end, it was quite a pack. Even before 60 Minutes aired, White House communications director Dan Bartlett was countering Clarke's charges in interviews with the networks and cable news channels. Reporters also received a four-page rebuttal of Clarke's book by email from the White House. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who racked up the most Nielsen points, declined to speak publicly before the 9/11 commission, citing Executive privilege, but swung at Clarke for any reporter willing to listen. She even took the rare step of inviting unwieldy clutches of journalists into her vast but tidy West Wing office. "What's the Texas expression?" asks a Bush adviser, assessing the pell-mell response of the various Administration officials. "A hit dog yelps."
Republicans in Congress then took the highly unusual step of seeking to declassify closed-door testimony Clarke gave in 2002 before a congressional committee to determine whether his remarks back then contradicted what he told the 9/11 commission or wrote in his book. "It is one thing for Mr. Clarke to dissemble in front of the media," said Senate majority leader Bill Frist, "but if he lied under oath to the United States Congress, it is a far, far more serious matter." A number of Democrats who had heard Clarke's 2002 testimony came to his defense, saying they heard nothing then that was at odds with what he is saying now.
With all the dust flying around Clarke last week, the question of whether Washington appropriately handled the terrorist threat tended to get lost. That question is of course the one of greatest interest to the public in the wake of 9/11. TIME's guide to the main charges:
--Terrorism was not a top priority of the Bush team before 9/11
In his strongest public statement, to 60 Minutes, Clarke said Bush "ignored" the terrorist threat before 9/11. To the commission he testified, more soberly, that, for the Administration, it was an "important issue but not an urgent issue." Clearly, the Clinton White House worried more. Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger remembers telling his successor, Rice, during the transition that, for the Bush team, "the No. 1 issue that you're going to be dealing with is terrorism generally and al-Qaeda specifically."
The record of the Bush Administration's first half-year suggests its members didn't buy it. They were more focused on Russia, China and especially missile defense. In his book Bush at War, Bob Woodward quotes Bush himself saying of Osama bin Laden, "There was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11. I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace ... But I didn't feel that sense of urgency."
Clarke's strongest argument in this dispute is the pace with which the Administration considered the plan he proposed on Jan. 25, 2001 for combating al-Qaeda. The program had evolved during the Clinton years, as al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and then the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000. The Bush team put the proposal through an April meeting of senior officials, took their time with it over the summer and finally brought it to Bush's Cabinet-level security and foreign policy chiefs, who approved it, just a week before 9/11. None of that suggests it was a national-security priority.
The details of NSPD 9, the five-to six-page paper that was approved Sept. 4, remain classified. Its primary elements include covert and military efforts to disrupt al-Qaeda around the world, increased security of U.S. embassies and military bases, efforts to track down al-Qaeda funding networks, a strong public diplomacy program to win Muslim hearts and minds and a campaign to deny al-Qaeda a sanctuary in Afghanistan. Bush officials say they took months to approve a plan to fight al-Qaeda because they wanted to eliminate the group rather than roll it back, as they claim Clinton would have done. They also say they added crucial elements, including planning for a potential military invasion of Afghanistan three to five years down the road. But a senior Bush Administration official admitted to TIME that NSPD 9 was in nearly all respects the same as the plan Clarke proposed on Jan. 25.
--The Clinton Administration should have got bin Laden
At the hearings last week, commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic Senator from Nebraska, pointed out that bin Laden formally declared war against the U.S., among others, in February 1998, and argued that the U.S. should have responded in kind. In her testimony, Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright allowed that Kerrey was "probably right." But what might the U.S. have done?
Clinton tried to kill bin Laden. After the embassy attacks in Africa, the U.S. launched cruise missiles on a training camp in Afghanistan where bin Laden had been spotted, but in the time it took to decide to strike and during the flight time of the missiles, fired from ships in the Arabian Sea, bin Laden escaped. He was sighted several more times in Afghanistan, in December 1998 and February and May 1999. Each time Clinton officials ruled out strikes because there was no guarantee that bin Laden would be there when the missiles hit or because too many civilians would have been killed or, in one case, an Emirati prince could have died. An interim report by the 9/11 commission cites a CIA field official as saying that last case in particular was a lost opportunity to kill bin Laden before 9/11. It might have helped if the CIA under Clinton had been clear on its orders. Officials of the agency, from director George Tenet to operatives in the field, believed that bin Laden could be killed only in the course of a legitimate capture attempt. Clinton White House officials say their position was that he was fair game. Both sides now say they were unaware that they had different interpretations of the orders.
Once Bush took office, some critics say, his Administration should have acted faster to deploy armed Predator spy drones to start hunting for bin Laden once the winter weather cleared in early 2001. The first successful test of an armed Predator was in February 2001. However, the lethal planes weren't used in Afghanistan until after 9/11. CIA officials were worried that bin Laden and his Taliban hosts might learn how to evade or shoot down the drones when there were few available, and the agency was also concerned that assassinating enemies with the Predator would provoke an international outcry against the CIA.
Invading Afghanistan before 9/11 would have been politically difficult. It's highly doubtful that neighboring countries such as Pakistan, then an ally of the Taliban, would have allowed the U.S. to use their territory for basing operations. And there were other difficulties. As it was, when Clinton sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan in 1998, he was accused by members of Congress and the media of a wag-the-dog strategy--of attempting to divert attention from the scandal over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. After the Cole bombing, Clarke advocated striking al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan but could not win support from the FBI and the CIA, which were not yet convinced that al-Qaeda was responsible. Meanwhile, Clinton was engaged in a last-ditch effort at winning an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. And it's hard to imagine the U.S. public, much less American allies, supporting a full-scale assault against al-Qaeda, an enemy few Americans could have identified three years ago, in the absence of the provocation of 9/11.
--9/11 could have been prevented
"Assuming that [your plan] had been adopted, say, on Jan. 26, 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?" Republican commissioner Slade Gordon asked Clarke last week. "No," Clarke replied. Killing bin Laden and bombing al-Qaeda training camps, as Clarke advocated, might have dealt the organization a setback. But most U.S. officials believe that the planning for the terrorist attacks was already so far advanced that such actions wouldn't have halted them. Some of the 9/11 hijackers were already in the U.S. in early 2000 laying plans.
In theory, greater vigilance at home might have exposed their conspiracy. There were clues. Two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq al-Hamzi, were sought by the FBI and the CIA as suspected terrorists. An FBI agent in Phoenix, Ariz., had noted a pattern of Arab men signing up for lessons at flight schools. Zacarias Moussaoui, the suspected 20th hijacker, was learning to fly in Minnesota, apparently without asking for landing lessons. Clarke argues that if the President had been demanding action every day from his top aides, they would have passed the heat down the chain of command, and perhaps connections would have been made. That kind of attention from Clinton in late 1999, Clarke contends, prevented a planned al-Qaeda attack against the Los Angeles airport on New Year's Eve. Bush officials respond that the 1999 plot was undone more by luck than by executive action; an immigration agent blocked a suspicious man from crossing the border with British Columbia. In any case, no one denies that it would have required good fortune to foil the 9/11 plot.
--The Iraq war worsened the terrorist threat
In his book and in media appearances promoting it, Clarke goes beyond his criticism that the Bush Administration failed by neglecting to wage a war on terrorism before 9/11. He accuses the Administration of actually making things worse by fighting what Clarke regards as an unnecessary war in Iraq. He seconds the allegation of former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that the Administration was intent on invading Iraq from the time it took office, the justifications be damned. Clarke charges, and John Kerry has agreed, that the Iraq war diverted U.S. efforts away from the fight against al-Qaeda, undermined global cooperation against terrorism and fueled Islamic extremism.
The Administration responds that it can both fight terrorism and remove what it believes was a grave threat in Iraq. Indeed, Bush officials still see them as connected. They believe you must simultaneously attack terrorist networks directly, diminish the number and availability of the terrorists' allies and change the environment that breeds terrorism. "On all three scores Iraq makes a contribution to the war on terror," says National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. 50
That remains to be seen. The Madrid bombings suggested that the Iraq war had inspired further terrorist attacks. And by the Administration's admission, al-Qaeda has taken root in Iraq and is targeting Americans, those who help them and innocent civilians. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stopped saying the U.S. would rather fight terrorists in Iraq than in the U.S. While an Iraq free of Saddam Hussein is potentially a partner against terrorism, the disorder there hardly guarantees that outcome. And there is still no evidence that
50
Saddam and al-Qaeda ever collaborated in attacking the U.S. Clarke told 60 Minutes that because of Bush, "Americans went to their death in Iraq thinking that they were avenging Sept. 11."
In the end, the drama produced by Clarke in Washington was not about the last terrorist attack against the U.S. but about the next one. Since it began its work in early 2003, the commission has uncovered huge failings in the national-security system, including how even a presidential order can be misunderstood down the chain of command. But these dangers got lost in a high-stakes political showdown. Unless Washington can focus on them, someone may risk having to ask forgiveçãçõçéááPriestley Weds Longtime Girlfriendmai 17, 4:37 EST
JASON PRIEST TIES THE KNOT
The Associated Press
NEW YORK -- Former "Beverly Hills, 90210" star
Jason Priestley has married longtime girlfriend Naomi Lowde, the actor's publicist, Marla Weinstein, said Tuesday.
Priestley and Lowde wed Saturday on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, Weinstein said. No further details were available.
After several years together, the 35-year-old actor and Lowde, a makeup artist, became engaged last May. It is the second marriage for Priestley, who was married to Ashlee Peterson, also a makeup artist, for less than a year before divorcing in early 2000.
Priestley, who played Brandon Walsh on the long-running teen drama, was seriously injured in an August 2002 car crash. The avid race car driver spun out of control at 180 mph and hit a wall nearly head-on during practice at the Kentucky Speedway.
More recently, Priestley appeared in the campy independent film "Die Mommie Die! " He also directed the 1999 documentary "
Barenaked in America," about his fellow Canadians, the band
Barenaked Ladies.
çãçõçéááAssessing Pope Benedict XVI
çãçõçéááDavid Van Biema: The choice reflects a number of things: A desire for continuity with the papacy of John Paul II, which the cardinals believe — correctly or incorrectly — that Ratzinger best represents, having been more intimately involved with the last papacy than anybody expect John Paul II himself. As the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he was John Paul II's theological enforcer for almost a quarter century. A second consideration would probably be that Ratzinger was almost universally acknowledged as one of only a handful of cardinals possessing the gravitas to take on the papacy. His intellect, his piety, his grasp of what the Church is all about and his willingness to grapple with the issues that face it were probably as great, if not greater than anyone else in that room. It takes a certain sort of person, in the eyes of the cardinals, to combine the qualities needed to make a good pope. And Cardinal Ratzinger represented one of a few who they already knew, without extensive investigation, possessed those qualities, and was able conceptually, intellectually and spiritually to take on the job.
çãçõçéááThey clearly wanted somebody conservative, not only because the previous pope was conservative, but also because the cardinals themselves are mostly conservative — their rise in the Church under John Paul II, in whose papacy doctrine was more strictly enforced, would signal agreement with his own conservative views. For the cardinals who felt that way about the direction of the Church, the choice would have been between Ratzinger and someone who felt a good deal like Ratzinger. If Ratzinger was willing to take the job, he was probably viewed as the man who could implement those ideas in the most powerful and efficient manner.
TIME.com: Could it be said that choosing a figure from within the Curia, known primarily as a strict and vigorous enforcer of doctrinal positions, may reflect a greater concern with managing the Church's bureaucracy and doctrinal issues among the clergy than with the sort of pastoral role played among the Catholic faithful by John Paul II?
DVB: By virtue of his central and high profile role in the previous papacy, we certainly know more about Benedict XVI than about many of the people who might have gotten the job. If there is a question mark over what he may do in the course of his own papacy, it probably has to do with the question if he'll act in a different way as pope than as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which used to be called the Office of the Inquisition. It is not pastoral by nature. It deals with possible heresies, which requires an approach very different from that of a pastor dealing with his flock. There were two sides to John Paul II: his doctrinally conservative side, and his pastorally brilliant side. That enabled him to communicate effectively with his flock and garner a certain sympathy even when announcing a teaching that some of them disagreed with. It was one of his great gifts to be able to maintain a connection even with many of the people of his Church who disagreed with him. And that pastoral brilliance softened his conservative legacy within the Church. So the question becomes, is Benedict XVI capable of developing a pastoral side that could similarly soften the impact of his doctrinal side, which has been prominent for so long?
Managing the Curia, the Church's bureaucracy, is a separate question, and it may be as open-ended as the one about how good a pastor Benedict will be. It's less important to the non-Catholic on the street, but it's extremely important to the Church. Ratzinger was a master of the Curia, and used it as well as anybody. At the same time, he's reportedly of a non-bureaucratic cast of mind, and prefers to be as direct as possible in getting things done. That may prompt him to streamline the Curia. There's certainly some anticipation that he'll shake things up.
A related question is how centralized the Church will become, and whether any authority will devolve back to the Bishops. Benedict's papacy will pour cold water on the hopes of those who saw Vatican II as opening up the Church on questions of distribution of authority and autonomy, either to the residential bishops or to the laity. Most of the great debates of the past half-century in the Catholic Church have been about how to interpret Vatican II. Many Catholics in the U.S. who have problems with the Church's stance on all kinds of issues, such as birth control, abortion, the status of gay people and other issues had already been greatly discouraged under John Paul II from expecting a shift towards emphasizing the primacy of individual conscience. The choice of Ratzinger won't please those believers in the U.S. who had been hoping that a new papacy might, if not advance a more liberal interpretation of Vatican II then at least reopen discussion over it, which had been shut down under John Paul II with Ratzinger as enforcer.
TIME.com: Benedict XVI's frequently stated positions appear to accept the inevitability of the decline of Church membership in the industrialized West, rather than to reach out to accommodate the concerns of those who might be drifting away from the Church.
çãçõçéááDVB: Some in the Church see the conservatism personified by the new pope as the reason for the decline of membership in Europe and to a lesser extent the U.S. Others, however, feel that Church has not explicitly enough stated its guiding values strongly enough, and that a stronger sense of what the Church stands for would have avoided the decline in numbers. For the latter group, Benedict XVI's papacy offers a great deal of hope. But the more common analysis is that people in the West have left the Church because not only do they disagree with some of its teachings, they are not allowed to disagree out loud on questions such as the ordination of women. The closing down of dissent — which the new Pope had an active part in during his previous job — doesn't sit well with the norms of post-Enlightenment Western cultures.
By that analysis, the Church would continue to shrink in the West under Benedict XVI, unless he turns out to be extremely gifted pastorally. But that would not necessarily bother him that much. He has previously indicated that he would be comfortable with an extremely small Church, preferring a small church of true believers to a larger one whose numbers are swelled by people he would not see as good Catholics. Benedict XVI has previously argued that it is not unhealthy for church to be a counter culture rather than a dominant player in secular Western society. He's willing to see it play the role of an oppositional minority to a cultural drift he sees at odds with Church teachings.
TIME.com: John Paul II was celebrated for his outreach to other Christian sects, and to Jews and Muslims. Cardinal Ratzinger was clearly uncomfortable with some of these efforts and took a lead in restating the differences between the Church and these other groups. He's also on record, for example, of opposing Turkey's entry into the European Union for fear of diluting Europe's Christian identity. Can we expect a change in the Church's attitude to other Christians, and other faiths?
DVB: It may be expected that ecumenical efforts in relation to other churches are unlikely to advance during the new papacy. Benedict XVI has, for example, insisted that other Christian churches not be called "sister churches," but "daughter churches." And given that view of the relationship, I'm not sure ecumenism will be a major party of his legacy. The same might be true on interfaith efforts. After John Paul II had pulled together the remarkable convocation of religious leaders of every stripe at Assisi in 1986 where they prayed, in one another's presence, for peace, Cardinal Ratzinger was quoted as saying that this could not be the model.
On the other hand, Benedict XVI won't leave any doubt in the minds of other religious leaders where they stand with him. There's often a lot of cotton in interfaith conversation that allows everyone to participate in good faith, but prevents things getting down to brass tacks. Benedict XVI is all about brass tacks. So, while it may not move interfaith dialogue forward in the way that John Paul II did, his approach may define it more clearly.
TIME.com: It was notable both in his Easter homily and in the one he delivered before the Conclave began that Cardinal Ratzinger was inclined to paint the Church as in a state of considerable crisis. Over Easter, he spoke of "filth" inside the Church, and likened it to a boat shipping water from all sides. Yet this is an institution that John Paul II, and Ratzinger himself as the chief enforcer, have controlled for two decades. How does this square with his picture of a Church in crisis?
DVB: Benedict XVI feels that he and John Paul II were involved in a battle for the duration of the previous papacy, and the battle continues. They were on crisis footing when he came in, and they continue to be on crisis footing. He sees the society surrounding the church in the West, and elsewhere, has having become worse, in the sense of making it harder to be a good Catholic and a comfortable member of society at large. And in this ongoing crisis, he appears to be willing to make the Church a minority clearly defined by its strong values and identity — a process that he would see as having only just begun under John Paul II. Of course, that Church would be very different fro the current Church, and the transformation would involve a tremendous amount of stress.
çãçõçéááThe New Shepherd
çãçõçéááIt's hard to follow a superstar; will the new Pope with the fierce reputation be able to take up where John Paul II left off? By
NANCY GIBBSçãçõçéááMay. 2, 2005
Pope Benedict XVI thinks the church is like a symphony orchestra. Both abide by strict rules designed to promote both majesty and mystery. Both have many parts but one glorious message; many players but one leader they all must follow. And like a Pope, a conductor is applauded before he lifts the baton. Even though Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger had been proclaimed the front runner, Pope John Paul II's strong right hand, he was an introvert, bookish, had always been able to walk from his apartment to the Vatican without attracting much notice. But that would all change just three days after his 78th birthday, when the papal conclave's fourth ballot gave him the two-thirds vote of the Cardinals needed to become the 265th Pope. Crowds milled in St. Peter's Square, watching the tin chimney, waiting for the white smoke that would signal a choice had been made. Inside the Sistine Chapel the Cardinals wrestled with the stove in the corner just left of the entrance.
"They were trying to get enough chemicals on the fire to make the smoke white," recalls Chicago's Francis Cardinal George. "The stove backed up, pouring smoke into the chapel." Outside, when the first tendrils appeared, they were gray and vague. But in time they whitened, and then the bells pealed, and people came running into the square from all directions to hear the news, "Habemus Papam!" We have a Pope! And then the transformation began.
A wave of welcome came washing over the small man who stepped out onto the balcony. "Viva il Papa!" the crowd chanted, and he smiled, raised his hands and circled his arms, like a large bird at lift-off. Typical Pope behavior, but not typical of Ratzinger. In fact, he used to wonder whether the Holy Spirit was really in charge of these decisions, given how many Popes throughout history had been the kind of men of whom the Spirit would hardly approve. "You know, we believe grace comes with the office," said Cardinal George. "When he came out on the balcony and started waving his arms, I thought, 'It's working! I've never seem him make those gestures before!'"
When that first audience was over, the new Pope and his Cardinals dined on bean soup, veal cordon bleu and ice cream, offered their new leader a champagne toast and sang to him, the lover of Mozart, their many languages finding one in common.
And so the concert begins.
For the past few weeks the commentariat had debated the merits of a red or blue Pope, a progressive or a conservative, First World or Third, a creature of the future or the past. The last conclave had occurred in the pre-cable-news dark ages, which allowed for a measure of mystery. This election took place in the glare of the 24-hour media and was so swift and smooth that the Cardinals' message seemed clear. By picking a traditionalist, they get continuity; by choosing an experienced manager, they restore administrative discipline; in a 78-year-old who has had a cerebral hemorrhage, they get, in effect, a transitional figure. In an old Pope from old Europe rather than a fresh face from the thriving Third World church, the Vatican seemed to be making a last stand to win Europe back for Jesus.
To the media, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Having just discovered the depth of emotion that a beloved Pope can evoke, many pundits were amazed that the Cardinals could resist offering up another "rock star." If John Paul II was idealized in his final days, Benedict faced an impossible contrast. Even his name—the old one, Ratzinger—sounded to many like some mutant hornet, and his past did not have the heroic arc of his predecessor's. The Sun of London headlined his bio, from hitler youth to papa ratzi. His Vatican office, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the newspapers noted, used to be called the Inquisition; he was dubbed God's Rottweiler. The Panzer Cardinal. And so forth. Where was the pastoral tenderness, the charisma, the charm? To read the reviews, it was as though Benedict XVI had done the one unforgivable thing—he was not John Paul 3.0.
So while there were certainly many faithful fans ready to welcome the anointed successor—there was so much demand for Benedict XVI souvenir T shirts and beer mugs that ratzingerfanclub.com crashed—the wider ripple of reaction, especially across the rutted spiritual expanse of Western Europe and the U.S., was more complicated. Would he welcome intellectual challenge and inquiry or banish critics and crush dissent? How can he declare other religions deficient but then be open-minded and eager to reach out to other faiths? ANTI-TURKISH POPE, said the headline of the Cumhuriyet newspaper in Istanbul, where many recalled Ratzinger's opposition to Turkey's joining the European Union on the grounds that a country of 68 million Muslims would dilute Western Europe's Christian heritage.
Some found reassurance in his first papal homily, with its moist themes of inclusion, collegiality, continuity and hope. "I address everyone with simplicity and affection," he said, "to assure them that the church wants to continue to build an open and sincere dialogue with them, in a search for the true good of mankind and of society." Longtime colleagues defended the power of his intellect: this was a man who could improvise jokes in Latin, a walking theological encyclopedia. They rejected the image of a cold and ruthless oppressor. "He is gentle in his personal dealings," says Father Peter Gumpel, a Vatican-based German priest who has known Ratzinger since the early '60s. "If you talk about an inquisitor, that's a stern man. And that's not the case. He is firm on principles. But he listens, listens to everybody."
He is, however, also known to embrace a Benedictine motto, Succisa virescit (Pruned, it grows again), which has led some people to wonder how sharp are his shears, how deep might he cut. He has raised the prospect of shrinking the church back to its true believers and rejecting in firm sorrow all those who call themselves Catholic without accepting the obligations of the faith. And what exactly might that mean for the Pope's often restless American flock? Paul Wilkes, 66, a liberal Catholic author who has wrestled with the challenge of progressivism in the church, said Ratzinger's election "makes it more difficult for Joe and Mary Catholic—who are trying to raise their kids Catholic, but they use [birth] control, have friends who are divorced or are divorced themselves, know people who have had abortions—this is very, very distressing for them. It just indicates that the church still has not heard these people." While the church has taught doctrine for centuries, Wilkes noted, "it has also taught that the free exercise of human conscience is the ultimate arbiter of our Catholic lives." But that's not in Ratzinger's lexicon. "This 'my-way-or-the-highway, let-them-become-Episcopalians' attitude is harmful to a Catholic Church that is supposed to be a wide, sprawling tent," said Wilkes.
Conservatives rather enjoyed the discomfort of liberals, seeing it as confirmation of the wisdom of the choice and the ignorance that finds it surprising that a deeply conservative institution actually picked a deeply conservative man to lead it. "These reformisti inhabit a world of their own," said Father Joseph Fessio, head of Ignatius Press in San Francisco. "They waited for years for John Paul to die and maybe install one of their own, and then he finally died, and who do they get? John Paul in spades!" Such supporters reject the idea that the new Pope was some kind of enemy of freedom or modernity. "Pope Benedict XVI does not have a dour, gloomy view of the future," argues Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, an interfaith journal. "He has the tranquil confidence which is faith. Homosexuality, abortion, women priests—forget it. Those are only distractions." Indeed Pope Benedict had already moved on: greeting and hugging kids outside the Vatican, writing his very first letter to the chief rabbi in Rome, and wooing the press with the implicit promise that he too would be a great story.
