Pope John Paul II Has Died

[VisibilityMissing]

<!--QuoteBegin--> <table border='0' align='center' width='95%' ><tr><td class='quotetop'><b>Quote:</b> </td></tr><tr><td class='quotebody'> April 2, 2005<br><b>Catholic Leader's Death Comes After Long and Public Illness</b><br><br>By IAN FISHER<br><br>VATICAN CITY, April 2 - Pope John Paul II died today, finally succumbing to years of illness endured painfully and publicly, ending an extraordinary, if sometimes polarizing, 26-year reign that remade the papacy.<br><br>He died in his chambers here at the Vatican, just after 9.37 p.m. here, the Vatican said. His health had deteriorated over the last few weeks, and in the last few days his decline was precipitous. He had been near death since Thursday, when his already weak system suffered a series of serious blows, including heart and circulatory collapse. On Friday morning, the Vatican announced he was in "very grave" condition, and that night it said his condition had become even worse, with his breathing shallow and kidneys failing.<br><br>This morning the Vatican said he was fading out of consciousness, the first time it had said he was not fully lucid, though his chief spokesman, Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls, insisted he was not in a coma. Dr. Navarro-Valls said he had been alert enough on Friday night to express thanks for the tens of thousands gathering on St. Peter's Square as he lay on his deathbed.<br><br>Even before his death, expressions of grief and respect began to spill over not only in Rome, but in his home country of Poland, where in Warsaw churches remained open through the night; in Asia and Latin America, and particularly in Africa, a region in which the church has grown strongly under John Paul II's reign.<br><br>On a gray, rainy day in New York, people stopped by St. Patrick's Cathedral and other churches to attend Mass or say a prayer that the pope might pass on peacefully and without pain.<br><br>Though the next week will be devoted to praising and burying John Paul II - he will be interred aside other popes inside the subterranean grottoes at St. Peter's Basilica - the ancient institution of the Roman Catholic church will soon turn toward the future and the selection of the next Pope. No sooner than 15 days from today, and no later than 20, most of the 117 voting members of the College of Cardinals will meet in secrecy below the frescos of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel to decide who will inherit the seat of St. Peter.<br><br>The latest crisis for the Pope began on Thursday, when a urinary tract infection caused a high fever and a serious drop in his blood pressure. He was treated with antibiotics, and Dr. Navarro-Valls, a medical doctor though he did not treat the pope, said his condition temporarily stabilized.<br><br>"But in the following hours, it evolved negatively," he said.<br><br>At some point, he suffered what Dr. Navarro-Valls called "a state of septic shock and cardio-respiratory collapse." At 7:10 p.m. on Thursday the pope was given the sacrament for the sick and dying, often called "last rites," Dr. Navarro-Valls said.<br><br>Dr. Navarro-Valls said it was the pope's own decision not to return to the Gemelli hospital clinic, where he was admitted twice in February to be treated for the flu, fever and trouble breathing. On the second of those rushed trips to the hospital, doctors inserted a tube in his windpipe to allow him to breathe easier.<br><br>His last appearance in public came last Wednesday, when he appeared at his window off St. Peter's Square looking weak and gaunt. That same day, he had a feeding tube threaded from his nose to his stomach.<br><br>Born as Karol Wojtyla on May 18, 1920 in Wadowice, Poland, he was 84 years old and suffered for years from Parkinson's disease, which slumped his head, shook his hands and slurred his speech. In the last few weeks of his life, following two earlier hospitalizations and a tracheotomy operation in February, a pope known for his great ability as a communicator could hardly speak.<br><br>In 1978, he came to office as a fit and handsome 58 year-old, blessed with a charisma, intellectual vigor and energy that took him to 129 foreign countries as the pulse of the Catholic church moved away from Europe to Africa, Asia and Latin America.<br><br>He served either the second or third longest of any pope, depending who did the counting, in the nearly 2,000-year history of the papacy - making him the only Pope whom many young and middle-aged Catholics around the world remember clearly.<br><br>A Pole chosen as the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, he transformed the papacy into a television-ready voice for peace, war and life, from the womb to the wheelchair. He also reached beyond religion into politics, encouraging his fellow Poles and other Europeans to reject Communism. Some historians believe he deserves part of the credit for the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.<br><br>Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.