← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · kminta
Thread ID: 17585 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2005-03-31
2005-03-31 23:41 | User Profile
[I]The end may be near...[/I]
[B][URL=http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=1&u=/nm/20050331/ts_nm/pope_dc_31]Pope in Sharp Turn for Worse with Fever, Infection[/URL][/B]
[B]19 minutes ago[/B]
[I]By Philip Pullella and Crispian Balmer[/I]
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope John Paul's fragile health took a sharp turn for the worse as he developed a very high fever caused by a urinary infection, the Vatican said.
Italian media said the 84-year-old Pontiff, who is struggling to recover from throat surgery, had received the sacrament for the sick and dying, commonly known as the Last Rites. It is given to the very seriously ill but does not mean necessarily that death is imminent.
"He's ill, very ill," an unnamed medical source was quoted as saying by Italy's Ansa news agency on Friday.
The Pope was not taken to hospital despite the gravity of the situation. One media report said he was too frail to move.
The Pope, leader of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics for the past 26 years, was receiving "appropriate antibiotic therapy," the Vatican said in a statement late on Thursday.
"The Holy Father was today stricken by a very high fever provoked by what has been ascertained to be an infection of the urinary tract ... The clinical situation is being closely watched by the Vatican medical team treating him."
Ansa quoted medical sources as saying he Pope was responding to the antibiotics but that the situation was extremely severe.
Hours earlier Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, seen as a possible successor to the Pontiff, told the Austrian news agency APA that the Pope was "approaching, as far as a person can tell, the end of his life."
Schoenborn said he hoped for the Pope's sake that "the moment of relief comes for him."
His health deteriorated suddenly a day after doctors inserted a feeding tube from his nose into his stomach to try to boost his strength.
Worried Catholics gathered in St Peter's Square as news of the Pope's decline spread, staring up at the papal apartments with anxious faces. The lights on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace, from where the Pope usually addresses crowds, were switched off at midnight (1700 EST).
"We heard the news, and we're here to pray. We feel we need to be close to the Pope right now," said Sister Antonia, a nun from Rome.
PARKINSON'S DISEASE
The Polish-born Pontiff, who has also been suffering from Parkinson's Disease for years, has been convalescing from throat surgery for more than a month and aides said earlier on Thursday he was disappointed by the slow pace of his recovery.
Once before, in 1981, he received the Last Rites after being shot by an assassin. His present seems equally grave.
The Pope, one of whose major legacies according to historians will be his role in the fall of communism in eastern Europe in 1989, underwent the tracheotomy on Feb. 24. Once dubbed the "Great Communicator," he has been unable to speak in public since.
The third longest-serving pope in Roman Catholic history spent 28 days in Rome's Gemelli Hospital in two periods in February and March after suffering breathing crises.
He has had a breathing tube in his throat since the Feb. 24 operation and the feeding tube was added on Wednesday because Parkinson's disease was affecting his muscles and making it difficult for him to swallow.
Vatican officials interviewed by Reuters earlier on Thursday said they were increasingly pessimistic about the Pope making a full recovery from his ailments.
"Hardly anyone thinks the situation will improve but everyone is hoping for a miracle," said one official.
Poles believe John Paul's unflagging support for the banned Solidarity trade union in the 1980s while communists tried to crush it was a potent force in keeping the movement alive.
Solidarity formed the East Bloc's first non-communist government in 1989, marking the start of a wave of freedom which saw Marxist regimes fall like dominoes across Europe.
HISTORIC HOLY LAND TRIP
A decade after witnessing the fall of communism, the Pope fulfilled another of his dreams. He visited the Holy Land in March 2000, and, praying at Jerusalem's Western Wall, he asked forgiveness for Catholic sins against Jews over the centuries.
A tireless traveler, hailed as "God's Athlete," he has clocked up some 775,000 miles in 104 foreign trips to some 130 countries. A familiar figure across the globe, the Pope has drawn crowds of up to four million people.
He has been determined to use his office to draw attention to the plight of the world's neediest and oppressed while at the same time keeping a firm and conservative grip on his Church.
"I speak in the name of those who have no voice," he said on a trip to Africa in 1980.
He has felt just as much at ease lecturing dictators of the left and the right as he has telling leaders of world democracies that unbridled capitalism and globalization are no panacea to the world's post-Cold War problems.
A strong defender of human rights and religious freedom, his calls for a "new world economic order" and defense of workers' rights have led some to call him "the socialist pope."
Others, however, have criticized his traditionalist stance on family issues, such as his condemnation of contraception.
A former actor who wrote several plays, John Paul has used his mastery of timing, levity and languages to communicate like few other world figures of modern times.
(Additional reporting by Phil Stewart)
2005-04-01 14:24 | User Profile
*[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif, geneva][size=2]Address the New Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Holy See
On November 8, the Holy Father received H. E. Hans-Joachim Hallier, the new Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Holy See. This is a translation of a passage of the Pope's address in German.
In this context we should also mention the tragedy of the Jews. For Christians the heavy burden of guilt for the murder of the Jewish people must be an enduring call to repentance; thereby we can overcome every form of anti-Semitism and establish a new relationship with our kindred nation of the Old Covenant. The Church, "mindful of her common patrimony with the Jews, and motivated by the Gospels' spiritual love and by no political considerations, . . . deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source" (Vatican II, Declaration Nostra Aetate, No. 4). Guilt should not oppress and lead to self-agonizing thoughts, but must always be the point of departure for
[/size][/font]*[url="http://www.adl.org/pope/Pope_Holocaust6.asp"]http://www.adl.org/pope/Pope_Holocaust6.asp[/url]
2005-04-01 14:45 | User Profile
I'm leaving for Italy next week to go sightseeing, but if the Pope dies I don't think anything will be open in Rome. What do y'all think?
Anyway, I'm Protestant, but I'll pray that Jesus has mercy on John Paul's soul, like I would anyone else who is near death.