çãçõçéááThe PopeWhat The New Job Specs AreObserving John Paul II's funeral, his Cardinals realized again how much his legacy will influence who becomes his successor. Here are the attributes and issues likely to loom largest in the conclave's deliberationsBy
DAVID VAN BIEMAçãçõçéááApr. 18, 2005
Star Quality
"You can reach the whole world by television," Belgian CARDINAL GODFRIED DANNEELS told Time shortly before the death of the Pope. "You can be very close to everyone, individually." That observation is notable less for its shopworn truth than for the fact that Danneels, a blunt-spoken former liturgy professor on some short lists to be the next Pope, has essentially conceded the degree to which John Paul II's personal magnetism and its electronic deployment have made photo-ready charisma a nearly essential element of the papal job description.
"John Paul was lucky because the bar was set very low," says David Gibson, author of The Coming Catholic Church. "John XXIII had charisma, but he didn't travel. Paul VI traveled, but he didn't speak other languages very well. John Paul II ran the table." To follow that act, many observers agree, his successor will need to speak several languages, have a ready smile (or at least a telegenic frown) and, as Gibson puts it, be able "to make news by virtue of who he is" as much as by what he has done.
Two Cardinals who are often tagged with the word charismatic are Honduras' OSCAR RODRIGUEZ MARADIAGA and Austria's CHRISTOPH SCHONBORN. The first is a polymath with a c.v. that includes eight languages, debt-relief work with the rock star Bono, some music playing of his own and what an observer calls an "effervescence." The second possesses a different charm (see box). The cosmopolitan scion of generations of European and Catholic nobility, he has what John Allen, author of Conclave, called a "princely bearing," which has kept him in good stead among world leaders. Never before have musical chops and impressive posture--as opposed to the men's formidable professional accomplishments--been quite so important to their papal chances as they may be now.
Yet 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. Even JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER, John Paul's theological enforcer as well as a possible Pope, has grouched about a certain "untidiness."
Says a Vatican official, addressing an issue that is expected to get relatively little play at the conclave: "The sex-abuse crisis showed that we need a manager. There wasn't enough action from Rome because the Pope was too much of a delegator. It leaves you ill equipped to respond to crises, since no one wants to pass bad news up. There's a need to find someone who will do the nitty-gritty and handle the balance sheet--and not just the financial balance sheet."
Could a relatively colorless manager like GIOVANNI CARDINAL BATTISTA RE, head of the Congregation of Bishops, ride such a sentiment to St. Peter's chair? Probably not. More likely, the electors will try to find a John Paul--like inner glow combined with a head for institutional detail. Says Chicago's FRANCIS CARDINAL GEORGE: "Maybe you have to do both."
Global Smarts
The Coming Catholic Church's Gibson uses a novel analogy to explain 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."
With the proportion of global south Catholics at two-thirds and climbing (even as Latin American practitioners engage in near hand-to-hand combat with encroaching Pentecostal Protestantism), preventing deadly poverty is as much a matter of church survival as it is a spiritual commitment to the beatitude "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Moreover, unlike some of the late Pope's doctrinal stances (or his no-condoms position on aids prevention in some of the same locales), economic justice is win-win, a cause to which theological absolutists in Rome or Lagos and cafeteria Catholics in the moneyed West all feel some cultural affinity and obligation.
Thus the south's champions in the conclave will be many, some with formidable credentials. Rodríguez Maradiaga did not just hang with Bono. Calling debt "a tombstone pressing down on us," he presented a 17 million--signature petition for debt relief at a G-8 meeting, and he has bent German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's ear on the topic. In the 1980s, Brazil's CLAUDIO CARDINAL HUMMES backed strikes and defied his country's dictators by letting leftist labor leader Luis Inacio Lula da Silva (now Brazil's President) make speeches during Mass. He has spoken out in favor of the organization of the landless in Brazil. Asked his priorities by Time, he immediately replied, "Evangelization and solidarity with the poor." Some outside the Third World have been almost as involved. Milan's DIONIGI CARDINAL TETTAMANZI, sometimes tagged as front runner for the papacy, famously blessed antiglobal protesters in Genoa despite political fire from the Italian right.
If there is a counterposition, it is advanced by a group that Monsignor Brian Ferme, a dean at Catholic University who knows several of the papabili, describes as "not denying the inequalities of injustices but arguing that if you get the church's internal priorities right, its external work will proceed that much more effectively." Roughly translated, that is a line long familiar to some conservative Protestants: Take care of the souls, and the pocketbooks will follow. Yet to become Pope, anyone pursuing in that camp will need to convince his brethren that he does care about the pocketbook part of the equation.
Doctrinal Fidelity
"Not one comma will change in the doctrine." That is not the battle cry of some Vatican mossback but a matter-of-fact assessment by Andrea Riccardi, the well- connected founder of the Catholic social-justice group Comunità di Sant'Egidio. Among the major conclave topics, John Paul's conservative stance on faith-and-morals issues is least likely to be debated. That is unsurprising, since he made that stance clear in thousands of pages of explanation and appointed 113 of the electors. Says Catholic University's Ferme: "I don't think there is a shadow of a doubt among the Cardinals that there will not be woman priests or that the church must oppose abortion." No one better articulates such positions than Ratzinger, who as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has been enforcing them for more than two decades.
What may be in play in the conclave, however, is some papabili's position that it is all right to discuss such changes (a practice John Paul and Ratzinger limited severely). Belgium's Danneels, for instance, has predicted that the church may someday want to revisit its role for women. That charms the liberal, priest-challenged West, although it may not ultimately help his papal chances. Others may hope to project a pastoral openness or allow their priests a certain leeway while refusing to cross certain lines. "Flexibility keeps coming up" in Cardinals' statements, says Gibson. "Not compromise but flexibility." Finally, there are church positions that remain somewhat undefined, and the Cardinals' stance on such questions as how to apply the idea of the soul to biotechnological advances may help sway their colleagues.
Interfaith
John Paul's approaches to Islam were not quite so historic as those to Judaism, but his first-ever papal visit to a mosque, in 2001, and his apology for the excesses of the Crusades indicated his understanding that Islam is both one of Catholicism's great competitors and, in many places, its next-door neighbor. Sept. 11 was perhaps the first great issue that the Pope, by then physically weakened, addressed in a less than aggressive manner, and the Vatican sense of urgency regarding Islam's various faces, although as keen as the rest of the world's, remains papally undefined. "It's the 800-lb. gorilla sitting in the room," says a well-placed Vatican source. "It's huge and expanding, has violent elements, so what will be the church's modus operandi confronting this dynamic?"
Until recently, the conventional wisdom had it that the most plausible papabile to respond to such challenges was FRANCIS CARDINAL ARINZE, former head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and a native of Nigeria, where Christianity and Islam come into contentious conflict. But his long service in the Vatican bureaucracy, or Curia ("He's more Curial than African" goes a typical comment), and his recent transfer to another department have dimmed his prospects. Some electors may side with Bologna's former ARCHBISHOP GIACOMO CARDINAL BIFFI, who has suggested that non-Catholic immigration to Italy should be limited. But theirs will be a minority view. Says Comunità di Sant'-Egidio's Riccardi: "The man chosen by the Cardinals can't be a Pope of the clash of civilizations." The most common posture in conclave will apparently be one of cautious outreach to what is, by origin, another Abrahamic faith. Two Cardinals normally regarded as conservative, Schönborn and Venice's ANGELO CARDINAL SCOLA, have explored that; the latter founded Oasis magazine.
Collegiality
"It's the sleeper issue at the Conclave," says Father Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame. "I think it should go to the top of your list," says Catholic University's Ferme. Although little-discussed outside the church, there is one area in which the papabili may wish to distinguish themselves by openly criticizing John Paul's legacy: Rome's centralization of power at the expense of its local managers.
For all 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 authority."
Curial Cardinals have tremendous sway in Rome, where their diocese-running brethren are usually only visitors. But diocesan Cardinals will make up the vast preponderance of the electors. That (along with several other factors) is why many Roman sources tout the chances of Ratzinger, a master of the Curial as well as the doctrinal universe, but why non-Romans see him as a potential kingmaker but never the king.
Age Suitability
Prior to the past few weeks, there was much talk that the conclave that replaced John Paul might discount relatively youthful papabili like Schönborn, 60, and Rodríguez Maradiaga, 62. Reason: after John Paul's multidecade marathon, the electors would, as McBrien puts it, "be looking for a breather" and would try to avoid the possibility of another long-term Pontiff. There was much discussion of an older, interim figure, a caretaker who by definition would have to worry less about living up to John Paul's gargantuan legacy.
But a funny--or, rather, somber--thing happened during John Paul's hard final days. Vatican handicappers realized that there is a downside to an old Pope and a short papacy. A Vatican official who watched several electors view John Paul's body says, "The look in their eyes said the unstated, [that] the last thing we'd want is a decrepit [Pontiff]." Now fans of the interim solution have reluctantly had to return to regarding the full spectrum of Cardinal options.
So rather suddenly, the speculations and assumptions about papal succession--the sort bandied while a Pope still lives--undergo sober reassessment in the cold light of his passing. The theoretical contracts rather alarmingly into the real, conversations with the outside world truly do taper off, and the 115 men who now stand before one of the most important decisions they will ever make are reminded of precisely why they pray for the Holy Spirit's guidance in their task. --With reporting by Jordan Bonfante, Emma di Ravello and Jeff Israely/ Rome; Jeff Chu/ New York; and Marguerite Michaels/ Chicago
çãçõçéááReligionGood News for Pope John PaulBy
JOHN KOHANçãçõçéááAug. 17, 1981
But at the Vatican problems are piling up
After weeks of uncertainty and pessimism, the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome had some good news. Its famous patient, Pope John Paul II, had finally conquered a lingering infection and fever and was well enough for a long-delayed second operation. In what was termed a "perfectly successful" procedure, Gemelli doctors reconnected segments of the Pontiffs colon, a simple operation that reversed the intestinal bypass surgery performed last May after the attempt on his life. With a reticence typical of reports on the Pope's progress, Vatican spokesmen waited half an hour to inform the public about the operation. By the time Gemelli issued the hopeful medical bulletin, John Paul was already conscious and smiling as hospital staff members wheeled him back to his suite. He will still have to spend at least ten days in Gemelli and a longer period of convalescence at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo before resuming his duties at the Vatican.
Early hopes that the Pope would make a rapid and complete recovery from the assassination attempt had faded when he was forced to return to the hospital last June. Though Gemelli doctors reported that John Paul was gaining in his battle with cytomegalovirus, an infection similar to mononucleosis, rumors persisted that he was more seriously ill than either hospital or Vatican officials were willing to admit. In a prerecorded television address to the International Eucharistic Conference in Lourdes last month, John Paul appeared as a wan reflection of his former robust self. Hunched over a table, his face pale and his hands trembling, he explained that "God has permitted that at present I myself, in my own body, experience suffering and weakness."
For 2½ months John Paul has had to delegate most of the responsibility for the day-to-day operation of the church to Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, Vatican Secretary of State. Casaroli, 66, presides over weekly sessions of the Council of the Curia, the Vatican's chief administrative body, and keeps a watchful eye over the Holy See's worldwide communication network, as well as its complex local government. For weeks the Italian press has been referring to him as "il Vice Papa." Even so, many matters of doctrine and morals, which only the Pope can deal with, have been piling up. John Paul, for example, must rule on all annulment petitions and requests from clerics who want to leave the priesthood. Cardinals need to be appointed in a number of large urban dioceses, among them Milan, Paris and Washington. Crucial projects to overhaul the Vatican's financial organization and to revise the church's canon law have been delayed, and a shake-up of the cumbersome Curia is long overdue. All await papal supervision and approval.
In the days since his fever subsided, the Pope's condition has noticeably improved. He gained back seven of the 20 lbs. he lost, and has been meeting daily with various Cardinals. Despite the good prognosis for full recovery that followed last week's operation, nagging doubts remained about the future of John Paul's papacy. He has made no secret of the fact that he would rather serve as pastor to a far-flung flock than face the daily grind of church business. Vatican officials wonder what he will do if he is no longer able to carry on those winning, globetrotting ways that have helped him dramatize to the world a conservative and sometimes unpopular vision of the church. Because of his long convalescence, the Pope has already had to cancel scheduled trips to Switzerland, France and Spain.
The fluctuating health bulletins from Gemelli, before the operation, prompted speculation in the press that John Paul might do the unthinkable and abdicate, rather than limp along as a semi-invalid Pope confining his actions to the minutiae of the Vatican bureaucracy. There had even been talk of a new papal conclave. This time around, the early favored papabili were Italians who have reputations as seasoned administrators. One was Casaroli, a moderate who has gained exposure as John Paul's loyal second in command. The other: Giovanni Benelli, 60, the conservative, often abrasive Archbishop of Florence, who was runner-up to John Paul at the 1978 conclave. There are some ancient precedents for a papal abdication. Benedict IX (1032-45) sold his office outright to the reforming Pope Gregory VI; Celestine V (Aug. 29-Dec. 13, 1294) resigned to become a hermit after realizing he was not suited for the job; Gregory XII (1406-15) abdicated as part of a deal to end a schism and reunite the church. But Vatican insiders insisted that John Paul believes God has chosen him for the office, and will not voluntarily give it up. Besides, asked a Vatican official, "what do you do with an ex-Pope, especially if he is as strong a man as Wojtyla?"
More recent speculation has focused on what new direction a less strong and energetic John Paul might give his pontificate. Would he, like ailing Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII, retire to a life of meditation and reflection behind Vatican walls, rather than touring the globe?
Even before the assassination attempt, many hard-liners in the Curia, who are unhappy with the freewheeling style of this Pope, hoped he would consider doing just that. But there are indications that John Paul has other things in mind. After lunching with the Pope several days before his operation, Poland's new Primate Jozef Glemp declared that John Paul will "almost certainly" be traveling next year. As it happens, next year Poland will be marking the 600th anniversary of the arrival of the nation's most venerated religious symbol, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, clearly a celebration the former Cardinal from Cracow would move heaven and earth not to miss.
— By John Kohan. Reported by Barry Kalb and Wilton Wynn/Rome
çãçõçéááReligionA Swift, Stunning Choice
çãçõçéááSep. 4, 1978
In an "instant conclave, "the Cardinals elect a new Pope: John Paul I
For more than an hour, confusion reigned in St. Peter's Square. When the smoke first began to curl out of a temporary rooftop chimney from the Vatican's Sistine Chapel at 6:24 p.m. on Saturday, it looked white—the traditional color to signal that the secret conclave within had elected a Pope. But could it be true? Not likely—not on the opening day of the largest, most complex gathering of Cardinal electors in the long pageant of papal elections. Sure enough, with dusk beginning to enfold the splendid statues and pillars of the Bernini colonnade, the smoke turned blacker, then gray. Exasperated, the Vatican Radio announcer said, "There is still uncertainty about the color of the smoke." The crowd in St. Peter's Square swelled from 10,000 to 25,000 and then to 50,000 on the off-chance that history was about to be made.
Suddenly, more than an hour after the puzzling signals began to billow forth, the Vatican's Pericle Felici, ranking Cardinal-deacon in the Sacred College, appeared at the opened Window of the Benediction in the center of St. Peter's Basilica. His Latin words boomed out over loudspeakers: "Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum. Habemus Papam!" (I announce to you a great joy. We have a Pope!) The crowd was hushed as Felici went on: "He is the Most Eminent and Most Reverend Lord Cardinal Albino Luciani, who has taken the name of John Paul the First [in Latin, Joannes Paulus Primus]."
The name was unusual—and unprecedented. No Pope had ever adopted a double name; none had selected a first-of-its-kind name in a millennium. Apparently, the new Pontiff wanted to signal originality and also a bond of continuity with his two immediate predecessors: the reformer, John XXIII, and the moderator, Paul VI. Or was he evoking their New Testament forebears?
If the election's speed was surprising, so was the identity of the 263rd Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. In the first days after Paul's death, Luciani, 65, Patriarch of Venice, had been mentioned only as a remote compromise candidate if the conclave reached a deadlock. Now he was in the window, a frail-looking, slight, bespectacled figure in ponifical vestments, lifting his hands gingerly in the papal salute, offering blessing with a brisk gesture of his right hand, nodding smilingly at the excited crowd below.
Master of Ceremonies Virgilio Noé held a large scroll before him as John Paul I read out his first apostolic blessing, the traditional benediction, urbi et orbi (to the city and to the world). His high voice quavered a bit as he chanted the Latin in lilting Gregorian style. Before the blessing, the new Pope made an unusual gesture, granting "to all" who heard the words—either in person or by broadcast—a plenary indulgence. In Catholic belief, all sins, though forgiven, must be atoned for—either here on earth or, after death, in purgatory. For those truly repentant, a plenary indulgence cancels the debt for all past sins.
After the blessing, with the bells of St. Peter's ringing loudly, the new Pope met the rising applause with a wave and a wide, yet almost shy smile. He withdrew, but three minutes later, at the insistence of the continuing applause, the new Pope appeared again. The 110 Cardinals, crowded together on the lateral loggias flanking the central balcony on the basilica façade, smiled happily. John Paul lifted his hands slowly in the papal gesture and smiled once again, this time more radiantly, less shyly.
As the news circled the world, most Catholics admitted knowing little about their new leader. London's Sunday Times headlined him as THE UNKNOWN POPE. "We have never heard of him here," said James Reuter, a leading Jesuit in the Philippines. But he added, "At least we are thankful it is not some of the others." In Little Rock, Ark., Bishop Andrew J. McDonald heard the news from a priest and was forced to look up Luciani in a church directory. The rapid decision, quipped the bishop, "just shows that the Holy Spirit is quicker than the speed of light."
The swiftness of the vote also caught the Vatican bureaucracy by surprise. Some of the Swiss Guards had to be rounded up from neighborhood cafes, and they finally mustered for an honor march across the square during John Paul's appearance on the balcony, but not—as is customary—before it. Vatican officials on the list of those who make the act of obedience to the Pope after the appearance were scattered, some at the beach. Such notables as Substitute Secretary of State Giuseppe Caprio scurried back just in time for Felici's announcement. They were not summoned into the Sistine Chapel for the obedience ritual, however. Like John XXIII, John Paul decreed that the Cardinals remain in sealed conclave overnight, presumably to hear the Pope's views or convey their own. The new Pope also announced that his coronation would be held on Sept. 3.
With the Cardinals still behind locked doors, Vaticanologists could only guess at how a long shot like Luciani had been thrust so suddenly into the most power ful position in Christendom, the leadership of the world's 700 million Roman Catholics. When Paul died at his summer villa in Castel Gandolfo three weeks ago, there seemed to be a front rank of about half a dozen contending Cardinals, a second echelon of another six or so, and a dozen or more dark horses. Not until about a week before the conclave convened did the Patriarch of Venice begin to emerge as a genuine possibility.
Then how did the required majority coalesce so swiftly? One observer explained it succinctly: "The foreigners," the 85 non-Italians, did not want a bureaucrat from the Curia but a man who, like John XXIII, had the warmth of a good pastor. In addition, almost all the Cardinals seemed to want a man who emblemized faith as well as hope and charity, one who, like Paul VI, had a deep concern for doctrine. Luciani fitted both bills. He was also ideal in another respect. The Cardinals are always uneasy at the prospect of a lengthy papacy—15 or more years—and the Patriarch of Venice is a 65-year-old who was sickly as a child and suffered a two-year siege of tuberculosis as a young man.
In past elections, caught in near deadlocks, "arrangements" sometimes had to be made—for instance a "ticket" pairing a papal candidate with a Secretary of State, the virtual Prime Minister of the Vatican. According to an informed reconstruction of the 1958 conclave, just such a gentlemen's agreement was worked out. Key Cardinals approached Angelo Roncalli, the man who became Pope John XXIII, and implied that they would vote for him in return for indirect assurances that Domenico Tardini, an experienced administrator and a Curial traditionalist, would be appointed Secretary of State. Replied Roncalli: "Eminences, one could not fail to take into consideration a man of such abilities." Soon thereafter, Roncalli was Pope and Tardini the Secretary of State.
The "instant conclave" of 1978 may be explained, at least in part, by the unusually long interim between Paul's death (Aug. 6) and the beginning of the conclave (Aug. 25). The Cardinals had plenty of time to get together in small groups and large, conferring, trading intelligence, lobbying ever so discreetly. By last Friday, when they assembled at the Altar of the Chair in St. Peter's Basilica, beneath Bernini's stained-glass window portraying the Holy Spirit as a white dove in a solid circle of gold, they had carefully weighed all the papabili (possible Popes). During a Mass celebrated in Latin, the Cardinals invoked divine guidance for the task ahead of them.
As the 111 Cardinals, in scarlet chasubles and gleaming white miters, flowed out of the transept in two slow-moving files, a four-year-old girl in the crowd was heard to ask, "Which one is the Pope?" Replied her father: "One of them is—but they haven't decided which one yet."
Six hours later, having replaced the white miters with red birettas, the Cardinals reassembled to begin making that decision. Promptly at 4:30 on Friday afternoon, Jean Cardinal Villot, Camerlengo (Chamberlain) of the vacant Holy See, gave a signal and the 70-member Sistine Chapel choir started to sing Veni Creator Spiritus (Come Holy Spirit). The Cardinals then filed into the Sistine Chapel. There, beneath Michelangelo's great fresco The Last Judgment, they seated themselves on facing rows of plain chairs at twelve long tables. There were too many Cardinals this time to accommodate them with the traditional canopied velvet thrones.
To the left of the portal through which they entered was the iron stove that was later to send out those confusing signals. Beside the stove were chemical cartridges for producing black and white smoke. After a brief prayer, a final roll call and a last-minute sweep for bugging devices, the master of ceremonies pronounced: "Extra omnes" (Everybody out), and the doors were locked.
The next morning the balloting began, and as the basilica bells were still pealing the noontime Angelus, the first puff of smoke wafted from the chapel chimney: black. Nine minutes later, more black smoke billowed forth, then seemed to turn white, then black again. False alarm. After the morning's first two ballots, Vatican Radio announced, there was no decision.
As the Cardinals entered their carefully sealed sanctum, most Vaticanologists anticipated a wide-open race but, paradoxically, a relatively brief conclave. Until the election of Pius IX in 1831, conclaves normally ran for weeks, months and, in one case, more than two years. The conclave period was often punctuated by power plays among Europe's monarchs, high intrigue within the College of Cardinals, and brawling in the streets.
This time, the chief reason for celerity was the Cardinals' fear that a prolonged struggle would betray factionalism and damage the new Pope's image. Besides that, the Cardinals, particularly those who were aged or ailing, were not anxious to prolong their quarantine in the less-than-comfortable quarters of the rambling Apostolic Palace. Genoa's Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, 72, a veteran of the two previous elections, said prophetically as the conclave was about to begin, "One does not feel very comfortable in a conclave. In a certain sense, one is buried alive. This is why I think those who believe we will have a long conclave are not well informed."
Siri was right, but even the best-informed Vaticanologists were stunned by the conclave's brevity—about 8% hours from first ballot to last. True, Pius XII was elected in a record 7% hours in 1939, but he was a rising star, renowned throughout the Catholic world as a diplomatic genius and the protege of his predecessor, Pius XI. He was not a very popular man, this remote intellectual, but no one else came close to promising the firm hand that the church needed in a world hurtling toward war.
Today the church confronts a less dramatic but no less complex situation. That is especially so in Italy, where the church is closely identified with the long-ruling Christian Democratic Party in its struggle with the Communist Party, which has been gaining ground.
Luciani has been adamant that the priests of his patriarchate must not condone Catholic votes for Communists. Said he: "Marxism is incompatible with Christianity." But neither is he known for advocating get-out-the-vote sermons in favor of the Christian Democrats. He has said that if priests disagreed with his policy on Communism, they should at least not express this in church.