<br><br>need some quote from supporter<br><br>John Paul II's admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.<br><br>"The situation in the Catholic church is serious," Hans Kung, the eminent Swiss theologian, who was barred by from teaching in Catholic schools because of his liberal views, wrote last week. "The pope is gravely ill and deserves every compassion. But the Church has to live. ...<br><br>In my opinion, he is not the greatest pope but the most contradictory of the 20th century. A pope of many, great gifts, and of many bad decisions!"<br><br>Among liberal Catholics, he was criticized for his strong opposition to abortion, homosexuality and contraception, as well as the ordination of women and married men. Though he was never known as a strong administrator of the dense Vatican bureaucracy, he kept a centralizing hand on the selection of bishops around the world and enforced a rigid adherence to many basic church teachings among the clergy and Catholic theologians.<br><br>But he defied easy definition: For all his conservatism on social and theological issues, he was decidedly forward looking - too much so even for some cardinals - on the sensitive question of other religions. While never veering from his belief in the unique power of redemption of Jesus Christ, he reached out tirelessly to other faiths, becoming the first Pope to step foot in a synagogue, in Rome in 1986, as well as a mosque, in Damascus in 2001.<br><br>And, as attention turned to who might be the next the Pope - would he be old or young; conservative or liberal; Italian, South American or African? - most experts said John Paul charisma would no longer be optional. He was a most public man, bear-hugging, chatting and preaching the value of love with a warmth that belied his often-doctrinaire positions on church issues.<br><br>The Cardinals who gather to choose a successor will be, by long tradition, cut off from the outside world during their deliberations, though now in a new $20 million residence, outfitted like a hotel, built by John Paul II on the Vatican grounds. They cannot make phone calls, read newspapers, watch television or listen to the radio. All but three of the cardinals were appointed by John Paul II and to some extent share his conservative views, but there is no guarantee the next Pope will be chosen in his image.<br><br>"Always follow a fat pope with a skinny pope," goes a typically knowing old Roman saying. Some Vatican watchers call it the "pendulum effect," in which cardinals seek to restore a balance - or to correct faults in the previous pope - as they work, in the words of one papal expert, to answer the question: What sort of pope do we need for what sort of world?<br><br>There is, at the moment, no favorite in the running, no single, obvious inheritor to John Paul II's formidable legacy. In theory, the cardinals can select any Catholic male for the job, but in practice, it will almost certainly be one of them.<br><br>In making their choice, the cardinals will have to weigh the range of issues facing the church - many of which, critics as well as some supporters argue, have been left languishing in the Pope's illness, especially these last few months of virtual incapacitation.<br><br>Among those issues are: the increasing secularism of Europe, where the church has become a decidedly less relevant institution; poverty and the widening economic divide between the northern hemisphere and the south, where the church is growing strongest; the balance of power between the church bureaucracy and local bishops, along with the concern that the Vatican bureaucracy has long been left to its own devices without day-to-day coordination by the pope; relations with other faiths, particularly Islam and the rising number of Muslim immigrants in Europe; the undermining of the authority of church in the United States after the wrenching sex scandals there.<br><br>Not least, the long illness of John Paul II - and the realities of modern medicine - may force the cardinals to confront an uncomfortable and historic change: whether the next Pope should be forced to retire after a certain age. Already bishops are required to hand in their resignations at 75, an age at which this pope was beginning to show the signs of sickness.<br><br>"We elected a Holy Father, not an eternal father," went one quip attributed to a during the 25-year reign of Leo XII, who died in 1903. That saying has been resurrected often to apply to John Paul II, but with more immediacy now that the Vatican realizes that a papacy of 20 years may no longer be unusual.<br><br>Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table> <!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Miles E Traysandor]

*Plays appropriate funreral tribute for the deceased Pope*

[Tom Flapwell]

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[Zaaphod]

Requiescat in pace, Karol Joseph Wojtyla.<br><br>*observes a moment of silence*

[Arloest]

=( He seemed like a good guy.

[Rikirk]

He no longer suffers,...he can finally find peace.