Keeping the title doesn't help reconciliation with the East, dropping the title doesn't help reconciliation with the West. You can't win with these guys!

Benedict XVI drops a traditional papal title : Catholic World News

Dropping papal title does not advance ties, Orthodox prelate says : Catholic World News

Pope Benedict drops one of his nine titles: Reuters

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict has dropped one of his nine official titles, giving up "Patriarch of the West" in a discreet step apparently intended to help promote closer ties with the Orthodox churches of the East.

Benedict will retain titles such as Vicar of Jesus Christ and Servant of the Servants of God, but the patriarch title will not appear in the Vatican's annual directory due out later this month, Roman Catholic Church officials said on Wednesday.

The Pope has stressed his desire to improve ties with the Orthodox churches, which split from Rome in 1054, and a Vatican aide said scrapping the patriarch title was meant to help that.

"In the past, the patriarchate of the West was contrasted with that of the East," Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, former head of the Vatican office for eastern rite churches, told the Italian news agency ANSA.

"I think the Pope wanted to remove this sort of contrast and his act is intended as a spur to ecumenical progress."

Some Vatican observers were not so sure this would help.

The daily Corriere della Sera said the Orthodox churches "could see this papal innovation ... as an indirect affirmation of himself as a 'universal patriarch'."

Vatican relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest of these churches, have been strained because the Moscow hierarchy suspects the Catholic Church of trying to win new members there following the fall of communism in 1991.

Orthodox leaders could see the move as a Vatican bid to ignore geography and rise above the ancient structure of Christianity as centred in the five main patriarchates of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.

Rome is the centre of the Roman Catholic Church while Istanbul, the former Constantinople, is home of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, symbolic head of the Orthodox churches. The others play much lesser roles in Christian affairs.

Benedict will visit Bartholomew in Istanbul in November.

The Pope's remaining eight titles are Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Metropolitan Archbishop of the Roman Province, Sovereign of Vatican City and Servant of the Servants of God.

Perhaps it's a concession to feminists: "Down with Patriarchy!"

What you always assumed to be true, is according to the Italian government

Pope's Shooting Laid to Soviets by Italian Panel: New York Times

Citing new photographic analysis, an Italian parliamentary commission has concluded that top Soviet leaders were behind the failed plot to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981...

The new claim revolves largely around two new analyses of photographs of the crowds in St. Peter's Square that day. The analyses show decisively, the report says, that a Bulgarian, Sergei Ivanov Antonov, the former director of Balkan Air, was in the square at the time of the shooting and so had lied when he said that he was in his office at the time.

Mr. Antonov and two other Bulgarians were cleared by an Italian court in 1986 of accusations that they had hired the Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, who was convicted of attempted murder and was imprisoned in Italy until 2000.

Agca might be insane with his legion of stories, each one different, about how he came to shoot the Pope.

I've always thought the Italians were wrong to release him without a verifiable confession from Agca identifying and implicating the people who paid him, gave him phony id, weapons, etc.

Lenten Practices of the Catholic Church

align=left width=640>Alms, Fasting, Abstinence, Flagellation

Today we practice voluntary acts of self-denial. The tradition of mortification of the flesh and flagellation has passed from the mainstream of Catholic culture.