His biggest policy crisis as patriarch undoubtedly came on the eve of the 1974 divorce referendum in Italy. The local Catholic students' movement, whose radical experiments in liturgy and biblical research he had tolerated, issued a pro-divorce statement. Luciani stayed up all night pondering the document and the next morning closed down the students' union and withdrew its spiritual counselor. He also warned 20 of his priests that if they persisted in participating in pro-divorce rallies, he would suspend their right to say Mass. Like other Italian bishops, he is against both abortion and women priests. In the 1960s there were reports that Bishop Luciani was open to modification of the church's rigid teaching against artificial birth control, as a consultant to the papal commission on the problem. But when Paul issued his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, Luciani announced that this relieved him of "every doubt," and he was among the first to insist that doubters assent.
But he is no rigid Pius XII in his approach to the new scientific issues of the age. When the first test-tube baby was born and some Catholic theologians condemned the experiment, Luciani said in an interview, "I extend the warmest wishes to the English girl. As for the parents, I have no right to condemn them. Subjectively, if they acted in good faith and with good intentions, they could even gain great merit before God."
Then, his pastoral point made, Luciani continued, "Progress is a great thing, but not all progress is good for man. Will not science bear the appearance of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, who scatters mighty forces without, however, being able to dam or dominate them? Could there not be danger of a new industry arising, that of manufacture of children? The individual conscience must always be followed, but the individual must make an effort to have a well-formed conscience. Conscience, indeed, does not have the duty of creating law, but of informing itself first on what the law of God dictates."
Luciani is a man who is not afraid to change his mind. He kept a low profile at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and admitted afterward, "The part that caused me most problems was that on religious liberty. For years I had been teaching his [Vatican Cardinal Alfredo Otta-viani's] theories about law, according to which only the true Roman Catholic religion has rights. I convinced myself, however, that we had been wrong."
Given the new Pope's flexibility, any predictions about his papacy—liberal, middle-of-the-road or conservative—are perilous. Above all, the Cardinals seemed to want a pastoral figure, and they selected a man with no experience in the Vatican bureaucracy or diplomatic service. John Paul is a quietly genial man whose priests find him approachable. He is also the third Patriarch of Venice to become Pope in this century. The first was Pius X.* The second was John XXIII, a beloved figure of reform.
The new Pope paid homage to both John and Paul in choosing his name, but he also made it clear that he would be neither John XXIV nor Paul VII. Said Baltimore's liberal Lawrence Cardinal Shehan: "Perhaps we can take it as a sign of his independence." "The name is of great importance," said José Miguez Bonino, a Protestant liberation theologian in Argentina and an honorary president of the World Council of Churches. "It shows that the new Pontiff is ready to continue with the program of reforms launched by the Vatican Council."
Luciani's name had first been floated in the preconclave period by Carlo Confalonieri, 85, the dean of the College of Cardinals. Respected among the "foreigners" as well as the Italians, Confalonieri was ineligible for the conclave himself because of Paul's ban on those 80 and over.
The other pivotal personality in Luciani's camp was Giovanni Cardinal Benelli of Florence, for years Pope Paul's right-hand man as the No. 2 official in the Vatican Secretariat of State. "Benelli spoke of Luciani to many of the other Cardinals," said an Italian prelate. At 57, Benelli proved too young to become Pope. Still, he seemed to be the leading Pope-maker of the 1978 conclave, and figures to be a prime contender at the next one.
Though he had Confalonieri, Benelli and many of the 85 non-Italians behind him, the new Pope was clearly not the Curial candidate. Said one official: "He was one of those Cardinals who always kept his distance from Rome, and he is virtually an unknown quantity in the Curia."
And elsewhere. Those who quickly asserted that Luciani would be a conservative as Pope, one of his former aides cautioned, should know that he left Venice for Rome intending to vote for the president of the Latin American bishops' conference, Aloisio Lorscheider, an outspoken advocate of social justice.
Luciani has a reputation as a pastor quick to pardon carnal sins, but not those of the spirit, and is particularly severe with those in positions of responsibility who openly question church teachings. "Those who treat theology as a human science rather than a sacred science, or exaggerate their freedom," he wrote in the Vatican daily in 1974, "lack faith."
Having long been a catechist and a teacher of theology, Luciani now assumes the primary teaching office in Roman Catholicism. The dissent against dogma from within the church that anguished his predecessor produced insistent demands for yet more change from the left and cries for discipline from the right. It is just possible that when the Cardinals so swiftly cast their two-thirds-plus-one majority for Albino Luciani, this problem was paramount.
In the scenic Argordo Valley of Northeast Italy, home region of the new Pope, church bells pealed in triumph to announce the election, as they had in Rome and round the world. At Belluno, the regional capital where he was a religion teacher, people rushed into the streets as the news broke. Said his brother Edoardo, a retired professor who lives in Canale, a town of 1,500: "I really did not expect that Albino could have been elected Pope. I am confused, moved. I can't say anything else. It's too great, so unexpected." Brother Edoardo spoke for legions, in urbe et orbe.
* According to a French gibe, Pius packed the Vatican with fellow Venetians: "De la barque de St. Pierre Us out fait une gondole " (They've made the barque of St. Peter into a gondola).
çãçõçéááOct. 9, 1978
COVER STORY
John Paul I's sudden death stuns and saddens the Christian world
"How deep are the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How inscrutable his judgments, how unsearchable his ways!" St. Paul's words rang out across St. Peter's Square in the genial, high-pitched voice of John Paul I on that happy day last month, Sept. 3, when he was installed as Pope and "Supreme Pastor" for the world's 700 million Roman Catholics. The new Pope was invoking Scripture as a commentary on the conclave that had unexpectedly elected him—and in a swift, single day at that. Last week the text he had chosen took on a different meaning as John Paul died of a massive stroke, just 33 days after he had been chosen as St. Peter's 263rd successor.
His speedy selection had seemed to be a second Pentecost, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, to those Cardinals who participated in the conclave; and his pontificate, brief as it was, had suffused the church with warmth and hope. "In a few days, he captured the world. He really did," said Joseph Califano, the only Roman Catholic in the U.S. Cabinet, after attending a memorial Mass. The Netherlands' Johannes Willebrands spoke for many Cardinals: "It's a disaster. I cannot put into words how happy we were on that August day when we had chosen John Paul. We had such high hopes. It was such a beautiful feeling, a feeling that something fresh was going to happen to our church."
For other princes of the church, trained in theology's formulas to explain the vagaries of existence, there were no ready answers to be grasped on this somber Friday morning. "So soon?" cried Manila's stunned Jaime Cardinal Sin. Said Cologne's Joseph Cardinal Hoffner: "God has willed it, as painful as His will is." And Paris' François Cardinal Marty: "The ways of the Lord are disconcerting to our human perspective." Boston's Humberto Cardinal Medeiros admitted, "I've been trying to say to God, 'It's your doing, and I must accept it.' " With American bluntness, Archbishop James V. Casey of Denver told a reporter, "When we woke up this morning we were a little disappointed and annoyed with God."
What spiritual meaning, indeed, could be found in the briefest pontificate in more than 3½ centuries? Perhaps, reasoned some Catholics, John Paul was preaching a final sermon to his beloved flock, a reminder of the fragility of human existence and the unpredictable but inevitable fact of death. "His death reminds us how small and how weak man is, that life and death are mysteries, that we are in God's hand," said Willebrands. "That is why we also have faith."
The last day of John Paul's life followed the routine that he had set almost from his first day in office. He arose at 5, for he found the quiet early-morning hours his most productive time. After Mass at the private chapel a few yards from his bedroom in the Apostolic Palace, he breakfasted in his dining room, worked in his bedroom till about 8, then took the antiquated elevator one floor below for the start of his official day. In halting English he told ten Filipino prelates, making their periodic report to the papacy, that Jesus spoke of justice and social liberation, but also could not remain silent about the fullness of life in the Kingdom of Heaven.
After a spare lunch and afternoon siesta, John Paul returned to his desk. Milan's Giovanni Cardinal Colombo, who talked to him by phone, recalled that he sounded "full of serenity and hope." He summoned Sebastiano Cardinal Baggio, head of the Congregation for Bishops and a papabile (papal possibility) going into the last conclave, to discuss pressing business. At 7:30 he had his usual daily meeting with Vatican Secretary of State Jean Villot, 72, who within hours was to become once more the interim administrator, or Camerlengo, of the Holy See. Villot said that the Pope showed no signs of fatigue as he bade him good night. The day ended where it began, in the chapel with evening prayer. As the staff members retired, they told John Paul of the fatal ambush of a Communist youth by right-wing extremists in Rome. "They kill each other —even the young people," he lamented. They were the last words anyone would hear him utter.
Early Friday morning the street cleaners and taxi drivers saw the light burning in the papal apartment and took some comfort, perhaps, in the thought that their Pope, like them, was already about his duties. When the Pope did not appear at Mass time, Father John Magee, one of his secretaries, assumed the alarm clock had not gone off and went to knock on the bedroom door. Receiving no answer, he entered and found John Paul propped up on pillows in a half-sitting position, with a reading lamp still on and Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ open beside him. His face bore the sort of smile that had already earned him around the world the appellation "the smiling Pope," as if to suggest that he had effortlessly slipped into eternity.
Magee summoned Villot and Assistant Papal Physician Renato Buzzonetti; the doctor determined that death had come from a stroke around 11 the previous night. Two hours after the body was found, the Vatican announced the death in a statement of scriptural simplicity. By noon the Pontiffs body was laid in the frescoed splendor of the Clementine Hall in the Apostolic Palace. Romans and tourists formed a mile-and-a-half queue that wound around St. Peter's Square to pay then- respects to the Pope. At the bier two nuns in blue, overcome, rushed through a gap in the wooden barrier to kiss the dead Pope's hands. White-tied Vatican ushers rushed forward, hissing, "Perfavore, suore!" (Sisters, please!). In the line, New Jerseyite Diane Rapp, 23, remarked, "He was a young people's Pope. He died too soon." In a Saturday-night procession, the body was carried into St. Peter's Basilica to lie in state there.
Once again Camerlengo Villot began the ritual of mourning and papal election that is now so familiar to the world. The 112 Cardinal-electors again received the summons to Rome, their trip made easier by the fact that Rome airport employees broke off their strike in respect for the Pontiff. The conclave to choose John Paul's successor will begin on the second earliest day permitted—Oct. 14. The Latin American bishops' conference, a once-a-decade meeting scheduled to begin Oct. 12 in Puebla, Mexico, meanwhile, was postponed. Though John Paul had decided not to attend, the meeting would have given the first clues to the policy of his newborn pontificate.
A week before he died, John Paul told a group of American bishops that he was "just a beginner." That was the truth, and the reason why he will remain forever, in terms of policy, the unknown Pope. In his days in office John Paul was able to sign only one major decree, and even that will now become invalid: a sweeping reform of seminaries that he had postdated for December release. Ironically, the same document was approved by his predecessor, Pope Paul VI, whose postdated signature also became invalid when he died. Now the document must await the scrutiny of a third Pope.
John Paul's only major statement was his address to the Sacred College of Cardinals the day after his election. Father Carl Peter, dean of religious studies at the Catholic University of America, finds one lasting point in that address, the endorsement of ecumenism as a "final directive." Says Peter: "I regard that as a promise that the rest of us will have to keep."
"There are no great deeds of this pontificate to recall," said England's George Basil Cardinal Hume sadly. Deeds, no. Impact, yes. Especially after the intellectual austerity of Paul VI, his successor's radiance, humility, directness and lack of pomp immediately endeared him to masses of people in a media age, as if they had befriended him by wire. "I felt that if I had a problem, I could go to this Pope and talk to him about it," said Father John T. Pagan of New York's Little Flower Children's Services. For many he seemed to rekindle singlehanded some half-lost feeling of goodness about the church.
The John Paul style was etched on the memory most characteristically by his few papal audiences. He dropped the formal "we" and the intellectualized addresses of Paul VI, and inaugurated an era of laughter. In his last audience last week, John Paul interviewed young Daniele Bravo by microphone while 10,000 people listened in. John Paul: "Do you always want to be in the fifth grade?" Daniele: "Yes, so that I don't have to change teachers." Laughter. John Paul: "Well, you are different from the Pope. When I was in the fourth grade I was worried about making it to the fifth." Laughter again.
The replacement of formal audience speeches with chats disconcerted some. Commented Robert Sole, Vatican correspondent for France's leftist intellectual daily Le Monde: The audiences "attracted the immediate sympathy of the public but had disappointed and sometimes worried church officials. The Pope expressed a philosophy of existence that recalled on occasion the Reader's Digest: common sense, a little simple at that, which broke with the grand theological flights of oratory of Paul VI. Visibly, he did not have the culture and the intellectual training of his predecessor."
But perhaps Le Monde's world is more circumscribed than is a Pope's global parish. Remarked Archbishop Manuel Menendez, head of Caritas in Argentina: "The other day on a street in Rome a little boy was asked if he loved the Pope and he said yes. He was asked why. 'Because I understand everything he says.'" As Albino Luciani, the Pope-to-be never studied on a campus outside his home area of northeastern Italy, nor did he gain the international sophistication of a Vatican bureaucrat or diplomat. In the town of Belluno, where he taught for several years, his old friend Archbishop Maffeo Ducoli said: "People are crying in the streets and in the shops as if someone in their family had died." He was a teacher with a remarkable gift for explaining things through unexpected metaphors, an asker of sharp questions, a man who could defend conservative values without seeming pompous or rigid to the young.
There were a few memorable quotations from the fleeting days of John Paul, and the Vatican found some of them unsettling. At his first audience he quoted Pinocchio and compared the soul in the modern world to an automobile that breaks down because it runs on champagne and marmalade instead of gasoline and oil. Meeting with the Vatican press corps, he tossed off the notion that today St. Paul, who carried the news of Christ around the Mediterranean world, would probably be the head of a wire service. There were his sternly pastoral addresses deploring divorce to a group of U.S. bishops, and to the Roman clergy insisting on the need for "the great discipline of the church." In calling for prayer for the Camp David summit, he stated that God "is our Father; even more, God is our Mother." Attacking Marxist-hued "liberation theology," he said: "It is mistaken to state that political, economic and social liberation coincides with salvation in Jesus Christ, that ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem [where Lenin is, there also is Jerusalem]"
In truth, John Paul's honeymoon period was not yet over. Some liberals were anxious about this surprise Pope with his profound doctrinal traditionalism, but they kept it to themselves. If he had lived to issue his first encyclical, make his first appointments, the ideological factions in Catholicism that were temporarily united behind this leader might have reverted to their past divisiveness. Observes Ontario's Archbishop G. Emmett Carter: "It will be very difficult for the new Pope. John Paul wasn't there long enough to make any significant decisions and thus he made no enemies. The new Pope's decisions will always be held up by those who oppose them as something that 'John Paul would not have done.' "
After the first rush of emotion had passed, Catholics in many nations came to the conclusion that the remarkable way in which John Paul assumed office might prove in the end his major legacy. At his installation Mass, John Paul insisted on humility and refused to be crowned with a tiara. St. Louis Church Historian John Jay Hughes says, "He abolished the 1,000-year-old ceremony with the tiara and relegated it permanently to the trash heap. It will be impossible to go back to this triumphalism of the past."
When John Paul proclaimed that he was taking the yoke that Christ had placed on "our fragile shoulders," everyone thought he was speaking figuratively and out of characteristic humility. So cheerful was he, so steady of hand, that hardly anyone thought about his health. Detroit's John Cardinal Dearden, who himself survived a heart attack, recalls that John Paul's health was never mentioned in the conclave. One historian wondered if the Cardinals might not be submerged in guilt over the affliction of the man they put in office. Did the pressures of the job exact a sudden toll, as Cardinals Konig and Suenens suggested in the first shock of the news?
In an earlier age so untimely a death might have stirred deep suspicions. "If this were the time of the Borgias," said a young teacher in Rome, "there'd be talk that John Paul was poisoned." Nothing illustrates how far the church has come since those devious days so well as the 1975 decree that no autopsy be permitted on the body of a Pope.
John Paul's brother Edoardo, in Australia on a trade mission, reported that the Pope had been given a clean bill of health after a medical examination three weeks ago. He was frail in health as an infant and as a young priest, but there were no reports of heart trouble. Since taking office he had driven himself, and had expected Vatican officials to arrive at their desks promptly each morning. One veteran in the Curia, however, speculates on possible emotional strain: "It could have been something to do with passing from responsibility for a relatively small diocese of 600,000 Catholics in Venice to responsibility for the entire Catholic world."
As it does when any Pope dies, the work of the Curia last week came to an abrupt halt. All the officials so recently reappointed by John Paul were again suspended; in the last papal interregnum Camerlengo Villot was so strict that one Cardinal who came by his old office was asked to leave immediately. One other traditional rite will not occur this time. A dead Pope's papal ring is ceremonially smashed; historically, the purpose was to prevent forgeries. But John Paul's papal ring will not be smashed—because there had not yet been time to mint one for him.
The lack of a ring—the emblem of authority—was a telling sign that John Paul's achievements, however impressive, were only symbolic. His death left Catholicism facing an array of groaning problems that were only obscured for a time in the joy of his election and the weeks of his papacy. Like Christianity in general, Roman Catholicism is still navigating perilously in secular and self-indulgent times. There are many specific threats from within, from an archbishop's small but troublesome rebellion on the right to a more subtle revolt against papal teaching and authority on the left, as well as a growing shortage of priests and nuns that could in time spell institutional collapse in some areas. Carlo Confalonieri, 85-year-old dean of the Sacred College, spoke out of his sense of intense loss at John Paul's death, but he aptly expressed the mood as a new Pontiff is chosen: "A mourning on top of another mourning —it is a very grave trial for the church and we must truly pray. Who knows what awaits us now?"
Morto un papa, goes the old Roman saying, se ne fa un altro. "When one Pope dies, we make another." The men most directly charged with what will happen to the church are the Cardinals eligible to take part in the conclave that will elect the new Pope. Hardly had the news of John Paul's death spread across the world than they began winging their way toward Rome. Tanzania's Laurean Cardinal Rugambwa had not even had time to return home from the last election. He was still visiting the U.S. when the word came. Stephen Cardinal Kim of Seoul left directly from a requiem Mass in Myongdong Cathedral to catch the day's last flight to Europe. Daily "congregations" — the early planning meetings of Cardinals present in Rome — began last Saturday. In that first congregation, the 29 Cardinals attending set the Oct. 14 date for the conclave and Oct. 4 for the funeral.
Almost all of the 112 Cardinals convoked have just finished electing a Pope. Some of them complained bitterly about the expense and the discomfort of meeting in the Sistine Chapel. But they all are familiar with the election process. Moreover, they presumably return to Rome with a shared vision of the kind of man they want to elect — a consensus shaped during the hot, anxious days of August after the death of Pope Paul VI.
They also must recognize that John Paul's reign set a new seal on the papacy. That fact may limit to some extent the Cardinals' range of choice. "Now they are going to elect not a successor to Pope Paul but a successor to Pope John Paul," said U.S. Sociologist Father Andrew Greeley last week. "That is a big difference. If he had been an ordinary Pope, this next conclave would be a rehash, but he was a very special man and Pope who has changed the whole ambience that the Cardinals are coming back to." Many other Catholics— prelates, theologians, lay people — also want to look for another Albino Luciani. Observes Canon Lawyer Ladislas Orsy, a Vatican veteran now at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.: "The very fact that John Paul's election was so successful will inevitably influence the next one. I think the Cardinals will look in the same direction as they did before."
Paradoxically, their apparent unity of aim may lead to difficulties and frustrations, if only because Luciani no longer exists as a candidate. He was a compromise, to be sure, but a happy one, whose graces and goodness had hitherto shone only in a small corner of a great church. Asks Archbishop Stanislaus Lokuang of Taipei with evident skepticism: "Will it be possible to find a man with the same qualities?" Though Luciani once described himself as a "wren" among bishops, his papacy revealed him as a rather rarer bird. His reputation for doctrinal conservatism made him acceptable to the traditionalists who voted on the first ballot for Genoa's ultraconservative Giuseppe Cardinal Siri. His firm stand against Italian Communists won him the backing of the pro-Christian Democrat forces, led by Florence's powerful Giovanni Cardinal Benelli. His roots among and love for the poor helped draw him votes from Third World Cardinals who distrust Europe. Such a winning combination could prove difficult to find so soon again.
John Paul's unexpected death may also weigh in the conclave's choice. The health of a potential candidate will surely become a much more serious consideration. Professor Enrique Miret Magdalena of Madrid's University Institute of Theology has suggested that papal candidates should have a complete medical checkup, "just as you would do with someone considered for an important job in secular life." John Paul's fate may change attitudes toward the ages of papabili as well. Hitherto there has been an age "window" for candidates, ranging from the early 60s to the mid-70s, mainly because Cardinals feared having a Pope in office for more than ten or 15 years. "Maybe one of the lessons of this is that age shouldn't count," suggests Monsignor John Grant, editor of the Boston Pilot. Asks St. Louis Historian Hughes: "Where else but in the Catholic Church is a man 56 years of age considered too young for a job?"
If the Cardinals in conclave again try to find their compassionate shepherd from within the ranks of Italian pastors, they will have their work cut out for them. The Patriarchate of Venice, left open by Pope John Paul, stands empty. Giovanni Cardinal Colombo, Arch bishop of Milan, will be 76 in December. The important Arch diocese of Turin is governed by a Franciscan friar noted for his spirituality, Anastasio Ballestrero, 66 this week. But Ballestrero, though eligible to be elected Pope, is an unlikely candidate because he is not yet a Cardinal. Antonio Cardinal Poma of Bologna, 68, is a kindly, humble man, a stern foe of any detente with Italian Communism. He is also head of Italy's national bishops' conference — but suffers from erysipelas ("St. Anthony's fire"), a painful, recurrent skin disease. The same affliction troubles Ugo Cardinal Poletti, 64, the Pope's Vicar for Rome and thus the capital's real bishop, a prelate who has shown a vigorous concern for the city's poor.
Even though he is 72— an age that may now be considered risky — Genoa's Cardinal Siri may wind up with the largest single bloc of votes on the first ballot at the new conclave, though he will almost certainly go no further. The Genoese arch bishop is a known foe of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council ("They will never bind us," he once said loftily of its pronouncements), and traditionalists who sympathize with his position have apparently supported him only as a gesture of conservative opposition. But Siri can not hope to add the additional 50 or so votes needed for election. This time Siri's less strident supporters may choose to try their luck by supporting Pericle Cardinal Felici, 67, an engaging but tough Curial conservative who managed the business of Vatican II without ever being caught up in its spirit.
That leaves only three major Italian sees with Cardinals who are papabili. Two are much in the mold of Luciani. The third is Benelli, the man who did much to promote Luciani's cause in the last election, but who may this time have a chance to be Pope instead of popemaker. The three:
CORRADO URSI, Archbishop of Naples, 70. Warmhearted, courageous, a champion of the poor and a friend of ecumenism, Corrado Ursi is the son of a baker from the Adriatic coast. Ursi went almost straight from ordination back into seminaries as a teacher, later a rector. In 1966, after being elevated to the See of Naples, he soon won admiration as a "good pastor." As Cardinal he not only visited his parishes but often stayed on for two or three days to learn their needs. Three years ago, when a cholera epidemic broke out in Naples, he visited the hospitals each day, personally giving the last rites to a dying woman. He annually leads clergy and lay people to the Anglican church in Naples for ecumenical services on Holy Saturday; he maintains cordial relations with the city's Communist administration. In sturdy good health despite his age, Ursi had a small core of support in the last election. If some former Luciani admirers shift to him, he could be ahead of the conservative bloc even on the first ballot. The frequently mentioned fact that he speaks only Italian and has never served outside Italy should weigh against Ursi less this time. As John Paul demonstrated, a generous heart crosses any border.
