PERISCOPE

Pope John Paul II went back to the hospital in Rome late last week for surgery to open up his breathing passage, and Dr. Rodolfo Proietti was waiting for him. Proietti led the team that treated the pontiff for flulike symptoms earlier in the month, and he had been impressed. "He is a patient with a very strong will," Proietti told NEWSWEEK in an exclusive interview at the beginning of the week. "He has a psychological ability to react to an illness that is very unusual."

Even as the aged pope's body shuts down in the late stages of Parkinson's disease, his will to live--and to impose his will on the Roman Catholic faithful--remains as stubborn as ever. In the days before he was readmitted to the hospital because almost no air was able to pass through his inflamed larynx, the pope insisted on making public appearances. To the assembled crowd in St. Peter's Square he reiterated that the source of his authority is Saint Peter himself, "the rock," he proclaimed, on which Jesus Christ said "I will build my church." The pope also spoke through a new book, "Memory and Identity," published last week. Though culled from tape-recorded dialogues with a pair of Polish philosophers back in 1993, the text was updated in the pope's own special, confrontational way. According to one of the philosophers, Krzysztof Michalski, the subject of abortion never came up in their conversations. They were talking mainly about the scourges of Nazism and communism in the 20th century. But the published text now segues from the "ideologies of evil" that drove the Holocaust and Stalin's massacres to abortion: "the legal extermination of human beings conceived but unborn" decreed by "democratically elected parliaments." The European Parliament's inclination to recognize homosexual unions as "an alternative type of family, with the right to adopt children," says the book, may be the work of another "ideology of evil."

Yet this same pontiff who continues to assert his will in the daily life of the church has given his doctors no instructions about how to sustain his life, or not, should he slip into a persistent coma. Could anyone--would anyone--pull the plug? And under what circumstances? NEWSWEEK asked Proietti, whose specialty is anesthesiology, who will make the final decisions if the pontiff is no longer conscious and able to communicate. "We never asked ourselves this question," said Proietti. Having spent a generation imposing his will on the church, the ailing John Paul has yet to make known a living will to guide his doctors.

--Christopher Dickey with Robert Blair Kaiser

The Dollar: 'Critical Turning Point'

It was just a subordinate clause in a dense 32-page report to a parliamentary subcommittee, but when the Bank of Korea last week indicated that it might begin to diversify its foreign reserves away from the dollar and into other currencies, traders around the world panicked. The dollar dropped 2 percent against the won in one day, and lost most of its gains against the euro so far this year. It ended the week down at $1.32 to the euro. And a big question hung over the markets: will China and Japan follow South Korea, leading to a plunge in the dollar?