Pope John Paul Ii

It's hard to miss Father Marcos Gonzalez, who wears an ankle-length black cassock every day, a garment most priests tossed out decades ago. But it's not just his clothes that bespeak an older, more traditional era of his Roman Catholic Church. When some priests spoke in favor of optional celibacy at a Los Angeles priest assembly last year -- a position supported by most American Catholics today -- Gonzalez booed in dissent.

Antonio Dante Zavatta started making things out of paper when he was a 12-year-old in Milan, Italy. He couldn't have imagined that four decades later he would be creating Christmas nativity scenes for the Pope. Seven years ago Zavatta, an envelope-maker in the Vatican press shop, began making creches for his fellow workers. One would never guess that they were crafted entirely from discarded pasteboard boxes. In his skillful hands, the paper assumes the realistic look of wood, stone and brick.

Tens of thousands of young Catholics from France, elsewhere in Europe and around the world have converged on Paris this week to rally around a faith that means less and less to their contemporaries and around an institution trying hard to use the millennium as an occasion for a Roman Catholic revival. As many as 300,000 young people are expected in this city in time to greet Pope John Paul II as he consecrates the 12th edition of one of his treasured innovations: World Youth Days.

As Christianity careens toward its second millennium, no religious leader has more profoundly shaped the course of world history in the waning decades of the 20th century than Pope John Paul II. By now the litany of his remarkable achievements in the affairs of humankind is as familiar to us as the Agnus Dei is to Catholics. He was a major player in bringing down the Iron Curtain, by emboldening first his native Poland, then Eastern Europe, to throw off the yoke of communism.

Maybe this is how they envision heaven, these 150 or so people playing bingo Thursday night at Pope John Paul II church. In a hall separated by a sliding partition from the worship area (where the Masses are held in English and Polish), TVs are mounted on the walls, showing the latest bingo ball to emerge from a pneumatic chute. Curtains of the same orange and brown print fabric that surround the windows are pulled back to reveal an electronic bingo scoreboard.

Gene Greytak, whose resemblance to Pope John Paul II turned the retired real estate broker into a papal impersonator with appearances in movies and television, has died. He was 84. Greytak died Sunday at his home in North Tustin of cancer, said his wife of 62 years, Dorothy. He was a lifelong Catholic who at first was reluctant to become a celebrity impersonator despite the obvious physical similarities and the encouragement of family and friends. "It took me about five years to get up enough courage," he told the Orange County Register in 1987.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will meet Pope John Paul II in a private audience next month, the Vatican said Monday.

Pope John Paul II will publish a new encyclical on Wednesday dealing with the Virgin Mary, the Vatican said Saturday.

Pope John Paul II has named Italian-born Archbishop Luigi Barbarito as the Holy See's new ambassador to Britain, the Vatican announced Tuesday.

When he heard that Pope John Paul II had died, Massimo Signoracci crossed himself, murmured a prayer and waited for a call that never came. The Signoracci clan, a dynasty of morticians and embalmers whose roots go back to an old Roman cemetery on an island in the Tiber River, has ministered to the last three popes and hoped to be asked to tend to this one as well. But for reasons that were unclear, no Vatican summons came.