SALVATORE PAPPALARDO, Archbishop of Palermo, 60. Regional jealousies are strong in Italy, even among Christian bishops. There has not been a Sicilian Pope in twelve centuries. But Salvatore Pappalardo could surmount that prejudice. A keen-minded Vatican diplomat who entered the Secretariat of State along with Giovanni Benelli, Pappalardo served early on as a secretary to Monsignor Montini, later Pope Paul VI. Eventually he became Paul's pronuncio to Indonesia, where the tropical climate sapped his health. Forced to return to Italy, he headed the school that trains Vatican diplomats. (His health is now fine.) In 1970 Paul named him to the See of Palermo. There he swiftly quieted a city badly divided among quarreling Mafia, Communist and Christian Democrat factions. He worked to aid emigrants' families and unemployed youth and—like Naples' Ursi —learned to live with a powerful Communist influence in the city. As a diplomat, Pappalardo pleaded for an end to "false nationalism" and for recognition that all nationalities are equal—a stand that may earn him support among Third World Cardinals.
GIOVANNI BENELLI, Archbishop of Florence, 57. As the Vatican's Substitute Secretary of State under Jean Cardinal Villot, Benelli was for a decade a power to be reckoned with by churchmen who wanted to see the Pope. Though he has befriended and backed pastoral Cardinals like Luciani and Pappalardo, Benelli had never held a pastoral post until Paul VI named him to the See of Florence in 1977. A brusque Tuscan with a deceptively cherubic face, Benelli has earned good marks during his 16 months in Communist-governed Florence. Even during his years as Pope Paul's front-office strong arm, he served as an able conciliator in several sharp internal church disputes. He has trouble delegating authority—a distinct problem for a Pope —and it is thought that he would oppose needed decentralization in the church. But his adroit leadership was apparent in his role as the principal supporter of the candidacy of John Paul. A Curia man himself, he opposed Curial candidates. Among the pastoral Italian archbishops he preferred Luciani for his personal qualities and antiCommunism. His connection with John Paul may help him in the voting.
If the Cardinals in conclave should move toward Benelli, they would be moving away from a pastoral choice and back toward Curial experience. If they choose to go in that direction, this time as in the last election they will have available a Curial man who also has far more pastoral background than Benelli —Sergio Cardinal Pignedoli, 68, the affable, gregarious president of the Secretariat for Non-Christians. In between rungs on his Curial career, Pignedoli served as a World War II chaplain (submarines) and auxiliary bishop of Milan (under Archbishop Montini). Young people love him and thousands write him letters about their problems. In the last election he ran close to Siri and Luciani on the first ballot. Also-ran status is a liability he shares with Sebastiano Cardinal Baggio, 65, prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, and Paolo Cardinal Bertoli, 70, a career Curialist, both of whom ran further back last time. Pignedoli has the best chance of the three.
The prevailing wisdom in the last election was that Italy lay in such precarious straits that an Italian Pope was needed to deal with the problems. Conditions have hardly improved but some Cardinals are wondering if an outsider might not do as well. One who almost certainly could is Jean Cardinal Villot, the Camerlengo for both the papal interregnums. In his home country of France, Villot served capably as both Coadjutor Bishop and Archbishop of Lyon before becoming Secretary of State to Pope Paul VI. In the last election his age would have posed no difficulty, but this time, though he is in excellent health at 72, he may be considered a bit too old.
There are younger pastoral foreigners. One of them was the late Pope John Paul's candidate during the last election for the job —Brazil's Aloisio Cardinal Lorscheider, a Franciscan friar who is Archbishop of Fortaleza. A social progressive but a theological moderate, Lorscheider is only 53—a disadvantage last time around. Youth should help this time, but fellow Cardinals are likely to worry about the fact that Cardinal Lorscheider has had open-heart surgery.
Two other non-Italians who figured in the dark-horse stakes last time may now be fading for reasons other than health. Argentina's Eduardo Cardinal Pironio, 57, no longer seems too young, but in his post as head of the Vatican's congregation for religious orders, he has neither the appeal of a pastor nor the clout of a Curial insider. The old Roman tie, however, recently deemed so valuable for a candidate, may diminish the chances of Utrecht's Johannes Cardinal Willebrands, 68. Willebrands has been doing double duty since 1975 as Primate of Holland, but he is identified with Rome because he has been in the Christian Unity Secretariat for 18 years—and still commutes there regularly as its head.
If the Cardinals in this new conclave are to reach across Italy's borders in a bold break with four centuries of tradition, the gesture should serve a more dramatic purpose, like finding the sort of loving and fervent priest they have just lost. One Cardinal who could meet that need is Britain's Cardinal Hume, Archbishop of Westminster, a Benedictine monk who was once Abbot of Ampleforth Abbey. Few Cardinals knew Hume at all until last month's election, but in Rome many came away from encounters with him admiring his evident spirituality, eloquence and warm presence. Hume's age—55—was a major disadvantage in August, but probably would not be held against him so much now. If anyone can fill John Paul's empty shoes, it might be this tall, rangy, soft-smiling Englishman.
There will be other names bruited about before the conclave begins next week, and there may be other forces, yet to coalesce, that will shape the Cardinals' ultimate decision. Just now, the church that John Paul leaves behind grieves and wonders, but there is solace in its centuries of experience, and a mission that endures and heals. As Bishop Daniel Cronin of Fall River, Mass., put it: "People have to stop and sort of redo things, but basically the work of caring for souls goes on. Every priest is in his parish, people are able to approach the altar, the bishops are among their people. The church goes on."
çãçõçéááThe Pope In AmericaIt Was "Woo-hoo-woo
çãçõçéááOct. 15, 1979
And a guitar, a white rosary, a quilting bee, an offering of zucchini
A gentle shepherd with a will of steel, John Paul II thrilled the U.S. with a glorious pilgrimage that won hearts—and challenged the nation
"He makes me think that the world and the people in it are not as bad as they seem."
—Mary Ellen Bickel, a Boston personnel manager
Only the rarest leaders inspire that kind of confidence in the basic goodness of humanity. As he led his triumphant seven-day journey of joy through the U.S., Pope John Paul II confirmed what his earlier tours of Mexico and Poland had intimated: after only a year in office, the Pontiff is emerging as the kind of incandescent leader that the world so hungers for—one who can make people feel that they have been lifted above the drabness of their own lives and show them that they are capable of better emotions, and better deeds, than they may have thought.
He was a man for all seasons, all situations, all faiths, a beguilingly modest superstar of the church. The professional philosopher read the diplomats of the U.N. a closely reasoned intellectual sermon on the importance of human rights and freedom—and offered in contrast the ghastly memory of Auschwitz in his homeland, where an emotional John Paul had prayed last June. The athlete-outdoorsman kept to a schedule that would have stunned many a man of far fewer years than his 59, and he seemed impervious to the driving rains that fell on his motorcades in Boston and Manhattan. The actor (John Paul toured Poland with a school theatrical company before entering the priesthood) displayed a sure command of smile, gesture and wink, even capitalizing on his thick Polish accent to draw a laughing cheer by voicing admiration for Manhattan's "sky-scroppers." Then he milked the line a bit, as the laughter and applause rose, and pronounced the word in Polish and Italian. The humanitarian pastor delighted in the happiness of his flock, and he became one with them. Children were his special favorites, and he swept them up lightly in his brawny arms. When a young monsignor from Harlem bent to kiss his ring, John Paul lifted him to his feet and kissed him on both cheeks. The Pope soothingly wiped the sweat from the head of a nervous priest who had been conducting the choir at Manhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral. In one amazing scene, perhaps as memorable as any that 1979 will offer, John Paul's hearty baritone voice rumbled "Woo-hoo-woo" over the loudspeaker at Madison Square Garden; he was giving the Polish equivalent of "Wow!" as 19,000 youths rocked the arena with nine minutes of spontaneous, frenzied cheers.
Americans of all beliefs and all backgrounds teetered on tiptoe to get a glimpse of him and roar their approval. Said Billy Graham, a man who knows something about rousing fervor in his audiences: "He's the most respected religious leader in the world today." Said President Carter to John Paul at Saturday afternoon's welcome on the White House lawn: "God blessed America by sending you to us." The Pope drew enormous crowds: 400,000 for a rainswept Mass on Boston Common, 1 million for a Mass in Philadelphia's Logan Circle, half a million at Grant Park in Chicago. Not everyone who attended the Pope's road show was swept up in the emotionalism, but the huge crowds of strangers seemed to become, for at least a little while, a community of friends. They serenaded John Paul with Getting to Know You and He's Got the Whole World in His Hands, and in New York City they had to be shooed away at midnight so that their singing of the Polish national anthem would not keep him awake.
The warmth inspired by the Pope's presence poses a conundrum about the man and his views. Although Mexico is largely anticlerical and Poland is Communist, the vast majority of their citizens are Catholics who have been reared from infancy to respect the papacy. But the U.S. is a pluralist, secular, sexually permissive society, and in the past two decades Americans have come to view with suspicion all institutions and authority, social, political or religious.
Even the 50 million American Catholics harbor attitudes that must be deeply disturbing to their Pope. An Associated Press-NBC News poll released on the eve of John Paul's visit showed that most of the Catholics questioned were rejecting parts of what the church and the Pope were preaching. Of those surveyed, 66% would like the church to approve the use of artificial birth control, 63% believe it is all right for a couple to get a divorce even when children are involved, 53% think that priests should be allowed to marry, 50% even tolerate abortion on demand. Those stands put them in the sharpest opposition to John Paul II, a firmly conservative occupant of the Chair of St. Peter. One indication of his uncompromising views: the austere Pope Paul VI got 32,357 requests from priests to be released from their vows and granted all but 1,033 of them; the warmly human John Paul II has not released one.
That John Paul nonetheless won the hearts—if not yet the minds—of many Americans is partly a tribute to the uniqueness of his office, one that gives him the most imposing pulpit in the world, and very largely a result of his simple humanity. His spontaneous delight in baby kissing, in bantering with crowds, is needed proof that the head of even an enormous and tradition-bound institution can lead with affection and empathy.
There may also be a deeper reason for the reaction to the Pope: in the U.S., as in other wealthy nations, many people, vaguely uneasy about the materialism of their lives, yearn in varying degrees for higher values and are even amenable to some fatherly chiding. John Paul sensed that mood and appealed to it in every one of his U.S. addresses.
This is a Pontiff who does not pontificate, but neither does he budge from any of his stands. In Philadelphia he asserted that he would not permit the ordination of women or married men, saying it is not "traditional." In Chicago, speaking to American bishops, he dramatically emphasized papal condemnation of birth control, divorce, abortion, extramarital sex and homosexual sex.
But John Paul saved his doctrinal fire primarily for specifically Catholic—indeed clerical—audiences. In the huge crowds, he made only glancing references to many of his most hotly disputed positions and chose instead to concentrate on aspects of the religious message as important as any thou-shalt-not preachments: peace, brotherhood, respect for human rights, the sharing of love. In Harlem he spoke of religious joy, in full knowledge of how seldom that emotion is felt on those mean streets. Said he: "How many people have never known joy? They live in our neighborhoods, they have never met a brother or sister who touched their lives with the love of Jesus.
Again and again he preached against materialism, exhorting the rich to share their wealth with the poor, nationally and internationally, while reminding the poor that God loves the rich too. New York Times Columnist James Reston noted that, with the possible exception of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, John Paul "condemned the moral anarchy, sexual license and material consumerism in this country more than any social critic. Yet somehow, despite his condemnation of our spiritual bewilderment, he has been received here with more applause than any religious or secular leader in the world."
Part of the explanation, surely, was the fact that John Paul did not speak in tones of condemnation; nor did he threaten God's vengeance. Rather, he appealed to his audiences to be true to nobler qualities in themselves, telling them in effect you can do better than that, and you know it.
A great deal of the Pope's message was not specifically Catholic; large chunks of what he said could have been uttered by other Christian leaders. And the Pope appealed quite specifically, and effectively, to members of other faiths; at Battery Park on the lower tip of Manhattan, he addressed the nation's Jews, saying, "Shalom—peace be with you." Perhaps partly to aid this ecumenical appeal, he constantly emphasized a humble manner. The contrast with Paul VI, the only other Pope to visit the U.S. (for only 14 hours in 1965, primarily to make a U.N. address), was striking. Paul frequently used the papal "we." John Paul clearly preferred "I," and once made "we" sound not imperial but conspiratorial. When those cheering youths delayed his speech in Madison Square Garden, he told them gleefully: "We shall destroy the schedule."
All this reflects conscious decision and a major development: John Paul, who is perfectly aware of his charisma, is quite deliberately converting the papacy into a personal office, seeking to lead not by the weight of his authority but by the force of personal example of humanity and faith. It is a strategy as radical in its way as some of the Pope's doctrinal views are conservative, but well adapted to John Paul's personality and the world's eagerness for leadership.
As he toured America, the Pope artfully carried out a strategy that he had planned well in advance of leaving the Vatican. Says Jerzy Turowicz, editor in chief of Cracow's respected Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny and a man who has known Karol Wojtyla for more than 30 years: "He looks at the American church and sees groups talking to each other using different 'languages.' They cannot understand each other. He would like to reunite the church. He is for pluralism, but with some limits, so that it does not verge on anarchy. He would like to restore church discipline and obedience and reverence for the institution. Perhaps what he faces is a problem of language, how to express his vision without seeming to take the part of a rigid conservative."
John Paul certainly made a skillful and impressive try to solve that problem. Said the Rev. Avery Dulles, son of John Foster Dulles and a theologian at Catholic University: "There is no lack of desire for spiritual leadership. But it must be exercised in a personal way. The Pope's personal style has a good chance of succeeding." The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., pastor of Manhattan's Riverside Church and a leading liberal Protestant clergyman, was reminded by John Paul's performance of a definition laid down by Phillips Brooks, a spellbinding 19th century Episcopal bishop in Boston. "Preaching," said Brooks, "is bringing truth through personality." In the case of John Paul II, man and message have become one. Bishop Daniel Cronin River, Mass., said the Pope was trying to create a sense of "oneness" among the nation's Catholics. "Here's a young and vigorous man. He's real. The way he engenders enthusiasm, it's as though the Holy Spirit has become visible"
John Paul had visited the U.S. twice before, in 1969 and 1976, and he began demonstrating his familiarity with the U.S and sure touch with its people, almost the moment his Aer Lingus 747 touched down at Logan Airport in Boston after Monday's flight from Ireland. Rosalynn Carter, acting as her husband's personal emissary, dressed in black suit and white blouse nervously delivered a graceful welcome: "You have lifted up the eyes of the world to focus on the enduring values of the family, the community, human rights and love for one another " The Pope kissed the soggy tarmac, planted two kisses on the cheeks of the Rev. Msgr. Charles Finn, at 102 the oldest U S priest, and said he would like to "enter every home, to greet personally every man and woman, to caress every child." Failing that, he said, "permit me to express my sentiments in the lyrics of your own song," and then, in his sturdy and serviceable English, quoted from America the Beautiful: "And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea."
Some 800 chartered buses had helped to bring an estimated 1 million visitors from all over New England to join 2 million Catholic Bostonians in this most Catholic of American cities to get a glimpse of the Pope. Many seemed not to mind that they got only a quick peek as his motorcade sped by. Whizzing through Dorchester on the way to town, he spotted a 6-ft. sign, hanging from the third floor of the home of Martin and Antania Olesch, that read, "Nie bojcie sie ofworzyc na osciez drzwi chrystusowi" (Don't be afraid to open the door wide for Christ).
At the 104-year-old Cathedral of the Holy Cross, about 2,000 priests and nuns rocked the rafters with cheers and the choir sang, "Ecce sacerdos magnus" (Behold the great priest). The Pope showed again how thoroughly he had been prepared for his trip by paraphrasing the words of John Winthrop, first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, written aboard the Arabella as the ship approached America in 1630: "We must love one another with a pure heart We must bear one another's burden." Said John Paul: "These simple words explain so much of the meaning of life— our life as brothers and sisters in our Lord Jesus Christ."
Then John Paul did an utterly characteristic thing. Leaving the cathedral, he turned left at the foot of the altar and headed for the only wheelchair in the church and Jane De Martino, 26 paralyzed as the result of an accident that severed her spinal column. He took her hand, kissed her head, bent close to murmur some words, and placed on her lap a small box inscribed with the words Totus Tuus (Totally Yours) and the papal coat of arms. When she opened the box, she found a rosary of white beads with a gold cross. Said De Martino: "If you had given me the whole world, it wouldn't have meant so much." A Boston cop who had been standing beside the chair began to weep. "I've got to get back to church," he said, and he walked away.
In the dimming twilight and rain, John Paul headed for Common, whose history serves as a reminder that Boston was once a center of religious bigotry. Quaker dissenters were hanged there in the 17th century. And while no Catholics suffered that fate, Protestants from Boston's North South ends staged organized brawls in the 18th century on Nov. 5 to determine which group would light a bonfire and burn the Pope in effigy that night.
Some people waited as long as eleven hours on Boston Common (everywhere in the U.S., John Paul ran late) and were thoroughly drenched. From the fringes of the throng, the brilliantly lit platform and altar looked like an ethereal spaceship radiating warmth. Many people back in the crowd had the strange experience of first listening to cheers for the Pope on their transistor radios and then hearing the actual sound following through the air like an echo. His white hair wet and plastered down John Paul led 300 priests, who waded through ankle-deep mud to hand out 60,000 Communion wafers that twelve nuns in Marlborough, Mass., had baked in a week of twelve-hour days starting each morning at 4:30.
Flying into New York City Tuesday morning, John Paul got a brief glimpse of sunshine, and his white robe glistened with golden light as he stepped off his plane at 9 a.m. Again a brief airport ceremony with dignitaries was enlivened by the Pope's ability to unstuff a shirt. Mayor Edward Koch introducing himself: "Your Holiness, I am the mayor." The Pope: "I shall try to be a good citizen." Then off for two days of shrieking crowds and perhaps the toughest hours of his trip, a series of wildly contrasting events that showed all the nuances and talents of his complex personality.
Tight police security — at times the cordons around him were four deep— kept the Pope from one of his favorite activities, working the crowds. But still he pressed the flesh with anyone he could reach, displaying a deft politician's hand that would have shamed Lyndon Johnson. The police had reason to wall off their charge: the FBI in Newark received a written warning that the Pope would be shot in Manhattan on Tuesday. The letter, purporting to come from the terrorist Puerto Rican Nationalist F.A.L.N., directed the FBI to an apartment in Elizabeth, N.J., where a submachine gun gun and several empty boxes of ammunition for handguns were found.
Harming the Pope, however, was the furthest thing from the minds of the people who greeted John Paul. "He waved!" exclaimed Miguel Vera, 30. "It's beautiful—as if it is almost God to me." The Pope found ample occasion to display his actor's gifts. He jokingly covered his ears as a crowd sent up deafening cheers. At one point he responded to shouts of "Long live the Pope!" with "You are right!"— an odd rejoinder that only John Paul could make seem charming. He addressed 60,000 at Shea Stadium in four of the seven languages he speaks with facility— English, Spanish, Italian and of course, Polish (French, Latin and German are the other three) and drew applause by simply pronouncing place names with theatrical timing, greeting the crowds "from Long Island— and New Jersey— and Connecticut [pronouncing all three c's]— and [long pause] Broke-leen."
At the U.N., where Arab and Jewish diplomats jostled with all the rest to see him, John Paul showed his intellectual side, his 61-minute speech ranged over a variety of topics tied together tightly by sequential reasoning. The headline-catching bits — an assertion that overall peace in the Middle East must include "a just settlement of the Palestinian question," a call for a "special statute" to assure the preservation of Jerusalem as a city holy to the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths — were really incidental notes.
John Paul's main theme was that peace is threatened by any violation of human rights anywhere, and that the U.N. can fulfill its peace-keeping mission only if it remembers and applies its own 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Pope also denounced the arms race ("The continual preparations for war ... mean taking the risk that some time, somewhere, somehow, someone can set in motion the terrible mechanism of general destruction"). He prayed that "every kind of concentration camp any where on earth may once and for all be done away with" and condemned "the various kinds of torture and oppression, either physical or moral, carried out ... under the pretext of internal 'security' or the need to preserve an apparent peace."
The delegates listened in total silence. From many, no doubt, the silence reflected only respect and attention, but it may also have signified irritation from some — the delegates of countries that maintain concentration camps and practice torture in the name of security. This Pope does not shrink from telling people what they do not want to hear. Said New York Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.: "I can attest from having watched that the Eastern European and Soviet delegates knew exactly what he was talking about, and for once in that chamber, looked fearful rather than bored."
The emotional high points of John Paul's New York stay were a Tuesday evening Mass in Yankee Stadium and the Wednesday morning youth rally at Madison Square Garden. A crowd of 75,000 waited impatiently at Yankee Stadium, occasionally cheering a white-mitered bishop whom they mistakenly thought to be the Pope. John Paul finally appeared, 45 minutes late, in his white "Popemobile" (a rebuilt Ford Bronco truck) that slowly circled the field as the standing Pope extended his arms, first to one side, then the other, in blessing. People far out of his range of vision in the upper stands felt impelled to wave back, as if the Pope were greeting them alone.
The rhythmic clapping and popping of thousands of camera flashbulbs like fireflies throughout the stadium made John Paul seem less a religious figure than a Hollywood celebrity. But his sermon was the exact opposite of rock-concert hedonism. It was a warning against "the frenzy of consumerism." Said the Pope to an audience that again fell silent: "Christ demands openness to our brothers and sisters in need — openness from the rich, the affluent, the economically advantaged; openness to the poor, the underdeveloped and the disadvantaged. Christ demands an openness that is more than benign attention, more than token actions or halfhearted efforts that leave the poor as destitute as before or even more so."
At crammed Madison Square Garden, the Pope displayed his remarkable rapport with youth. The occasion was billed as "Youth in Concert with Pope John Paul II." Once again, John Paul circled the arena floor in his Popemobile, reaching out exuberantly to youngsters leaning frantically out of their seats. The crowd went wild when he hoisted a young girl onto the roof of the vehicle. The 100-piece band from St. Francis Prep in Brooklyn played themes from Battlestar Galactica and Rocky. The Pope imitated a drummer and then gestured "thumbs up" with his left hand. For a few minutes, John Paul sat in the audience as he watched a slide presentation of youthful activities in the city. When he finally ascended the stage, young people presented him with gifts: among other things, blue jeans, a T shirt marked in red letters BIG APPLE WELCOMES POPE JOHN PAUL II and a guitar (an instrument that John Paul plays).
The Pope, obviously delighted, examined the gifts, and as he prepared to speak, the cheering built in a crescendo. Every time the noise would start to die down, someone would shout "Polish power!" or the name of a local high school or Catholic Youth Organization club, and the yelling would begin all over. Football-style cheers resounded from the balcony in praise of the Pope. John Paul shook with laughter. "Woo-hoo-woo," he cooed. But when he finally took the microphone it was to deliver to the young a serious Christian message: "When you wonder about the mystery of yourself, look to Christ, who gives you the meaning of life. When you wonder what it means to be a mature person, look to Christ, who is the fullness of humanity."
While in New York, the Pope at his own request also toured visibly blighted areas — not only Harlem but the South Bronx, where he pleaded with a crowd at a vacant lot not to "give in to despair." His visit concluded with the ceremonies at Battery Park and Shea Stadium. After telling the crowd in Shea that a city must have a "soul," he left for Philadelphia. As his plane taxied away, the Pope blessed New York.
In Philadelphia late Wednesday and early Thursday, John Paul pointedly answered some of the voices of dissent within the church. Ukrainian-rite Catholics, who have been agitating for more autonomy within the church, he insisted that they must accept his authority. To an audience of 14,000 priests, nuns and seminarians gathered from dioceses all over the U.S., he repeated uncompromising stands against the ordination of women and for priestly celibacy.
The Pope closed the door to ordination of women as priests during his pontificate. That, he said, "is not a statement about human rights, nor an exclusion of women from holiness and mission in the church," merely a reaffirmation of "the prophetic tradition" that only men can be priests. John Paul insisted on priestly celibacy "to express the totality of the yes that [priests] have spoken to the Lord" and made clear that his refusal to release priests from their vows would continue. "Priesthood is forever," he said.
