{"id":5555,"date":"2006-01-11T12:43:44","date_gmt":"2006-01-11T12:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/the-spontaneous-pope.html"},"modified":"2006-01-11T12:43:44","modified_gmt":"2006-01-11T12:43:44","slug":"the-spontaneous-pope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/the-spontaneous-pope.html","title":{"rendered":"The Spontaneous Pope"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Thavis of CNS on Benedict’s ad libbing:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

When the pope presided over a Mass in the Sistine Chapel to baptize 10 infants in early January, he was supposed to deliver a sermon presumably prepared by his staff. The text, released to journalists ahead of time, was nothing special. Maybe that’s why the pope pitched it.<\/p>\n

Instead, he stood beneath Michelangelo’s fresco of the "Last Judgment," looked out at the small congregation of parents and relatives, and began, "Just what happens in baptism?" Then he extemporized on the topic for 16 minutes — twice the length of his planned homily.<\/p>\n

The Vatican press office, meanwhile, sent out an urgent disclaimer telling reporters to ignore the prepared text.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Thavis of CNS on Benedict’s ad libbing: When the pope presided over a Mass in the Sistine Chapel to baptize 10 infants in early January, he was supposed to deliver a sermon presumably prepared by his staff. The text, released to journalists ahead of time, was nothing special. Maybe that’s why the pope pitched…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Spontaneous Pope - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/the-spontaneous-pope.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Spontaneous Pope - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"John Thavis of CNS on Benedict’s ad libbing: When the pope presided over a Mass in the Sistine Chapel to baptize 10 infants in early January, he was supposed to deliver a sermon presumably prepared by his staff. The text, released to journalists ahead of time, was nothing special. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}