Both homilies, however, illustrated John Paul's peculiar talent for winning personal enthusiasm from people who may disagree with his doctrinal stands by coupling them with positive thoughts. To the Ukrainian-rite Catholics he voiced enough praise of "diversity" within the church to win long applause. To the priests, nuns and seminarians he expressed— an exalted view of the religious life as one of devotion to God and service to humanity. At the end of his talk they stamped, clapped, whistled and sang. Many nuns who had sat stony-faced while John Paul said that women could not be priests joined enthusiastically in the rousing ovation.
John Paul showed the same touch with lay audiences. At his Mass on Logan Circle, he deplored sexual "laxity" but put his remarks in a context of freedom, which he said must not "be seen as a pretext for moral anarchy" but can be truly enjoyed only by those who have "respect for the truth." The Philadelphia crowds were as fervent as any in the U.S. and, as everywhere, included many non-Catholics, who found the Pontiff far more than a touring curiosity. Lois Kukcinovich, a pianist at the New Generation of Disciples of Christ Church in Philadelphia, slept Wednesday night with her clothes on so that she could get out early Thursday to see the Pope. Said she: "The vibrations from him are just wonderful."
Next came America's heartland: Iowa. It was a stop that was not on the Pope's original itinerary. But Joe Hays, 39, a farmer and mechanic in Truro, sent the Pope a handwritten letter inviting him to visit American farm country. John Paul, who grew up in a Poland that was then overwhelmingly agricultural, accepted only five weeks before his U.S. tour was to begin, throwing Des Moines residents into a frenzy of eleventh-hour preparation.
James Ross, a pottery teacher at the Catholic Bowling High School in West Des Moines, worked 110 hours in the last week making vessels for the papal Mass: a chalice, a plate for the Communion bread, a pitcher, a bowl for the washing of hands. Local carpenters crafted an altar and papal chair out of thick oaken beams salvaged from a 100-year-old barn.
Florist Lew Darnell and his wife Mary Kay placed bouquets of Enchantment lilies in vases, part of an enormous floral display. "We postponed our retirement," said Mary Kay. "We were supposed to move to San Diego the first of October, but when we heard the Pope was coming we stayed." To decorate the altar platform, 15 Wisconsin volunteers staged a two-week quilting bee to stitch together a 10-ft. square banner done in burnt orange, sky blue and leafy green.
Like the preparation, the papal visit had an earthy, homespun touch more gentle than the frenzy in the East. The Pope stopped first at the tiny (15 pews) St. Patrick's Church, nestled in rolling farm land near Gumming. "Feel grateful to God for the blessings he gives you," said the Pope, "not least the blessing of belonging to this rural parish community ... May the simplicity of your life-style and the closeness of your community be the fertile ground for a growing commitment to Jesus Christ."
Meanwhile, at Living History Farms, which re-creates early life on three operating farms, the biggest crowd in Iowa history was gathering. By the time the papal Mass began on a 180-acre pasture shortly after 3 p.m., the throng totaled 350,000, more than double the 150,000 that descended on Iowa in 1959 for a glimpse of Nikita Khrushchev. Police cordoned off a 16-mile stretch of Interstate 80 and Interstate 35 and used it as a parking lot for buses that rolled in from Kansas, the Dakotas, Colorado, Wyoming, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Nebraska. The crowd included many teenagers in jeans and backpacks. Seventy-five high school students from Independence, Iowa, walked 130 miles to see the Pope.
The Mass itself was filled with pageantry and song. At the Offertory, farm families carried to the altar symbolic gifts of soil, hand tools and garden vegetables: peppers and zucchini from Beverly and Tom Manning of Dallas Center; potatoes and apples from Frieda and Ray O'Grady of Afton; ears of corn from Mabel and Art Schweers of Lenox. In his homily, John Paul praised agriculture and one more time called attention to the plight of the world's poor. He told the farmers, "You have the potential to provide food for the millions who have nothing to eat and thus help rid the world of famine." Summed up Mike Keable, a Catholic deacon from Minnesota: "The Pope is the glue that holds the church together. What better glue can we have?"
Thursday night John Paul flew to Chicago, where a crowd of 1,000, shivering in upper-40s cold, chanted, "Long live the Pope," outside his bedroom window at 10 p.m. John Paul appeared on a second-floor balcony and wagged his finger playfully at the crowd like a father telling his children it was past their bedtime. At 5:30 a.m. he was awakened by chants of "We want the Pope." Though he appeared weary at times, most notably Thursday night, he drew strength from the crowds. He told an Italian TV interviewer: "When I first arrived in New York, I felt tired and it looked like a very long trip. But now it's beginning to look too short."
It was at a Chicago seminary, in an address to more than 300 U.S. bishops, that he gave the most doctrinaire talk of his tour. His technique was typically deft; he quoted exactly from a pastoral letter that the bishops themselves had composed in 1976, and in effect exclaimed: How right you are! On divorce, he told the bishops: "You faced the question of the indissolubility of marriage, rightly stating, 'The covenant between a man and a woman joined in Christian marriage is as indissoluble and irrevocable as God's love for his people.' " On extramarital sex: "You rightly stated 'sexual intercourse is a moral and human good only within marriage. Outside marriage it is wrong.' " He condemned "both the ideology of contraception and contraceptive acts" and quoted approvingly the bishops' denunciation of abortion: "You clearly said, To destroy these innocent unborn children is an unspeakable crime.' " He told the bishops that they had properly distinguished between homosexual acts, which he said are wrong, and homosexual orientation, which deserves sympathy: "You did not betray those people who, because of homosexuality, are confronted with difficult moral problems." He also approved the bishops' condemnation of racial antagonism and discrimination, but the total context of his talk was chilling to liberal theologians. He asserted that the church has a special mission to "guard and transmit intact the deposit of Christian doctrine," thus reaffirming the thought that Christianity is a body of fixed beliefs rather than a faith that ought to be adapted to modern circumstances.
John Paul topped off his Chicago visit with still another Mass, this time in Grant Park, scene of pitched battles between police and anti-Viet Nam War protesters eleven years ago. A crowd of 500,000 transformed it on Friday into something more like the site of a love-in.
On Saturday morning John Paul made his last and most historic stop, arriving in Washington in a blaze of sunshine and a feast of good will. For the first time, a Pope was visiting the White House, a happening that would have been inconceivable in U.S. politics just two decades ago. Warmly, graciously, the Southern Baptist President of the U.S. greeted the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Gathered on the North Lawn of the White House for the official greeting were 3,500 guests, including many of the ranking figures of the Government.
The President began his remarks in Polish: "Niech bedzie Bog pochwalony!" Then he added the translation: "May God be praised!" Carefully noting the American tradition of separation of church and state, Carter also lauded John Paul: "You have moved among us as a champion of dignity and decency for every human being, and as a pilgrim for peace among nations. You have offered us your love, and we as individuals are heartened by it. You can be sure, Pope John Paul, that the people of America return your love." At that, John Paul clasped his hands and quickly touched his heart.
In his reply, the Pope congratulated the President on his Polish. He said that he wished to be "the messenger of peace and brotherhood, and a witness to the true greatness of every person." John Paul said he hoped the meeting would serve the cause of world peace, international understanding and the promotion of full respect for human rights everywhere." He ended with his now-familiar "God bless America!" which brought the applauding guests to their feet.
After conferring for an hour, the Pope and the President greeted 6,000 guests gathered on the South Lawn for the afternoon's second major reception. Here Carter contributed one of the most moving moments of his presidency. In his best preacher's tone, he said to John Paul: "As human beings each acting for justice in the present — and striving together for a common future of peace and love — let us not wait so long for ourselves and for you to meet again. Welcome to our country, our new friend." Echoing the President, the crowd burst into prolonged applause. As the Pope kissed the President, somehow part of the magnanimity of the Pontiff, as well as his blessing, was momentarily transposed onto the troubled shoulders of Jimmy Carter. He knew it, as did the audience, comprised largely of party faithfuls.
The afternoon marked the beginning of the end of the Pope's extraordinary week. Little remained but a Sunday Mass — with crowd estimates at 200,000 — on the Washington Mall and the final takeoff of Shepherd I, his TWA 747, for Rome.
What did Pope John Paul II leave behind? He probably won few if any converts to his doctrinal stands. Those who believe in divorce, birth control and abortion presumably will go on doing so. Those who consider his refusal to ordain women a grossly mistaken policy began speaking up even while he was still touring the country. Indeed, groups of protesters dogged his two days in Washington. Read one typical banner: EQUAL RITES FOR WOMEN. Sister Lorraine Weires, a Dominican nun and ardent feminist who attended the Des Moines Mass dressed in black slacks, expressed hope that the Pope "is open to dialogue. He too will grow in consciousness." Perhaps. But there is little reason to expect that in the years ahead John Paul will bend his views to suit the world as most U.S. Catholics see it.
Yet somehow last week that did not matter. By his force of personality, by his natural qualities of leadership, and by the warmth of his generosity, he generated in his Catholic audiences an enhanced pride in their church, a feeling that they were part of a larger whole.
Perhaps more important, John Paul left behind a morally imperative message for a people who seemed to need it. His visit showed with surprising clarity that many Americans of many creeds are looking for direction, for stability. They found themselves attracted to this strong, virile figure, a natural leader who was both compassionate and stern. The charisma spared nobody. Waiting for John Paul's motorcade, U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim confessed: "This is one of my greatest experiences." In Boston, Henry Cabot Lodge, 77, the former Massachusetts Senator and an Episcopalian, and his wife Emily, 74, stayed with the Pope the whole stormy day, although Emily Lodge lost a shoe in the Boston Common quagmire.
Finally, John Paul's presence and words reminded Americans—and the world—that humanity does have a higher nature. Said Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, leading ecclesiastical historian at Catholic University: "The greatest contribution that the Pope's visit can make to our nation is focusing upon and emphasizing the need for a revival of morality. John Paul is a man of singular sophistication; he is no pious goose. But he is a moral leader—or he isn't anything."
Millions of Americans could agree last week that they had seen a moral leader at work.
çãçõçéááPope John Paul II: 1920-2005The Men Who Might Be PopeIt is not a matter of filling John Paul's shoes; there will never be another quite like him. But a lively field of papabili, ranging from moderate to ultraconservative, includes several highly qualified prelates: no Americans, but Italians, Latin AmericanBy
ROBERT SULLIVANçãçõçéááApr. 11, 2005
With John Paul's death the Sacred College of Cardinals faces the critical responsibility of electing a successor, a duty it has not executed in more than 26 years. Such procedures are fraught with suspense and barnacled with gossip and speculation. Secular and nonsecular observers fall over themselves trying to gauge the political and philosophical mind of the electorate before the Cardinals gather behind tightly closed doors to discuss, debate and ultimately decide who will be the successor of Peter.
The pre-vote guesswork is like nothing so much as handicapping a horse race, and the field is deep but without a clear favorite. Although John Paul personally selected all but three of the 117 voting Cardinals, don't expect a clone of the departed Pontiff. The outcome is often an expression of a pent-up desire to adjust the church's compass, however subtly. That said, the Italian members of the Sacred College had established, before the ascension of the Polish Karol Cardinal Wojtyla in 1978, a 456-year tradition of selecting from among themselves. Though the percentage of electors from Italy has plummeted from the 33% who helped elect John XXIII in 1958 to 17% today, the 20 Italians who can cast ballots remain powerful, and the next Bishop of Rome could be Italian.
For years CARLO MARIA CARDINAL MARTINI, 78, a Scripture scholar who was Archbishop of Milan, was considered a possible progressive successor to John Paul. But he stepped down from the archdiocese in 2002, spends half his year studying in Jerusalem and is effectively out of the running.
As the Cardinals file toward the chapel, Martini will be seen as the progressive kingmaker facing down a troika of powerful conservative Rome-based Cardinals: John Paul's doctrinal policy chief, JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER of Germany; the head of Italy's Bishops' Conference, CAMILLO CARDINAL RUINI; and Vatican Secretary of State Angelo Cardinal Sodano. The thinking is that their favored candidate would be DIONIGI CARDINAL TETTAMANZI, 71, the former Archbishop of Genoa, who has succeeded Martini in Milan. His philosophical approach is sufficiently unclear that neither the progressive Cardinals nor the doctrinaire are likely to oppose him. In Genoa he spoke out in favor of antiglobalization protesters, and in Milan he has called for compassion toward immigrants, drawing the wrath of rightist politicians.
Meanwhile he has remained in league with the conservative lay organization Opus Dei, which is rumored to have been working for some time as a preconclave lobby to make certain that the next Pope is a staunch traditionalist. Tettamanzi would play very well: he has a kind, grandfatherly mien still associated at the Vatican with the much beloved Pope John XXIII. Yet there is said to be friction between the Archbishop of Milan and his predecessor, Martini. The man who might have been Pope could work to derail Tettamanzi's candidacy. There are enough intrigues in Rome just now to fill a Dan Brown novel.
If Tettamanzi is not the Italian choice, ANGELO CARDINAL SCOLA, 63, could be. The Patriarch of Venice is a conservative who formerly headed the Vatican's Institute on Marriage and Family, where he was an incisive voice for John Paul's firm views on sexual morality. He is also seen as a smart, worldly pastor. He has one subtle strike against him: he is, for a potential Pope, young--and this is probably not a good time to be so. Father Richard McBrien, former chairman of the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame, told TIME, when John Paul II began to appear frail, "The next Pope will be an Italian Cardinal in his 70s. The Cardinals don't want another long-term Pope." If McBrien is right, the dark-horse candidacy of Genoa's TARCISIO CARDINAL BERTONE, 70, a well-liked pastor with a quirky charisma who used to serve as Ratzinger's deputy in the Vatican's doctrinal office, has improved. For that matter, the Cardinals, in reaction to John Paul's long tenure, could simply decide not to decide and name either Ratzinger, who is 77, or Ruini, 74, as Pope. There is scuttlebutt in Rome of this happening: the ascension of what is, in effect, an interim Pontiff who would for a few years carry out John Paul II's mandate while the church takes a deep breath and decides where it really wants to head next.
Beyond Ratzinger, other non-Italian candidates are thick on the ground. The church is booming in the Third World, and some 40% of the Cardinals who will elect the next Pope are from developing nations. Because of this, there are several Latin American Cardinals whose candidacies range from reasonable to viable. JORGE MARIO CARDINAL BERGOGLIO, 68, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, is an extremely humble Jesuit who will do nothing to campaign for the papacy but who might emerge as a correct, holy choice. CLAUDIO CARDINAL HUMMES, 70, Archbishop of the 6 million-strong Sao Paulo, Brazil, diocese, is an equally soft-spoken Franciscan conservative who has long fought for the poor. By contrast with the borderline-shy South Americans, OSCAR ANDRES CARDINAL RODRIGUEZ MARADIAGA, 62, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, is passionate and telegenic. He could ably succeed John Paul as a high-profile Pope. Already he has campaigned for Third World debt relief alongside U2's Bono. Among Rodríguez Maradiaga's many talents: he can explain his moderate philosophies in eight languages, play the piano and fly a plane.
Further north, an equally outspoken candidate is Mexico City's Archbishop NORBERTO CARDINAL RIVERA CARRERA, 62. He epitomizes the feverish Catholicism of his 19 million mostly poor acolytes, boosting native rites and symbols. But Rivera Carrera is no liberal; he has close ties to the Legionaries of Christ, a flourishing right-wing society of priests. He is sometimes a too-fierce defender of the faith: when the U.S. pedophile crisis broke, he saw it as a "campaign of media persecution against the entire Catholic church." Another archconservative is DARIO CARDINAL CASTRILLON HOYOS, 75, whose star is said to be fading but who nevertheless has a compelling personal history. Quite like John Paul, this man from Medellín, Colombia, has displayed courage, tenacity and a willingness--even an eagerness--to mix church and state. He has gone deep into Colombian jungles to mediate between leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads, and once showed up at the house of cocaine king Pablo Escobar disguised as a milkman. Revealing himself, Castrillón Hoyos implored Escobar to confess his sins, which, presumably at some considerable length, the vicious gangster did.
There are also a couple of non-Italian Europeans who will be given consideration. GODFRIED CARDINAL DANEELS, 71, Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, Belgium, is an intellectual and a moderate, bordering on being a progressive. He has called for compassion for those who divorce and remarry and has urged a greater role for the laity, including women. CHRISTOPH CARDINAL SCHONBORN, Archbishop of Vienna, is regarded in Rome as a brilliant conservative theologian and a smooth parish leader. He was well placed in life to become both: he studied theology under Cardinal Ratzinger, who will surely argue Schönborn's case before the conclave, and is the third Cardinal in his family's lineage. As might happen with the Italian Scola, Schönborn's relative youth--he is 60--could work against him.
Asia's best chance is with Bombay Archbishop IVAN CARDINAL DIAS, 68. His brother Cardinals appreciate his mix of diplomatic skills (he speaks a dozen languages) and doctrinal clarity in the rocky terrain of multifaith India.
The list extends from here, and as Wojtyla's extraordinary election more than a quarter-century ago proved, there is absolutely no predicting what will occur when the Cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel beneath the Michelangelo frescoes and devoutly swear to "preserve a scrupulous secrecy regarding everything that relates in any way to the election of the Roman Pontiff." Having pledged, they will get down to their task, filling in their ballots under the words "I elect as Supreme Pontiff." Outside, St. Peter's Square will be filled with pilgrims, gazing up at the chimney, awaiting the puff of white smoke that announces Habemus Papam!: "We have a Pope!" --Reported by Jeff Israely/Rome
çãçõçéááReligionDiscord in the ChurchA decisive Pope John Paul confronts challenges to his authorityBy
RICHARD N. OSTLINGçãçõçéááFeb. 4, 1985
On a gray and misty morning late last week, Pope John Paul II arrived at a $ Rome airport in a Mercedes-Benz limousine, quietly bade farewell to Vatican aides and boarded an Alitalia DC-10. Once again the Pope was airborne, setting forth this time on a strenuous twelve-day "pilgrimage of hope" to Latin America. Arriving at Caracas' Simon Bolivar Airport under a warm afternoon sun, the Pontiff, his white robe flapping in the soft Caribbean breezes, was greeted by Venezuelan President Jaime Lusinchi. Waving to the crowd, the Pope traveled in his converted Land Rover Popemobile along a twisting hillside road into the capital.
Meeting with Venezuela's bishops that evening, John Paul issued decisive marching orders. He called upon the region's hierarchy to correct errant Catholic thinkers "with charity and firmness." Too many theologians, said the Pope, "proclaim not the truth of Christ but their own theories," a theme that may recur during the current journey. By the end of his 18,500- mile trip, John Paul will have flown from Venezuela to Ecuador to Peru to Trinidad and Tobago, delivered 44 other speeches, lunched with steelworkers, met upcountry Indians and visited a sector of Peru rife with Maoist guerrillas.
Indeed, one of the most enduring images of this pontificate is surely the white-garbed figure of John Paul descending from an aircraft, his arms spread wide, the familiar smile bestowed on a welcoming crowd. In his six years as Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, he covered 210,000 miles during the 24 foreign voyages prior to his current trip. No other religious leader has ever traveled so extensively or been seen in person by so many millions of people. No previous Pope, moreover, has placed such a determined emphasis on the unifying message that John Paul II has proclaimed as the reason for his travels: to assure each local congregation, no matter how remote, of its important role in the universal church.
The 1980s mark a historic turning point for Roman Catholicism. Beneath all of the gloss and spectacle of the papacy, beyond the wealth, power and influence of the Holy See, a profound struggle is taking shape, one that is of crucial importance to the church's 810 million members--and to many not in its fold. At stake is the future direction of a strong, dynamic, yet deeply perturbed institution.
In recent centuries the church has apportioned a substantial part of its energies to battles against external enemies--skepticism, nihilism, secularism and atheism. Today Rome finds itself under a strong challenge from some who & profess to be loyally Catholic. Latin America, a region that the Pope is visiting for the sixth time, grapples with such problems as poverty, unemployment, crowded housing and political turbulence. The church hierarchy is divided over the growing influence on the area's 338 million Catholics of a radical movement, partly influenced by Marxism, that is known as liberation theology. In the U.S., the papacy confronts restiveness and even anger among sisters and laywomen who are unhappy about the church's rigid stands on abortion, birth control and an exclusively male priesthood (see following stories). In Europe as well as in the U.S., the Pope and his aides face challenges from theological scholars whose reinterpretations of traditional dogma verge on what Rome considers heresy. In the Third World, notably black Africa, where Catholicism is flourishing, there are large and puzzling problems of what to do about "inculturation," the desire to adapt the church's rituals and procedures to local customs.
Afundamental issue underlies these concerns: the authority of the papacy. In a pre-Christmas address to the Curia (Vatican bureaucracy), John Paul applauded "wholesome pluralism" within the church. But he warned against the dangers of "isolationist" and "centrifugal" forces that threaten the unity of Catholicism. The mission of the Pope and the Holy See, he said, "consists precisely in serving . . . universal unity." The center, in other words, must remain the center: Rome must decide what is Catholic and what is not.
There are, however, dissident church members who believe that in a democratic age Catholics should have the right to decide troublesome issues for themselves. The challenges occur in several crucial and overlapping areas: worship, the claims of national and local autonomy, issues of family life and morality, discipline among priests and nuns, and doctrine.
Although papal authority has emerged as the overriding issue, there are also important debates about church involvement in contemporary social matters. John Paul has led the way, denouncing economic injustice and insisting on the rights of the downtrodden. Taking their lead from the Pontiff, American bishops are issuing strong moral stands on their nation's nuclear arms strategy, the U.S. economic system and the evil of abortion. Bishops in Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uganda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and other lands have boldly denounced human rights abuses by their governments. In South Africa, white Archbishop Denis Hurley will go on trial in February because of his public protests against police brutality toward blacks in Namibia.
Some flamboyant manifestations of this activist spirit disturb more traditional Catholics. To protest nuclear arms spending, Seattle's Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen flatly refuses to pay half his income taxes; the Government has garnisheed his salary. In Arizona, two priests and three sisters in the "sanctuary" movement face federal charges of harboring illegal aliens from Central America. In Latin America and the Philippines a scattering of priests have taken up arms with Marxist guerrillas. Father Conrado Balweg of the Communist New People's Army, on the most-wanted list of the Philippine military, proclaims that liberation from oppression is "the essence of the Mass."
The roots of much of this tumultuous activity were planted two decades ago during the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Such an ecumenical council is a policy-setting meeting of the world's bishops presided over by the Pope. In a surprise announcement last Friday, Pope John Paul II said that he was summoning an extraordinary synod of bishops from around the world next Nov. 25 to Dec. 8 to re-examine the changes made by Vatican II. The gathering will involve patriarchs of the Oriental Rites and the presidents of the 101 national and regional conferences of bishops. The purpose: to clarify what the council said and how its decrees are to be interpreted.
The changes wrought by Vatican II were the most radical in Catholic life in centuries. The council decreed that the central act of worship, the Mass, could henceforth be celebrated in the language of the people rather than in Latin. Against centuries of tradition in heavily Catholic countries, it declared for freedom of religious belief without interference from the state. Along with greater social concern, the council urged work toward unity with other Christians and closer relations with Jews. There was to be a greater involvement of the laity in church worship and work.
In terms of the authority of the hierarchy, however, Vatican II decrees were essentially conservative. They enhanced the role of bishops in governing along with the Pope in accordance with "collegiality." They continued to declare that in matters of faith and morals, members were to show "religious submission of mind and will" to their bishops and especially to the Pope. The old magisterial structure emerged substantially intact, although harsh abuses in the exercise of authority were to be eliminated.
John XXIII, who called the council, was succeeded by Pope Paul VI (1963-78), who completed its work, implemented its decrees and then suffered in anguish while the church seemed to begin eroding at the edges. Legions of priests and nuns in the West quit their vocations. Paul's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, reaffirming the church's ban on artificial contraception, was attacked by theologians and largely ignored by married Catholics. Says Neoconservative British Author Paul Johnson: "The fear grew that there was no tenet of the faith of ordinary Catholics that was now immune to reinterpretation . . . or indeed outright abandonment."
When Pope Paul's successor, John Paul I, died after only 33 days in office, the Cardinals' second conclave of 1978 produced a surprising choice for the papacy: Poland's Karol Wojtyla, who took the name John Paul II. He was something new to the church. A onetime actor and factory hand who had dated women before discovering his priestly vocation, he wrote poetry and loved skiing and folk singing. Above all, he had the presence of a religious superstar, and his magnetism attracted not only Catholics but millions who did not share his faith.
To be sure, some Catholics were quick to notice limitations. Although the Pope comes from bourgeois stock, he is, says Chicago Sociologist William McCready, something of a "peasant intellectual Pope. He understands the life of a peasant, whether in the Third World countries or European countries like Poland. But he doesn't understand urbanized, pluralistic societies." Sister Amelie Starkey, an archdiocesan official in Denver, says that the Pope's Polish anti-Communism gives him a "horrendous bias."
Within John Paul, there is unquestionably a fierce, determined belief in the lessons learned from his early life. During the days of Hitler and the Stalinists, the young Polish priest concluded that the church is strong only when individualism makes way for the requirements of unity. Indeed, Catholicism has thrived in Poland as in few other places, making its church both inspiring and atypical.
Early in his pontificate, a new Vatican strategy took shape. Unlike the cautious, introspective Paul VI, John Paul decided to strengthen his authority over his flock, and he was unafraid to apply punitive sanctions when necessary. He laid out crystal-clear lines. The ordination of women was beyond discussion. Priests and nuns must get out of political office. Religious orders must regain lost discipline. Bishops were expected to uphold Rome's policies. Meanwhile, a re-energized Curia began questioning theologians who strayed too far from official teaching. Disillusionment has been building ever since among progressive Catholics who want a more flexible church. Swiss Theologian Father Hans Kung, an early target of the papal crackdown, charges that "a new phase of Inquisition" has begun. Says Kung: "The present Pope suppresses problems instead of solving them." One renowned U.S. commentator on the Vatican, Redemptorist Father Francis X. Murphy, pronounces this Pope "very dictatorial." Some Protestant ecumenists say the papacy does not look as attractive as it used to in the decade or so after Vatican II.
On the other end of the ideological spectrum, however, there is celebration. James McFadden, editor of New York's scrappy, right-wing Catholic Eye, says that under Pope Paul VI "the realization that the leadership wasn't there led many conservative Catholics not to give up, but to cease fighting. These people have been reinvigorated by this Pope. They believe that something can be done." Encouraged by the new signals emanating from the Pope, conservative Catholics have flooded the Vatican with letters of complaint about all manner of alleged infractions by U.S. bishops, priests and sisters.
Some moderates worry about the impact of the conservative lobbying. Says one Italian theologian: "Even if the Pope does not intend it, certain actions encourage conservatives who have been waiting 20 years to roll back the effects of the council. This creates a climate of anxiety and distrust." Vatican observers say that in his own mind, John Paul is totally a man of Vatican II. Yet he does insist upon holding to the letter of what the council said, despite liberals who contend that the "spirit" of the council inspires openness to further changes not specifically endorsed by it. Confusion over this point is precisely the reason the Pope called next fall's special synod.
In the face of criticism that the Pope is turning back the clock to precouncil days, one of his closest advisers declares that this is a misinterpretation of papal aims. John Paul, says this observer, looks to the future, viewing his mandate in terms of three core concepts. They are integrality, identity and clarity: the integrality of the Christian message; the identity of the priests and nuns who present it; and, above all, clarity that will let everyone know exactly what the church stands for.
Integrality is a concept that explains what to some is a paradox in John Paul's vision of the church's mission. One common interpretation categorizes the Pope as liberal on social issues but conservative on doctrine. Says a close Vatican adviser: "Such talk is totally incomprehensible to Pope John Paul. To him, Christian doctrine is one unified whole, a package deal that doesn't break down into social and theological, this-worldly and otherworldly. There is a social message in the Eucharist, just as there is a doctrinal basis for social action. In fact, he sees the Eucharist as the primary social action, a moment when all people are unified with each other and with Christ, when division and class struggle are impossible."
The second of John Paul's concepts, identity, explains his concern about restoring firmer discipline among priests and sisters, and distinguishing their role from that of the laity. One of his first decisions as Pope was to tighten up on official approval of requests to leave the priesthood, a process known as laicization. He quickly followed with a worldwide letter to priests stating that celibacy is a lifelong commitment. Turning to priests in religious orders, the Pope reproved the leader of the Jesuits, the largest and most influential of male orders, because its members were too frequently challenging church policy. He later installed his own temporary administration at Jesuit headquarters. Though the order is on its own again, it is not yet clear how much new Superior General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach will bend the society to the papal will. John Paul's strictures do not seem to have discouraged vocations: six years ago the worldwide total of candidates for the priesthood was 61,000; in 1982 it had risen to 73,000.
All of John Paul's actions are part of a strategy leading toward a high- profile identity for priests, brothers, sisters and nuns (in technical usage, nuns are a distinct category of sisters who take solemn vows). Explains one Vatican staff member: "You wonder why a man would bother to take holy orders if he is going to do the same job he could do as a layman." Rome has ordered a study of all U.S. seminaries, and a principal reason for this, says the Vatican source, is to guarantee that these institutions "are not turning out psychiatrists and social workers in collars." For similar reasons Rome, concerned that women's orders could vanish if sisters appear little different from laywomen, is investigating the orders in the U.S. and requiring distinctive garb and community life.
The same principle explains the Pope's controversial demand that priests and sisters give up political careers. The effects in North America: Jesuit Father Robert Drinan of Massachusetts left the U.S. Congress; Father Bob Ogle is no longer a member of the Canadian Parliament; and, in a reverse decision, Sister Arlene Violet decided to quit her order to serve as Rhode Island's new attorney general.
Some critics accuse John Paul of undercutting his own call for social justice by limiting the roles of priests, brothers and sisters. Others say that he seems to be applying a double standard, in light of the church's active political role in Poland. He believes he is consistent, however, in wanting bishops and priests to preach social justice. It is probable that never before has Catholicism been so engaged in this crusade as under John Paul, who continually hammers away at the themes of peace, poverty and human rights.
On the other hand, as the Pope understands Vatican II, the church should let the laity work out policy details and fill public offices. The Pope has praised and encouraged lay organizations that attempt to put Catholic ideals into practice in everyday life. Two of his conservative favorites are Opus Dei, a tightly disciplined international organization of 74,000, and Comunione e Liberazione, a less structured group with about 60,000 adherents in Italy and growing numbers in Europe and Latin America.
Clarity, the third theme, may be the most important. John Paul seems determined to make it plain that there should be unquestioning allegiance where basic church doctrine is concerned, which critics see as a denial of intellectual freedom. Asks the Rev. Richard McBrien, chairman of Notre Dame's theology department: "Are we back to book bannings, blacklistings, suspensions, expulsions and even excommunications?"
To the Pope, the important question is, rather, whether the church's teachings are accurately presented and clearly understood by the laity. Says a person who often chats informally with John Paul: "The Pope believes that the youth of today demand a crystal-clear presentation of the Christian message and resent it when their bishops try to accommodate them by watering down that message." New York Archbishop John O'Connor says that in appointing bishops, John Paul looks first and foremost for "a very clear articulation of church teaching."
This expectation extends to theologians. The dissenting Hans Kung, who has questioned the personal infallibility of the Pope, among other dogmas, has been denied the right to teach as a Catholic theologian, though he remains a priest and is still a professor at the University of Tubingen in West Germany. John Paul combats the radical strains of Latin America's liberation theology, even while endorsing some of the terminology, because he believes Marxist concepts like the class struggle conflict with the message of the church. One liberationist, Brazil's Leonardo Boff, has been asked to justify his views.
One long-running dispute between Rome and a dissenting theologian has resulted in a partial settlement. The subject: Belgian Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx's 1980 book, Ministry, which argued on historical grounds for a more democratic church that to some looked suspiciously like Protestantism. The Vatican announced in January that in his next book the liberal theologian will declare support for the church's teaching that only validly ordained priests can celebrate the Mass. Schillebeeckx insists he is not retracting his views under Vatican pressure; he simply changed his mind. In the ongoing quest for clarity, perhaps the most controversial aspect since Vatican II has been the family and personal morality, particularly the stricture against birth control. Last year John Paul drove home this teaching in a series of weekly sermons delivered at his general audiences in Rome. The widespread rejection of that papal view by lay Catholics in Western nations is the most glaring instance of what U.S. gadfly Priest Andrew Greeley calls the arrival of the "do-it-yourself Catholic." Father Charles Curran of the Catholic University of America, a frequent critic of the birth-control tenet, could well be the next theologian summoned to Rome for questioning. Curran says only that he is "in correspondence" with the Vatican. John Paul is not budging on other issues. In his 1979 U.S. tour and since, he has condemned abortion, divorce and remarriage, homosexuality and all sexual activity outside marriage.
Opposition to abortion, a burning issue in the U.S., is one of the most deeply held commitments in Catholic tradition. There was consternation when 28 , U.S. sisters, priests and brothers signed a New York Times advertisement that countered what the ad called the "mistaken belief" that the abortion stance of the Popes and bishops "is the only legitimate Catholic position." The Vatican response: Retract or face expulsion.
The Catholic condemnation of homosexual behavior underlies Archbishop O'Connor's resistance to a New York City executive order demanding that the archdiocese, as a contractor receiving city funds for child care, must pledge nondiscrimination against homosexuals. The church hires "homosexually inclined" people, O'Connor says, but wants the right to do so on a "case-by- case basis, to find out whether an individual would be able to operate in a Catholic agency within the strictures of Catholic teaching."
In asserting control over doctrine and discipline, John Paul's Vatican often runs up against a striving toward more freedom for local and national expressions of Catholicism. In Africa's churches, problems involving the inculturation of Christianity range from the kind of dancing and drumming to permit during Mass to ways of dealing with polygamy. If Vatican officials have trouble with Latin America, says Simon E. Smith, an American Jesuit missionary, "they will be infinitely less able to understand and accept the developments under way in Africa." He warns, "Excessive interference in legitimate and responsible inculturation projects could provoke schism." For the most part, Rome so far has gingerly handled the young African churches, whose growth rate is among the fastest in the world.
In the U.S., progressive Catholics tend to talk about disagreements with Rome in terms of their own democratic culture. They demand civil rights within the church, often sounding like "Don't Tread on Me" revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the rule of Europe. Says Sister Monica Asman (known as "the mosquito nun" because she teaches entomology at the University of California at Berkeley): "In Rome they don't understand us as Americans, that we have democratic roots." The untitled leader of the U.S. hierarchy, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, handles the question of national vs. universal Catholicism rather cautiously: "I think the American experience is very important and that the church can learn from us--and we can learn from the rest of the church too."
A difficult challenge to Rome on the autonomy issue has arisen in The Netherlands, which John Paul will visit next May. For many years the bishops there followed a live-and-let-live policy, as activists in the parishes tested liturgical novelties, ignored Vatican dictates on matters like interfaith communion and called for married priests. A close adviser to John Paul calls it "our worst-case scenario in Western Europe. A whole generation has been lost there." But there has been a recent slowdown in dissent, he thinks, and the Pope's activism is the reason. Meanwhile, the Pope has appointed several conservative bishops who have called a halt to much of the experimentation. One result of the clampdown, however, is that large numbers of liberal Dutch Catholics are so discouraged that they do not bother to deal with the official church any more, much less attack it. An influential progressive, Ton Crijnen of the Catholic weekly De Tijd, says, "Young people are turning away from the Catholic Church in huge numbers. The church has split down to its foundation."
Since Vatican II, national bishops' conferences have gained considerable power, coming to share the role of mediation and communication with Rome that was formerly played exclusively by the Vatican's diplomats. Some U.S. bishops are privately wary of the accumulating power of the hierarchy's national agencies, while liberals say that Vatican officials prefer to deal with individual bishops, rather than with a more powerful national phalanx.
The American bishops have had to fight a series of minibattles with Rome over liturgical details. Last year, in one decision dealing with worship, one Roman congregation appeared to violate Vatican II's concept of collegiality. This was the decision to allow a carefully restricted use of the traditional, or Tridentine, Latin Mass, which was suppressed after the council. The decision went against the preference of 98% of the bishops, according to a worldwide survey.
Despite these marginal squabbles, the Mass remains, as always, the powerful unifying center of Catholic life. Says Gerald Costello, editor of Catholic New York: "I think the average Catholic is very impatient with all these debates. He's much more concerned with his church as a place of worship: 'I want to be inspired. I want to be reassured. I want instruction. I want a place to pray.' "
In light of that, there are significant revelations in an ongoing large-scale study by the University of Notre Dame of 1,100 American parishes two decades after the Vatican Council. More than 85% of respondents in the survey felt & that their own parish did a good job in meeting their spiritual needs. A hefty 24% of the adult laity were involved in Bible studies, catechism classes or spiritual renewal and prayer groups. Most accepted the changes in the Mass. On the other hand, Gallup polls show that only 51% of U.S. Catholics attend Mass in a typical week, down from 74% in 1958. And the situation is far worse in parts of Western Europe (30% in West Germany, 20% in France).
The challenges are huge, but in the effort to solve the controversies of his far-flung dominion and give it a sense of direction and purpose, John Paul can employ not only his personal gifts but also considerable institutional powers. "In the Roman Catholic system, it's very hard in the end to buck the Pope," says Dale Vree, editor of the conservative New Oxford Review, and a convert from the latitudinarian world of the Episcopal Church.
In fact, Catholic canon law and tradition give great potential authority to the Pope. To help apply his program, John Paul has gradually been building a Vatican Curia with a core of tough disciplinarians who will play a key role in future events. Remarks one Vatican observer: "If the Pope wants an iron hand, he's got the team that will provide it."
Without doubt the most influential man in John Paul's Curia is Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, 57, the German-born prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pope's theological watchdog. Though Ratzinger and John Paul are not close personally, they see eye to eye on theological orthodoxy, and the Pope respects the onetime professor's intellectual skills. Extremely hard working, articulate and reserved, Ratzinger was a progressive adviser at Vatican II. Disillusioned with its aftermath, he turned conservative, and now says, "Not all valid councils have proven, when tested by the facts of history, to have been useful."
In a reshuffle in the Vatican last year, John Paul installed two other key hard-liners. Jean Jerome Hamer, 68, a Belgian, was dubbed "the Hammer" during his years as No. 2 man at the doctrinal congregation. He was John Paul's choice to replace the indulgent Eduardo Cardinal Pironio and keep a tight rein on the congregation that supervises religious orders. Hamer, now enmeshed in the crucial test of wills with U.S. nuns over the abortion issue, is deemed by some leading sisters to be uncommunicative and insensitive toward women. Augustin Mayer, 73, a German workaholic, was for years the top aide to Pironio, handling the tough jobs that his boss had little stomach for. He now runs the congregation that regulates liturgy and the sacraments.
Silvio Cardinal Oddi, 74, the Italian member of the in group, runs the congregation that deals with priests not in religious orders, managing, for instance, the crackdown against priests in politics. Affable and highly conservative, he is a friend of John Paul's; the Pope enjoys his dry humor and no-nonsense air. Another Italian, Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, 70, is nominally the Pope's top aide, but has little influence on internal church affairs: he is now largely restricted to temporal and diplomatic matters, in which the Pope recognizes his supple mastery.
Besides his Vatican appointments, of course, the Pope names all new bishops, and, says one of the leading figures among the U.S. bishops, "He's trying to change the makeup of the hierarchies so he will have more control." Some liberals question whether papal authority can be so easily imposed. Father Greeley points out that U.S. Catholics no longer constitute an immigrant culture, and are far more likely to attend college than are Americans as a whole. Says he: "The American hierarchy and the Vatican simply haven't realized that we have a well-educated population out there whom you cannot coerce or talk down to." Joseph Pichler, an active lay Catholic and president of a retailing chain, agrees: "People won't stand for getting nailed any more. The risk the Pope runs is that in exercising his authority, he may lose it. People will quietly engage in spiritual disobedience."
Still, it is obvious that John Paul sees no choice but to clarify and unify the church's public voice and preserve its heritage, although it is not certain what further disciplinary measures he might impose to achieve that goal. Like most previous Popes, he is planning strategy not for tomorrow but for the centuries. His church has experienced persecution, wars, internal venality and schism, and yet survived and thrived. It is quite possible that John Paul II, who is only 64, will see Catholicism into the third millennium, a calendar point to which he often refers. He looks to that day mindful of the words of Jesus Christ to St. Peter that the powers of death and hell will not prevail against the church, and convinced that his own program of consolidation will help to secure that promise.
çãçõçéááCover StoryThe Conquest of RomeTHE STEALTH CAMPAIGN FOR RATZINGER BEGAN 18 MONTHS AGO. AN INSIDE LOOK AT HOW HE WONBy
JEFF ISRAELYçãçõçéááMay. 2, 2005
In the days before the conclave, almost every Cardinal who deigned to speak to the press declared that he was praying to the Holy Spirit for guidance in choosing the successor to John Paul II. The Holy Spirit's efforts in this particular case began 18 months ago, with a stealth campaign that in the end transfigured an unpalatable candidate into the inevitable Pontiff, turning Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany into Pope Benedict XVI. The momentum, orchestrated by key Curia Cardinals, was such that a last-ditch attempt by liberals to derail it petered out after the first round of voting. "They didn't realize how strong Ratzinger was," says an aide to a Cardinal who almost certainly did not vote for the German. "The reformers have been out of touch with this growing tide around Ratzinger."
Back in October 2003, as a litany of papabili, or potential candidates, was intoned by the press amid one of John Paul II's health crises, Ratzinger wasn't mentioned at all. The favorite was an Italian, Dionigi Cardinal Tettamanzi of Milan. Even though Ratzinger was dean of the College of Cardinals, many saw him as past his prime. Moreover, his work as John Paul's ideological enforcer had made him a divisive figure in the church. "He had fallen off the radar," says a Curia official. But something was afoot that October. A Cardinal in the Curia, in conversation with another Vatican official, suddenly said, "I like Ratzinger's chances." Surprised at the time, the official now says, "Getting elected Pope is more a question of how many enemies you have than friends. And I thought Ratzinger still had too many enemies."
But John Paul, in spite of his ailments, was attending to that problem. In October 2003 he would not only persevere to celebrate his 25th anniversary as Pope but also forge ahead with an exhausting ceremony to install a new batch of Cardinals. By the time of his death, he had appointed 115 of the 117 Cardinals eligible to vote, stacking the college with men who were more likely to want to continue his conservative policies. Just as important, in the ensuing months most of the influential Cardinals of liberal stripe would pass the voting age limit of 80. The only one of stature left to rally wavering Cardinals to the liberal cause was Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini. But his clout was limited. In 2002 the Pope had allowed the ailing Martini to leave his power base in Milan to pursue his love of biblical scholarship in faraway Jerusalem. The Pope, on the other hand, refused to let Ratzinger give up his bureaucratic jobs in the Curia.
By the end of 2003, instead of being exhausted by work, Ratzinger appeared to have been rejuvenated. Not only did he keep on publishing books and papers, but he also became more audible as a conservative voice in European and global affairs. He became particularly visible in Italy, which was expressing some nostalgia for an Italian papacy after years of a Polish Pope. Ratzinger wrote several articles for major Italian papers. "All of a sudden last year," said a senior Vatican official, "he had become the darling of the [conservative] Italian intelligentsia."
In the first week of January 2005, hints that Ratzinger was a front runner hit the press. "The Ratzinger solution is definitely on," TIME quoted a well-placed Vatican insider. "There was a stigma. He rises above that now." But even then, many others found the idea unbelievable. "I thought the window was closing because of his age," says a Vatican official. If John Paul had lived two more years, says the official, Ratzinger "would have disappeared from the horizon."
In February, John Paul was admitted to the hospital. And as the church focused once again on potential successors, something close to a papal campaign debate took place. Ratzinger and Tettamanzi attended a funeral in Milan for the founder of Communion and Liberation, a powerful conservative Catholic lay movement. Without notes, Ratzinger delivered an inspiring eulogy and received enthusiastic applause. Tettamanzi, who presided over the service as the local Cardinal, read his remarks and, according to a supporter of the Milanese prelate, left the crowd cold.
For Ratzinger, it was a critical time to appear strong and confident--and he got several opportunities to bolster such an image. For Good Friday, with John Paul near death, Ratzinger wrote the text for the closely watched reading of the Stations of the Cross. His daring language on the need to cleanse the church of "filth"--an apparent reference to the sex-abuse scandals plaguing the priesthood--startled some but was applauded by many looking for strength as John Paul's ebbed. Without having to claim as much, Ratzinger appeared to be the man in charge.
When the Cardinals arrived from around the world for John Paul's funeral, they naturally turned to the Cardinals of the Curia for advice and intelligence on who should replace him. "It's a fact that most Cardinals don't know most other Cardinals--not well, anyway, and not personally," says a priest close to Ratzinger. "The way they get to know each other is in Rome. And how do they get to know each other? They tend to ask the Curia Cardinals." And the person everyone wanted to meet was Ratzinger.
He made himself available to share his views. "My voice is tired because I've been talking all week," Ratzinger said on April 16, the Saturday before the conclave, as he stopped by his office so his staff could celebrate his 78th birthday. (They sang Ave Maria in rondo to mark the anniversary.) "His voice was almost gone," said Monsignor Gerald Cadieres, a Venezuelan who worked for him. For days, Ratzinger had been impressing visiting Cardinals by speaking in German, French, English, Italian and Spanish. It was like nonstop town-hall meetings in a U.S. political campaign--with this caveat: no one is allowed to campaign. One observer describes the pro-Ratzinger maneuvers not as politics but as attempts to change the "mood" of the conclave.
Still, like any good campaigner, he was center stage at every turn--at John Paul's funeral; at the first of the novemdiales Masses, held on the nine days after the Pope's funeral; as chairman of the Cardinals' daily congregation meetings; at the preconclave Mass. Were they all required appearances? Apparently, the novemdiales Mass did not necessarily have to be celebrated by Ratzinger. He was also under no obligation to deliver such substantial homilies. "Ratzinger seems to have grabbed the ball and run with it for two weeks," remarked an experienced Vaticanologist. A Ratzinger supporter put it in more pious terms: "Some inner fire was lit, like God had chosen him."
And then, on the Monday of the conclave, he delivered a homily that effectively acknowledged his candidacy, making it plain that he would not compromise his ideals to gain votes. It was a gauntlet thrown down before would-be challengers and a rallying cry for supporters. "What was he doing issuing a whole program for the future of the church?" asked an aide to a liberal Cardinal. "That should have been a moment for the dean of Cardinals to reflect on the spiritual process they were about to enter, not lay out his visions." Ratzinger's supporters saw it otherwise. "It's not that he wanted the job. He didn't," said one. "But his brother Cardinals saw him leading an important Mass. Watching him, there was something that had changed, almost like he had already ascended to a new level."
If the liberals arrived in Rome not truly believing Ratzinger was a viable candidate, they did now. Cardinal Martini had tried to organize a countermovement, and as the electors entered the conclave on Monday afternoon, the consensus was that two camps would be pitted against each other: the conservatives around Ratzinger and a group behind Martini. But Martini, who is suffering from Parkinson's disease, was hoping only to blunt Ratzinger's momentum to give other less conservative Cardinals a chance to gather support.
The biblical scholar managed a good showing in the first round of balloting, but Ratzinger was already solidly ahead. The rest of the votes were spread among several Italians and, according to one voting Cardinal, several ballots were left blank. By evening, it was clear that no one was going to be able to step in for Martini.
Not even Ratzinger's younger conservative rivals could put up a fight. Tettamanzi, bested in eloquence on his home turf, reportedly managed only two votes. And the Italians never coalesced around another countryman. Indeed, while analysts at the time focused on the bloc-voting potential of the 20 eligible Italian Cardinals and how it might portend an Italian Pope, few noticed that the bloc had a fissure and that nine of those Cardinals were members of the Curia--well within Ratzinger's sphere of influence. A senior Vatican official notes, "What lifted him over the threshold were the Italians. If he got it in four ballots, it means the Italians were on board." An Italian member of the Curia, Camillo Cardinal Ruini, the vicar of Rome, is believed to have ridden herd on the pro-Ratzinger Cardinals as they gathered. One Cardinal elector said many of the 20-member Latin American bloc closely aligned with the German's traditionalist stance arrived intent on getting Ratzinger elected.
By Tuesday, Martini, who does not dislike Ratzinger personally, withdrew his candidacy and might have even thrown his support to him. Liberals who could not stomach that option reportedly swung over to Buenos Aires' Jesuit Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio in an anyone-but-Ratzinger move, though several sources said the Argentine was himself aligned with the German. But the second balloting saw Ratzinger reach 60 votes. By the third, he was just shy of the 77 required for the papacy. By the fourth, he had won 95 out of 115. Liberal stalwarts left grumbling. "A good conclave is one where there are at least two candidates deadlocked," says a liberal supporter disappointed by the process. "A bad conclave is where there's one dominant figure. That was the case this time."
The liberals were simply outorganized by the Curia. "The ease of Ratzinger's victory was proof of just how compact and well prepared the Roman nucleus was," a Cardinal elector told TIME. The conservatives could also say it was answered prayer and proof of the intervention of the Holy Spirit. In the Sistine Chapel, as the tally went over the required two-thirds, "there was a gasp all around," Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor of Britain recalled in a press conference. Ratzinger, he said, "had his head down. He must have been saying a prayer." When Jorge Cardinal Arturo Medina Estevez--who would announce the election to the world from the balcony of St. Peter's--asked Ratzinger what name he would assume, the Pontiff-elect did not hesitate. "In the past, there's been a wait while the new Pope pondered the question for 10 minutes or so," says an informed source. "Not so this time. Ratzinger replied right away, 'Benedict XVI.' He was prepared." --With reporting by Jordan Bonfante and Giancarlo Zizola/ Rome and Howard Chua-Eoan/ New York
Cover Story
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Photographs for TIME by Michael Grecco
From the Magazine Person of the Year
Time's Person of the Year: You
In 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matterBy
LEV GROSSMANSUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHORFrom the Editor:
Now It's Your TurnPosted Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2006The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.
To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.
And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.
And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.
America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious. From the Dec. 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine
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BRITISHPRIMEMINISTERSTONYBLAIR
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USPRESIDENTSGeraldFord
Thursday, Jan. 11, 2007
Fatherland. Socialism — or death. I swear it. I swear by Christ — the greatest socialist in history.
HUGOCHAVEZVenezuela
— Hugo Chavez
on being sworn in for a third term as Venezuela's President
Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007
BRITISHPRIMEMINISTERSTONYBLAIR
So the crimes that Saddam committed does not excuse the manner of his execution, but the manner of his execution does not excuse the crimes.
— British prime minister Tony Blair
condemning Saddam Hussein's execution
AlQaeda
Al-Qaeda Leader Reported Killed in Somalia Was "Close to the Top"
Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007 By
BRIAN BENNETT/WASHINGTONFazul Abdullah Mohammed, a suspected terrorist wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies Tanzania and Nairobi, is shown in a photo released by the FBI.
FBI / Getty
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If early reports are correct that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was killed in Tuesday's air strike in Somalia, al-Qaeda will have lost a key operative in East Africa — and with him the years of nurturing and expertise invested in cultivating a kingpin.
The portrait of Mohammed that emerges from U.S. intelligence sources and courtroom documents suggests he was personally groomed by Osama bin Laden, and was one of the key planners of the 1998 simultaneous bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. On the morning of August 7, 1998, he drove the lead truck to the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. The resulting blast killed 224 including 12 Americans. Mohammed, who had been responsible for the basic logistics of the attack, such as renting the apartment to mix explosives and having it cleaned, escaped to his native Comoros Islands off the coast of Mozambique.
Bolstered by the success of his role in the embassy bombings, Mohammed remained in Africa and is believed to have become a leader of al-Qaeda's operations in Somalia, say officials. "It is a very significant event if he's been captured or killed," says Mary Jo White, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who indicted Mohammed along with Osama bin Laden and 19 others in absentia in 2000 for the embassy bombings. "He's close to top leadership of al-Qaeda."
He worked his way up into bin Laden's circle from the bottom. Mohammed was a teenager when he started down the jihadi path, leaving his family home in the impoverished Comoros at age 16 to study on a Saudi-sponsored scholarship at a religious school in Pakistan. Within a year, in 1991, he was training at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, learning urban warfare and counter-surveillance tactics. In 1993, when Osama bin Laden turned his attention to Africa, Mohammed was sent to Somalia to train local tribesmen to fight the United Nations intervention there.
He soon established himself as a guy who could get things done for bin Laden. According to the U.S. indictment, he hid sensitive papers for operatives, hand-delivered cash from Bin Laden to other parts of Africa and, in May 1996, traveled to Lake Victoria to investigate the death of an al-Qaeda military commander who died in a ferry accident, with instructions to report back directly to bin Laden.
After his indictment in 2000, says White, the U.S. government hoped to capture Mohammed alive, believing he could provide valuable information on al-Qaeda's structure in Africa. There were a "few times," says White, between 2000 and 2002 when "we had pretty good leads, but he escaped."
With his decade-long connections to Somali tribes, Mohammed is believed to have been al-Qaeda's key liaison with the Islamic Courts Union, which took control of Mogadishu and much of Somalia in the summer, but which was recently scattered by an Ethiopian invasion. The Pentagon is not confirming if Mohammed's body has been identified after the strike. "If he's dead, I'm glad," said an an official of the FBI, which lists Mohammed as one of its most wanted terrorists.
"He is an important person to capture or kill," says White, "for the vindication of the victims" of the embassy bombings. His death, says White, would mean "taking out of circulation someone who is very dangerous to have walking around in the world."
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Add RSS FeedGerald R. Ford, 1913–2007 Learn about America's leader in the post-Nixon era at Biography.com®.
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1.
Racist murder or suicide? New mayor's death roils town (01.06.2007) In the hours before his death on the evening of December 30, the first black mayor of this overwhelmingly white town started learning his new job.
2.
Mayo Clinic: Elder Bush has second hip replaced (01.04.2007) Former President George H.W. Bush is "resting comfortably" after having his right hip replaced at the Mayo Clinic, the facility announced Thursday.
3.
Week of January 1 (01.04.2007) January 5, 2007
4.
First day of new Congress, Review of year's first headlines (01.04.2007) January 5, 2007
5.
UK teen breaks transatlantic record, Hindus gather at the Ganges (01.03.2007) January 4, 2007
6.
Former President Ford lauded, laid to rest (01.03.2007) The body of former President Gerald Ford ended its sentimental journey Wednesday afternoon in Grand Rapids, where his body was placed in a hillside tomb as the sun declined in the cloudless winter sky.
7.
Wednesday, January 3 (01.03.2007) WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The leaders of the new Democratic majority in the House will kick off their tenure Thursday with new rules designed to rein in the influence of lobbyists, limit free travel by members and make it harder for lawmakers to slip their pet projects into spending bills unnoticed.
8.
Former President Ford: Your memories (01.02.2007) Since former President Gerald Ford's death on December 26 at the age of 93, CNN.com has received hundreds of e-mails from readers sharing their memories and personal experiences with the nation's 38th president.
9.
Cheers greet police indicted in New Orleans bridge shootings (01.02.2007) Seven policemen charged in a deadly bridge shooting in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina turned themselves in Tuesday at the city jail, where more than 200 emotional supporters met them in a show of solidarity.
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Euro hits record peak against yen (01.02.2007) The euro rose to a record peak against the Japanese yen and a near seven-year high versus the Swiss franc on Tuesday as hunger for rising yields looked to be setting the tone for early 2007.
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Americans remember Gerald Ford, Iraqis react to Hussein's deathFirst Up: Remembering Gerald FordLLOYD: Thousands of Americans filed through the rotunda at the U.S. Capitol over the weekend to pay their respects to a renowned American leader. Former President Gerald Ford passed away on December 26th at age 93. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was the country's longest-living president. And though his time in office was relatively short, his impact remains. John King takes us on a walk through memories of a man who helped heal a country.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN KING, CNN REPORTER: It was, by his own design, Gerald Ford's last day in Washington, began in the rotunda of the House. to remember a man is to retrace his steps in history. And the gentleman from Michigan served here for a quarter century.
FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH: I watched here from the back bench, the political ally and adversary alike, Jerry Ford's word was always good. To know Jerry was to know a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.
KING: Across the capitol to the Senate. Vice Presidents also serve as presidents of the Senate. It was not a job he wanted.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: When President Nixon needed to replace a Vice President who had resigned in scandal, he naturally turned to a man whose name was a synonym for integrity: Gerald R. Ford.
KING: He was vice president just eight short months. Son Steve wiping a tear before retracing his father's most important steps. Down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.
HENRY KISSINGER, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: Propelled into the presidency by a sequence of unpredictable events, he had an impact so profound, it's rightly to be considered providential.
KING: In Washington's majestic National Cathedral, they gathered to remember the unassuming son of a broken family who held a nation together after its president resigned in disgrace.
BUSH: And when he thought the nation should put Watergate behind us, he made the tough and decent decision to pardon President Nixon, even though that decision probably cost him the presidential election.
KING: Just 2 and half years in the Oval Office, but days of considerable consequence, surviving the stain of Watergate and the humiliation of defeat in Vietnam.
FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH: For this and so much more, his presidency will be remembered as a time of healing in our land. History has a way of matching man and moment.
KING: Mr. Ford's impact hardly ended when he left the White House. Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are among the many old Ford hands who have had major roles in the current administration. Humor was one of Mr. Ford's best political tools and this self-deprecating man would have enjoyed one more laugh at his expense.
FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH: "I know I'm playing better golf," President Ford once relayed to friends. "Because I'm hitting fewer spectators."
KING: And after a few last steps, and "Hail to the Chief" in a blustery breeze, what he would have cherished most: his beloved Betty looking on, making sure he was settled in comfortably for the final trip home.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Fast Facts
CARL AZUZ, CNN STUDENT NEWS: Time for some Fast Facts! The scandal known as Watergate started in 1972, when five burglars were arrested for breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington's Watergate Hotel. President Richard Nixon denied having anything to do with it, but it later became clear that he was involved in a cover-up of the scandal. The House of Representatives moved to impeach Nixon, and he resigned on August 8th, 1974, insisting he had never broken the law.
Calm After The Storm
LLOYD: Richard Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign from office. So in 1974, Gerald Ford -- who had once said he had no intention to run for president -- found himself serving as just that. And he had an exceptionally tough task ahead: To heal a skeptical and angry country. Jeanne Meserve tells us how Ford's first major move to do that, actually might've cost him a full four year term in office.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON (archive footage): I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
JEANNE MESERVE, CNN REPORTER: Watergate was this nation's Shakespearian tragedy. Richard Nixon left the White House but, like Hamlet's ghost, he haunted the country...strewing division, distrust, disillusionment. With one dramatic, politically perilous move his successor, Gerald Ford, hoped to move the country past it.
FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT GERALD FORD: Do grant, a full, free and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States.
MESERVE: But the pardon...sprung suddenly on a Sunday morning just one month after Ford took office...did not heal the country. To the contrary, some of the anger which had been focused on Nixon...was redirected at Ford himself.
YANEK MIECZKOWSKI, AUTHOR: It lead to suspicious that Ford had somehow colluded with Richard Nixon and it tainted what had become Ford's stock in trade during the first month of his president...which was here was a man from the Midwest of decent values who could restore integrity to the Oval Office.
MESERVE: Ford maintained that there was never any deal that Nixon would make him president exchange for a pardon. But nonetheless Ford's action triggered a plunge in his approval rating. Overnight it plummeted from 71 percent to fifty. And it contributed to his loss of the presidency to Jimmy Carter in 1976.
But Ford never voiced any regret about the pardon....which came to define his presidency.
FORD: It was my principle responsibility to restore integrity in the White House and to bring about healing in the country. I have no question that it was the right thing to do then, and I am more certain today.
MESERVE: And today most historians agree. Ford famously called Watergate...a national nightmare. With his pardon of Richard Nixon, some say he allowed the country to dream again. Jeanne Meserve, CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Is this Legit?
AZUZ: Is This Legit? Gerald Ford was the only president who was never elected to the presidency or the vice presidency. True. President Nixon appointed Ford to replace Vice President Spiro Agnew; when Nixon later resigned, Ford became president.
Promo
LLOYD: A college football player, a U.S. Navy serviceman, a boxing coach, and a Yale University law school grad: Gerald Ford was all of them. For everything from a biography to a gallery of ford's life, head to our CNN.com special report. We've put a link at CNN.com/EDUCATION.
Saddam Hussein's ExecutionLLOYD: Former Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein was buried on Sunday. It was a milestone in a war that began almost four years ago to remove him from power. Hussein was found guilty last year for committing crimes against humanity, and he was executed on Saturday. Teachers, you may want to preview this segment. John Lorinc reports on how some Iraqis responded.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN LORINC, CNN REPORTER: Sunni prayers marked the burial of Iraq's former president Sunday just outside his hometown of Tikrit. The mood in the streets over the weekend was tense, with protesters loudly calling Hussein a hero and a martyr. The scene was in stark contrast to the jubilant reaction among Shi'ite Iraqis, many of whom lost members of their own family to the wrath of the brutal Hussein regime. There are still concerns over how Saddam's execution will affect overall security in Iraq, where staggering death tolls have become a daily occurrence. One member of the Iraqi government is hoping sensibility will prevail:
FEISAL ISTRABADI, DEPUTY PERMANENT REP. OF IRAQ TO U.N.: He was not the rallying cry for any of those who are carrying out acts of violence in Iraq today. I think he's seen very much as part of our, unfortunately, grim and tragic history.
LORINC: President Bush praised Iraqis for carrying out the proceedings against Hussein based on the rule of law, but also said that many sacrifices and difficult decisions lay ahead. I'm John Lorinc reporting from Atlanta.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Before We GoLLOYD: She's a star talk-show host who's met about every celebrity you can think of. And now, America's Oprah Winfrey is hoping she can change another country: South Africa. Yesterday, Winfrey opened a $ 40 million school for disadvantaged girls. Her aim is to give them a better education than they would've gotten otherwise, and to help them chase the same dreams you do. It's also the fulfillment of a promise Winfrey once made to former South African leader Nelson Mandela. Plans are now in the works for another school for both boys and girls.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEFF KOINANGE, CNN REPORTER: The fulfillment of a dream come true. At least, that's what U.S. talk show host Oprah Winfrey says as she opened her Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls here, outside Johannesburg. Set on 52 acres, and housing 28 buildings, everything from a library with a fireplace, a kitchen with marble tabletops, dormitories,audio visual center, a gym, tennis courts. You name it. Oprah spending more than 40 million dollars to make a dream come true and she says its a culmination of a promise she made more than half a decade ago.
OPRAH WINFREY, TALK SHOW HOST: This has been the most fulfilling, the most rewarding experience of my life. It has filled me up. So today I stand before you a full woman. My cup runneth over with love for these girls.
KOINANGE: And on hand, to help Oprah celebrate this day, Hollywood's A-list. from the movies and music industries. Everyone from Tina Turner, Maria Carey, Mary J. Blige Quincy Jones. Everyone from Chris Tucker to Chris Rock to Sydney Poitier and many, many more. But at the end of the day, Oprah says, it's not about the stars, it's about the girls, but mostly about the future of this country and this continent. Jeff Koinange, Henley-on-Klip, South Africa.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Goodbye
LLOYD: We hope you'll join us tomorrow, when CNN Student News returns. I'm Monica Lloyd.
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Administration sells troop buildup President Bush called for major changes in U.S. strategy in Iraq Wednesday night, saying, "The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people, and ...
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De Carlo, 'Munsters' star, deadInteractive FeatureSADDAMHUSSEINIRAQUE
Death of the Iraqi TyrantNeil MacFarquhar and John F. Burns report on the life and legacy of Saddam Hussein.
Interactive FeatureInteractive Feature: Hussein Sentenced to DeathJohn F. Burns reports on the scene in the courtroom as the former Iraqi leader was sentenced to death by hanging.
News, commentary and multimedia about Saddam Hussein from The New York Times.
Obituary: For 30 Years, a Terror to Iraq and Neighbors (December 30, 2006)
Readers' OpinionsReaders shared thoughts on the execution.
Related:
Iraq Complete Coverage: The Reach of War Qusay Hussein Uday HusseinPhotographs: Remembering the AttacksMany Kurds will have their first taste of retribution as the genocide trial against Saddam Hussein begins.
News, commentary and multimedia about Saddam Hussein from The New York Times.
Obituary: For 30 Years, a Terror to Iraq and Neighbors (December 30, 2006)
Readers' OpinionsReaders shared thoughts on the execution.
Related:
Iraq Complete Coverage: The Reach of War Qusay Hussein Uday HusseinGo to Timeline
ARTICLES ABOUT SADDAM HUSSEIN
Page: 1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next >>Newest First
Oldest FirstHussein’s Voice Speaks in Court in Praise of Chemical AtrocitiesBy JOHN F. BURNS
In recordings played in court, Saddam Hussein was heard justifying the use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds.
January 9, 2007 World News
MORE ON SADDAM HUSSEIN AND:
BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL WARFARE,
IRAQA New Video Posted on Web Shows Hussein After His DeathBy MARC SANTORA
The release of the video came as criticism of how Saddam Hussein was taunted as he stood on the gallows continued to reverberate.
January 9, 2007 World News
MORE ON SADDAM HUSSEIN AND:
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT,
RECORDINGS AND DOWNLOADS (VIDEO),
MALIKI, NURI KAMAL AL-,
BAATH PARTY,
IRAQHussein’s Voice Speaks in Court in Praise of AtrocitiesBy JOHN F. BURNS
In recordings played today in court, Saddam Hussein was heard justifying the use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds.
January 8, 2007 World News
MORE ON SADDAM HUSSEIN AND:
BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL WARFARE,
IRAQThe Timely Death of Gerald FordBy FRANK RICH
Our long national nightmare in Iraq, far from being over, is about to get a second wind.
January 7, 2007 Opinion Op-Ed
MORE ON SADDAM HUSSEIN AND:
UNITED STATES ARMAMENT AND DEFENSE,
UNITED STATES POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT,
FORD, GERALD RUDOLPH JR,
IRAQIn Days Before Hanging, a Push for Revenge and a Push Back From the U.S.By JOHN F. BURNS
Iraqi and American officials feuded over the execution of Saddam Hussein, and now they offer competing versions of what happened.
January 7, 2007 World News
MORE ON SADDAM HUSSEIN AND:
UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT,
IRAQTHE NATION; A Slim Guidebook for Executing a Deposed RulerBy MARY JO MURPHY
There’s more “honor” in a bullet than a rope, but history’s examples are few.
January 7, 2007 Week in Review News
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CAPITAL PUNISHMENT,
LOUIS XVI, KING OF FRANCE,
BHUTTO, ZULFIKAR ALIImages of Hanging Make Hussein a Martyr to ManyBy HASSAN M. FATTAH
Saddam Hussein’s public image in the Arab world has undergone a resurgence of admiration and awe.
January 6, 2007 World News
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UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,
SUNNI MUSLIMS,
ISLAM,
SHIITE MUSLIMS,
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PUBLIC OPINION,
MIDDLE EASTLawmakers Criticize Video of Hussein’s Final MinutesBy JEFF ZELENY and HELENE COOPER
Several Republican senators said they were troubled by the video and fearful of the reverberations it could provoke.
January 5, 2007 World News
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MCCAIN, JOHN,
SENATE,
IRAQBoy Hangs Himself After Seeing Reports of Hussein’s ExecutionBy MAUREEN BALLEZA
The boy watched television reports about Saddam Hussein’s execution and asked about it, said an uncle.
January 5, 2007 U.S. News
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR; Denying the Facts, Finding the TruthBy SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The United States is continuing, through other means, the greatest crime of Saddam Hussein: his never-ending attempt to topple the Iranian government.
January 5, 2007 Opinion Op-Ed
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UNITED STATES ARMAMENT AND DEFENSE,
WAR CRIMES, GENOCIDE AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY,
KIRKPATRICK, JEANE J,
HAGUE (NETHERLANDS),
IRAQThe Ugly Death of Saddam HusseinEditorial says outrageous manner of Saddam Hussein's hanging shows why Prime Min Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is not likely to produce national unity government that Bush administration demands and that Iraq desperately needs
January 4, 2007 Opinion Editorial
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BUSH, GEORGE W,
MALIKI, NURI KAMAL AL-,
IRAQTHE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ; Iraq Defends Hanging, But Holds Hussein GuardBy JAMES GLANZ and JOHN F. BURNS; REPORTING WAS CONTRIBUTED BY MARC SANTORA, SABRINA TAVERNISE, KHALID W. HASSAN, KHALID AL-ANSARY, and ALI ADEEB FROM BAGHDAD, and DAVID STOUT FROM WASHINGTON.
Iraqi Prime Min Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's office mounts its first public defense of way government carried out execution of Saddam
Hussein, saying Iraqi authorities have detained guard who they believe was involved in recording moment in macabre and unauthorized video that has generated revulsion around world; Iraqi officials seek to challenge impression that Hussein, for all his brutal crimes, behaved with more dignity in his final minutes than his seemingly thuggish executioners; United States mi...
January 4, 2007 World News
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MALIKI, NURI KAMAL AL-,
IRAQHussein Poem: Baathists Bloom, Enemy Is HollowFollowing is the first half of a poem attributed to Saddam Hussein, as transcribed and translated by The New York Times from a reading by his cousin Muayed Dhamin al-Hazza.
January 4, 2007 World News
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Verses written by Saddam Hussein after he was sentenced to death are his last written words, his relatives said.
January 4, 2007 World News
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January 4, 2007 World News
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●1INGLÊSportuguêsINGLÊSi•1INGLÊSportuguêsINGLÊSp●
●1INGLÊSportuguêsINGLÊSp●
John Morris Parker
Rosa Lídia Coimbra
Universidade de Aveiro
AmetáforaEaLinguísticaTextual
RESUM0
Muito se tem escrito sobre a metáfora, tanto na área da estitística literária como nas da filosofia
linguística e da semântica: estas interrogam-se sobre a natureza do fenómeno e procuram
estabelecer-lhe coordenadas classificatórias; aquela inclina-se mais para a análise dos efeitos
literários criados no texto por esta figura eminentemente 'poética'. Uma vez que, no texto escrito, com
a sua maior densidade lexical em relação ao discurso oral, as formas 'incongruentes' (Halliday: 1985)
devem criar certos problemas ao nível da COESÃO, estranha-se a pouca atenção que a linguística
textual tem dedicado à metáfora (veja-se, p.ex., a ausência de referências tanto em Halliday &
Hasan: 1976 como em Beaugrande & Dessler: 1981). Numa nossa comunicação anterior ('Factores
de coesão no ensino do texto poético', Actas do 1° Encontro Nacional de Didáctica, Aveiro, 1988),
tratámos brevemente de alguns dos aspectos problemáticos da metáfora, mas apenas no âmbito
mais geral dos factores de coesão. No presente trabalho, pretendemos aprofundar o nosso estudo no
sentido de tentar esclarecer quais os processos necessários.para.estabelecer,.num.texto.altamente
metafórico, a 'texture' que, segundo Halliday & Hasan (1976), é produto, precisamente, da coesão.
●1INGLÊSportuguêsINGLÊSi●
ABSTRACT
Much has been written about metaphor, both in literary stylistics and in the fields of linguistic
phitosophy and semantics: these latter discuss the nature of the phenomenon and attempt to lay
down guidelines for classífication, while the former leans towards the analysis of the literary effects
created in the text by this eminently 'poetic' trope. In the written text, with its greater lexical density in
retatíon to oral discourse, ' incongruent' forms (Halliday: 1985) must cause certain problems for
textual COHESION and it is surprising that text linguistics has given so little attention to metaphor
(there are no references, for example, in either Halliday & Hasan: 1976 or Beaugrande & Dressler:
1981). In a previous paper ("Factores de coesão no ensino do texto poético', Actas do 1º Encontro
Nacional de Didáctica, Aveiro, 1988), we dealt briefly with some of the problems related to metaphor,
but in the more general context of aspects of textual cohesion. The intention of the present paper is to
deal specifically with metaphor and to attempt to discover how, in an extremely metaphorical text, one
can find the 'texture' which, according to Halliday & Hasan (1976), is created by cohesion.
References
Halliday & Hasan, 1976. Cohesion in English Longman.
Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981. Introduction to Text Linguisics Longman.
Halliday, MAK, 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold.
DALAI LAMA
A Monk's Struggle
Wednesday, Mar. 19, 2008 By PICO IYER Enlarge Photo
Dalai Lama on the grounds of his private residence in Dharamsala, India. He walks a path between his home and his official office. He is guarded by the Indian military. Each time he passes, the sentries come to a salute with their arms.
James Nachtwey / VII for TIME
Article ToolsPrintEmailReprintsSphereAddThisRSSYahoo! Buzz "Since China wants to join the world community," the 14th Dalai Lama said as I was traveling across Japan with him for a week last November, "the world community has a real responsibility to bring China into the mainstream." The whole world stands to gain, he pointed out, from a peaceful and unified China—not least the 6 million Tibetans in China and Chinese-occupied Tibet. "But," he added, "genuine harmony must come from the heart. It cannot come from the barrel of a gun."
Photos
The Dalai Lama at Home
TIME photographer James Nachtwey visit the Tibetan leader at his private residence in exile in Dharamsala, India
Photos
A New Tibet
As the modern world and information age crashes down the mountains, the once isolated land struggles to maintain its ancient Buddhist traditions.
Photographs by Kadir van Lohuizen / Noor for TIME
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I thought of those measured and forgiving words—the Dalai Lama still prays for his "Chinese brothers and sisters" every morning and urges Tibetans to learn Chinese so they can talk with their new rulers, not fight with them—as reports trickled out of Tibet of freedom demonstrations that have led to some of the bloodiest confrontations in the region since similar protests preceded a brutal crackdown in the late 1980s. The violence has left 99 people dead, according to Tibetan exile groups; the Chinese government says 13 "innocents" were killed in the riots. Soon after monks began demonstrating in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, Chinese forces moved to contain the marchers, but the disturbances spread to other Tibetan cities, and their causes clearly remain unresolved. Working out how best to avoid further embarrassment as they prepare for the start of the Olympic-torch relay on March 25 will be a tricky challenge for China's rulers. As a diplomat told TIME, "They need to get this under control, but to do so without a lot of brutality."
How the crisis unfolds will be determined not just in Beijing but also by the words and actions of a man who protects his people from afar, in his exile home in the northern-India hill station of Dharamsala. As a Buddhist monk, the Dalai Lama speaks unstintingly on behalf of all people's rights to basic freedoms of speech and thought—though as a Buddhist monk, he also holds staunchly to the view that violence can never solve a problem deep down. If the bloodshed gets out of control, he said in recent days, he will step down as political leader—a symbolic act, really, since he would continue to be the head of the Tibetans and the democracy he has set up in exile already has an elected Prime Minister. In China meanwhile, Tibetans are still liable to imprisonment for years just for carrying a picture of their exiled leader (who by Tibetan custom is regarded as the incarnation of a god, the god of compassion). Some have been shot while walking across the mountains to visit cousins or children in exile.
As soon as you start talking to the Dalai Lama, as I have been doing for 33 years, you notice that his favorite adjectives are logical and realistic and the verbs he returns to are investigate, analyze and explore. The Buddha was a "scientist," he said the last time I saw him, which means that a true Buddhist should follow the course of reason (recalling, perhaps, that anger most harms the person who feels it). Contact and communication are the methods he always stresses—to this day, he encourages every possibility for dialogue with China and in places even urges Tibetans to study Buddhism under Chinese leaders whom he knows to be capable.
This determination to be completely empirical—as if he were a doctor of the mind pledged to examine things only as they are, to come up with a clear diagnosis and then to suggest a practical response—is one of the things that have made the current Dalai Lama such a startling and tonic figure on the world stage. There are few monks in any tradition who speak so rarely about faith while rejecting anything that has been disproved by scientific inquiry; on his desk at home, he keeps a plastic model of the brain with detachable parts so that he can take it apart, put it together again and see how it works. And there are even fewer political leaders who work from the selfless positions and long-term vision of a monk (and doctor of philosophy). It's easy to forget that the Dalai Lama is by now the most seasoned ruler on the planet, having led his people for 68 years—longer than Queen Elizabeth II, King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand or even Fidel Castro.
This all has deep and wide implications for a world that seems as religiously polarized now as it has ever been. Always stressing that the Buddha's own words should be thrown out if they are shown by scientific inquiry to be flawed, the Dalai Lama is the rare religious figure who tells people not to get needlessly confused or distracted by religion ("Even without a religion, we can become a good human being"). No believer in absolute truth—he eagerly seeks out Catholics, neuroscientists, even regular travelers to Tibet who can instruct him—he is also the rare Tibetan who will suggest that old Tibet may have contributed in part to its current predicament, the rare Buddhist to tell foreigners not to take up Buddhism but to study within their own traditions, where their roots are deepest.
Dalai Lama on the grounds of his private residence in Dharamsala, India. He walks a path between his home and his official office. He is guarded by the Indian military. Each time he passes, the sentries come to a salute with their arms.
James Nachtwey / VII for TIME
Article ToolsPrintEmailReprintsSphereAddThisRSSYahoo! Buzz (2 of 5)
As the world prepares for the Olympic Games in Beijing this August—and as Tibetans (and those in other occupied areas across China, like Xinjiang) inevitably use the world's attention to broadcast their suffering—a farmer's son born in a stone-and-mud house in a 20-home village in one of the world's least materially developed countries has, rather remarkably, become one of the leading spokesmen for a new global vision in which we look past divisions of nation, race and religion and try to address our shared problems at the source. Acts of terrorism, he said when I saw him in November, usually arise from some cause deep in the past and will not go away until the root problem is addressed. He could as easily have been talking about the demonstrations of discontent being staged in his homeland nearly a half-century since he saw it last.
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The Dalai Lama at Home
TIME photographer James Nachtwey visit the Tibetan leader at his private residence in exile in Dharamsala, India
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A New Tibet
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Photographs by Kadir van Lohuizen / Noor for TIME
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The Scientist
I have been visiting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala regularly since 1974 and have been listening to him speak to psychologists, non-Buddhist priests and philosophers—from Harvard to Hiroshima and Zurich to Malibu—since 1979. I'm not a Buddhist myself, only a typically skeptical journalist whose father, a professional philosopher, happened to meet the Dalai Lama in 1960, the year after he went into exile. But having spent time watching wars and revolutions everywhere from Sri Lanka to Beirut, I've grown intrigued by the quietly revolutionary ideas that the Dalai Lama has put into play. China and Tibet will long be geographic neighbors, he implies, so for Tibetans to think of the Chinese as their enemies—or vice versa—is to say they will long be surrounded by enemies. Better by far to expunge the notion of "enmities" that the mind has created.
Among fellow Buddhists, the Dalai Lama delivers complex, analytical talks and wrestles with doctrinal issues within a philosophy that can be just as divided as anything in Christianity or Islam, but he has decided after analytical research that when he finds himself out in the wider world talking to large audiences of people with no interest in Buddhism, the most practical course is just to offer, as a doctor would, simple, everyday principles that anyone, regardless of religion (or lack of same), might find helpful. Since material wealth cannot help us if we're heartbroken, he often says, and yet those who are strong within can survive even material hardship (as many monks in Tibet have had tragic occasion to prove), it makes more sense to concentrate on our inner, not our outer, resources. We in the privileged world spend so much time strengthening and working on our bodies, perhaps we could also use some time training what lies beneath them, at the source of our well-being: the mind.
His own people, inevitably, have not always been able to live according to these lucid precepts, and if you walk along the crowded, gritty streets of Dharamsala, you find as many Tibetans looking to the West for salvation as you find Westerners looking to Tibet. Melancholy signs in the Tibetan government-in-exile compound say Tibetan Torture Survivors' Program and Voice Of Tibet (Voice For The Voiceless), and many young Tibetans feel they have spent all their lives dreaming of a country they've never seen. In Tibet, meanwhile, I remember—visiting in 1990, when the shadow of martial law hung over the capital—seeing soldiers on the rooftops of the low buildings around the central Jokhang Temple and tanks stationed just outside the city limits.
Yet the larger sense of identity being proposed by the Dalai Lama—and many others from every tradition—has special relevance today because, as the Tibetan leader likes to say, we are living in a "new reality" in which "the concept of 'we' and 'they' is gone." And if the terrorist attacks and wars of the new millennium have made some people on every continent wary and skeptical of religion, they have also made them ache, more palpably than ever, for precisely the sense of moral guidance and solace that religions traditionally provide.
Dalai Lama on the grounds of his private residence in Dharamsala, India. He walks a path between his home and his official office. He is guarded by the Indian military. Each time he passes, the sentries come to a salute with their arms.
James Nachtwey / VII for TIME
Article ToolsPrintEmailReprintsSphereAddThisRSSYahoo! Buzz (3 of 5)
Exile and Opportunity
What could be called a global movement on behalf of post?identity thinking seems one of the brightest hopes of our new world order and one often advanced by such close friends and admirers of the Dalai Lama as Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu. Yet what has made the Dalai Lama's example particularly striking—and what was perhaps partly responsible for his receiving the 1989 Nobel Prize for Peace—is that he has had to live these principles and put them to the test during almost every hour of his 72 years. He came to the throne in Lhasa, after all, when he was only 4 years old, and he was receiving envoys from F.D.R. with intricate questions about the transportation of military supplies across Tibet during World War II when he was just 7. He was 11 when violent fighting broke out around him in Lhasa, and by the time he was 15—an age when most of us are stumbling through high school—he was the full-time political leader of his people, having to negotiate against Mao Zedong. After he fled Tibet at age 23, when Chinese pressure on Lhasa seemed certain to provoke widespread violence, he had to remake an entire ancient culture in exile.
Photos
The Dalai Lama at Home
TIME photographer James Nachtwey visit the Tibetan leader at his private residence in exile in Dharamsala, India
Photos
A New Tibet
As the modern world and information age crashes down the mountains, the once isolated land struggles to maintain its ancient Buddhist traditions.
Photographs by Kadir van Lohuizen / Noor for TIME
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The Ghost of Tiananmen
With the world watching once again, China must precisely calibrate its response to the unrest in Tibet
Why Beijing Needs the Dalai Lama
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A Monk’s Struggle
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Uprising Spurns Dalai Lama’s Way
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The result of all this is that he is as rigorous and detailed a realist as you could hope to meet. His life has never allowed him the luxury of talking abstractly or wishfully from a mountaintop. He follows the news more closely than many journalists do and cheerfully confessed to me more than a decade ago that he is "addicted" to the bbc World Service broadcast every morning. When he speaks around the world, one of his favorite lines is "Dream—nothing!" or some other expression to stress that instead of looking outside ourselves for help or inspiration, we should act right now because "responsibility for our future lies on our own shoulders."
This makes for a novel way of practicing the art of politics—one inspired, you could say, by the prince called the Buddha more than by the one described by Machiavelli. The central principle of Buddhism is the idea of interdependence—the notion that all sentient beings are linked together in a network that was classically known as Indra's Net. Thus, calling Chinese individuals your enemy and Tibetans your friend, the Dalai Lama might suggest, is as crazy as calling your right eye your ally and your left your adversary; you usually need both to function well, and all parts of the world body depend on all other parts. "Before," I heard him say last November, "destruction of your enemy was victory for your side." But in our globalized world, where ecology enforces our sense of mutual dependence, "destruction of your enemy is destruction of yourself."
The other essential idea of Buddhism (more accurately called a science of mind than a religion) is that we can change our world by changing how we choose to look at the world. "There is nothing either good or bad," as Hamlet said, "but thinking makes it so." For most of us, for example, exile means disruption and loss. But the Dalai Lama has decided that exile is his reality and therefore should be taken as opportunity. Almost as soon as he left Tibet in 1959, he started to draw up a new democratic constitution for Tibetans, allowing for the possibility of impeaching the Dalai Lama. He threw out much that he regarded as outdated or needlessly ritualistic in the Tibetan system while gradually bringing in reforms so that women are now allowed to study for doctoral degrees and become abbots (which they could not do in old Tibet) and science is part of the monastic curriculum. Tibetan children in exile take their lessons in Tibetan until they are 10 or so—to make sure they are strongly rooted in their own tradition—and then in English ever after (so as to be connected to the modern world).
This has made the Tibetan exile community one of the success stories among refugee groups in recent decades. But no less important, perhaps, it has offered a possibility to many others on a planet where there are, by some counts, as many as 33 million official and unofficial refugees. By showing how Tibet can exist internally, in spirit and imagination, even if it is barely visible on the map, the Dalai Lama has been suggesting to Palestinians, Kurds and Uighurs that they can maintain a cultural community even if they have lost their territory. Communities can be linked not by common soil so much as by common ground, a common foundation.
Challenging China
Yet even as the Dalai Lama has managed to make all these breakthroughs in the exile world, in Tibet itself he has made little visible progress over the past 50 years. Every Tibetan I've met remains immovably devoted to him. And yet, as he said to me 12 years ago, "in spite of my open approach of maximum concessions, the Chinese position becomes even harder and harder." The violence that broke out recently was a harrowing reminder of the fact that 98% of Tibetans have no access to their leader and are denied the most basic of freedoms. And in return for talking of interdependence and the need to stop even thinking in terms of enemies, the Dalai Lama is known in Beijing as a "splittist" and the "enemy of the Tibetan people."
Photos
The Dalai Lama at Home
TIME photographer James Nachtwey visit the Tibetan leader at his private residence in exile in Dharamsala, India
Photos
A New Tibet
As the modern world and information age crashes down the mountains, the once isolated land struggles to maintain its ancient Buddhist traditions.
Photographs by Kadir van Lohuizen / Noor for TIME
Related Articles
The Ghost of Tiananmen
With the world watching once again, China must precisely calibrate its response to the unrest in Tibet
Why Beijing Needs the Dalai Lama
China wants to tamp down the Tibet uprising with minimal force. And the exiled spiritual leader may be its best hope
The Dalai Lama’s Succession Rethink
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Indeed, his very determination to speak for openness and a long-term vision has sometimes brought him critics on every side. Some conservative Tibetan clerics believe he has been too radical in jettisoning old Tibetan customs, while some Western Buddhists, graduates of the revolutions of the '60s, wish he did not speak out against divorce or sexual license. True to his Buddhist precepts, he has not called for Tibetan independence from China for more than 20 years; he seeks only autonomy, whereby China could control Tibetans' defense and foreign affairs so long as Tibetans have sovereignty over everything else. But more and more Tibetans in exile ask how they can sit by and practice nonviolence while their homes and families are being wiped out by the Chinese occupation. "Why is he thinking of the future and not the present, the past?" asks an outspoken Tibetan in Dharamsala who once fought with the cia-trained guerrillas violently resisting the Chinese. "I want freedom in this world, not from this world."
In July 2006 Chinese authorities intensified what the Dalai Lama calls "demographic aggression" by launching a high-speed train linking Lhasa to Beijing and other Chinese cities, thus allowing 6,000 more Han Chinese to flood into the Tibetan capital every day. Lhasa, sometimes known as an "abode of the gods," has turned from the small traditional settlement I first saw in 1985 into an Eastern Las Vegas, with a population of 300,000 (two out of every three of them Chinese). On the main streets alone, by one Western scholar's count, there are 238 dance halls and karaoke parlors and 658 brothels, and the Potala Palace—for centuries a symbol of a culture whose people were ruled by a monk and home to nine Dalai Lamas—is now mockingly surrounded by an amusement park.
Yet the Dalai Lama, true to his thinking, points out that the Beijing-Lhasa train is neither good nor bad. "It is a form of progress, of material development," I heard him say four months ago, adding that Tibetans understand that for their material well-being, it is of benefit to be part of the People's Republic. The only important thing, he pointed out, was how its rulers use the train and whether they deploy it for compassionate purposes or not.
It can almost seem, in considering Tibet, as if two different visions of freedom are colliding. For Buddhists, liberation traditionally means freedom from ignorance and so from the suffering it brings. For Chinese pledged to material development, freedom simply means liberation from the past, from religion and from backwardness. According to the Dalai Lama, at the sixth and most recent round of regular talks between Chinese officials and a delegation of Tibetans, the Chinese said, "There is no Tibet issue. Everything in Tibet is very smooth." To which the exiled Tibetans said, "If things are really as good as you say they are, then why don't you let us come and see the reality?"
The Long Road
The central question surrounding Tibet, of course, is what will happen when the current Dalai Lama dies. In preparation for that event, the man has been stressing for years that the function of any Dalai Lama is only to fulfill the work of the previous Dalai Lama; therefore, any young child selected by Chinese authorities and declared to be the 15th Dalai Lama, a Beijing puppet, will not be the true "Dalai Lama of Tibetan hearts." As practical and flexible as ever and holding to the Buddhist ideas of impermanence and nonattachment, he told me as far back as 1996, "At a certain stage, the Dalai Lama institution will disappear. But that does not mean that Tibetan Buddhist culture will cease. No!" Most Tibetans, however, cannot abide the thought of a future without their traditional leader.
Photos
The Dalai Lama at Home
TIME photographer James Nachtwey visit the Tibetan leader at his private residence in exile in Dharamsala, India
Photos
A New Tibet
As the modern world and information age crashes down the mountains, the once isolated land struggles to maintain its ancient Buddhist traditions.
Photographs by Kadir van Lohuizen / Noor for TIME
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With the world watching once again, China must precisely calibrate its response to the unrest in Tibet
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The deeper issue, as the Dalai Lama always stresses, is that names and forms are unimportant so long as something more fundamental is sustained. The Buddha's job—and therefore that of his most prominent contemporary student—was not just to be clear-sighted and compassionate but also to show how compassionate and clear-sighted any one of us can be. In that regard, it hardly matters whether the terms Dalai Lama or Buddhism or even Tibet continue to exist. As it is, thanks to the exodus of Tibetans in the past half-century, Tibetan culture and Buddhism have become part of the global neighborhood. Whereas there were all of two Tibetan Buddhist centers in the West in 1968, there are now more than 40 in New York City alone. In Taiwan, there are more than 200. More French people call themselves Buddhist than Protestant or Jew.
Perhaps most significant, some of the people most eagerly drawn to Tibetan tradition and Buddhism are, in fact, citizens of China, who have been denied any religious sustenance for more than 50 years. The last time I visited Lhasa, in 2002, I saw more and more Chinese individuals going to the Jokhang Temple at the center of town as pilgrims, seeking out Tibetan lamas for instruction, even trying to learn Tibetan, the same language that is all but banned for Tibetans. When I traveled across Japan with the Dalai Lama last November, I saw dozens of Chinese people clustering around him, sobbing and asking for his blessing and, 30 minutes later, saw another group of Chinese, much more poised and sophisticated, eager to talk to him about their plans for democracy in the mainland.
"If 30 years from now, Tibet is 6 million Tibetans and 10 million Chinese Buddhists," the Tibetan leader said to me five years ago, "then maybe something will be O.K." As the world looks toward Beijing and its glittering coming-out party this August, and the Chinese government prepares to unveil all the fruits of its recent remarkable economic achievements, oppressed citizens in Tibet and elsewhere will no doubt use the same opportunity to remind the world of what has been lost in terms of freedom and humanity in the rush for those achievements. The calm scientist in monk robes, however, with his habit of looking at the deeper causes beneath every surface, will surely keep noting that the only revolution that lasts and that can truly help us toward a better world is the one that begins inside.
EUTHANASIA - Death Sets French Euthanasia Debate
Thursday, Mar. 20, 2008
By BRUCE CRUMLEY/PARIS
Chantal Sébire was found dead on Wednesday night. She had been suffering from esthesioneuroblastoma (ENB) an uncommon malignant neoplasm of the nasal vault.
JEFF PACHOUD / AFP / Getty Images
Article ToolsPrintEmailReprintsSphereAddThisRSSYahoo! Buzz Chantal Sébire is dead, but the debate she ignited over French laws prohibiting victims of terminal diseases from receiving euthanasia is certain to live on. Just 48 hours after a Dijon court rejected Sébire's request that doctors help her end her agony-stricken life without risking legal punishment, the 52 year-old was found dead in her home Wednesday night. Initial tests Thursday were unable to determine whether Sébire's death was induced or the result of the rare disease that left her horribly disfigured and in near-constant pain. But news of her passing provoked renewed dispute over France's ban on assisted suicide, which the former schoolteacher had sought to overturn in her final days.
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Making a Case for Euthanasia
France ponders a suffering teacher's legal petition to be allowed, under existing laws, to end her life
Sébire came to national attention earlier this month, when French media picked up on her plea to get help ending her life. Her malady, esthesioneuroblastoma, causes inoperable tumors to grow in and spread from the nasal passages, disfiguring and destroying the face before finally destroying the brain. The disease had already blinded and otherwise handicapped Sébire, and left her wracked with pain for hours on end despite medication to allay her suffering. Sebire explained her request for medically assisted suicide saying she wanted to leave the world following an evening of celebration with her three children — and avoid the prolonged coma she'd most likely fall into, which would make her a burden to her family.
While campaigning for office, President Nicolas Sarkozy indicated he was sympathetic to revising France's current law, which forbids assisted suicide but allows doctors and families to stop administering life-sustaining treatment to terminal patients. But last week, the Elysée responded to Sébire's written request for help to Sarkozy by indicating he could not sidestep legislation. Ahead of Monday's court rejection of her petition that the law be interpreted to permit active euthanasia, members of France's conservative government similarly rebuffed Sébire's plea with reactions ranging from evident compassion and empathy to cold legal rationalization — and in at least one case, prickly indignation. Housing Minister Christine Boutin declared that she was "scandalized that people can envision granting this woman death because she's suffering and deformed," adding that if France legalizes "the right to kill, we're heading towards a barbarian society."
Yet despite ethical reservations, it became very clear Sébire's case deeply moved a majority of people in France, both in and out of government. "Her illness has left French people shattered these last days," said French government spokesman Luc Chatel when news of Sebire's death broke. "[Sébire] inspired great respect among our citizens."
Even more importantly, however, her case has also gotten many people across France reexamining their attitudes toward the assisted suicides of terminal patients that are legal in Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands. France's standing law was written in 2005, after a mother and doctor provoked the death of a young man who no longer wanted to live in his paralyzed, virtually shut-in condition. Marie Humbert — the mother of that man — has continued denouncing the law for only allowing the passive act of interrupting life-sustaining treatment. Some 300,000 people have signed Humbert's petition to depenalize active euthanasia.
Some French observers of Sébire's case note that laws banning assisted suicide haven't prevented it. Instead, they say, the prohibition has only sent the practice underground, where doctors and medical workers secretly consent to respect patients' pleas to end their lives via over-medication or other means that aren't often detected. Some suspect that may be how Sébire finally died. "I find it very difficult not to offer an exit door that isn't one of love with one's family," commented French Foreign Minister and trained doctor Bernard Kouchner on radio station RMC Thursday. In the future, he said, France must prevent desperate terminal patients from "having to commit suicide in some kind of clandestine manner in which everyone suffers — especially their loved ones. I have a lot of admiration for Chantal Sébire [and] we must create an exception to the law... that would be human, necessary."
