An average man with common sense who suddenly finds himself with a burden of unprecedented responsibility would not hesitate to seek counsel from others who have the necessary expertise and the right experience to be of help, right?

Well, if he were an intelligent man - who has had steady contact with laymen who are considered leaders in their respective disciplines - who suddenly became Pope one day, would he stop having those contacts, and would he not avail of help from these contacts if he needed to?

Apparently, the good people behind NCR think so little of Benedict's intelligence that they think he is incapable of doing the right thing - at least insofar as the Muslim issue - so they have to advise him to send his cardinals on a 'listening tour' of the Muslim world.

Like most everyone else, they are not privy to what Benedict is doing behind the scenes to execute his manifold responsibilities. For instance, this item from the Italian newspaper La Stampa, about Henry Kissinger, whom we know the Pope met with recently... Here is a translation:
----------------------------------------------------------------

Ratzinger consults Kissinger
on international affairs
By Piero Mastrolilli



NEW YORK - Benedict XVI has asked Henry Kissinger to be part of his advisory panel on international affairs and he has accepted.

Kissinger reportedly confimed this, speaking to a top member of the Italian government, and authoritative Vatican sources reportedly confirm that the Pope and the ex-Secretary of State for Presidents Nixon and Ford have been in a continuing dialog.

The Pope received Kissinger in private audience in Castel Gandolfo at the end of September but the Vatican did not say what they discussed. It was supposedly during that meeting that the Pope requested Kissinger to be part of an 'advisory board'. Vatican sources had no comment about this either.

Whether such consultation is institutionalized or not, it is not unusual for the Holy See to consult experts in the secular world on various matters.

For instance, the Pope is known to be getting fiscal advice from Hans Tietmeyer, former president of Germany's central bank and speculated to be the Pope's next choice to head the Vatican bank IOR.

Michael Camdessus, former director of the International Monetary Fund, has also advised the Vatican on economic matters.

For centuries, Popes have had scientific counsel from members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, made up of leading scientists in their respective disciplines.

In foreign affairs, John Paul II's close relations with former President Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezsinski, a fellow Pole, are well-known. in fact, the KGB even suspected the existence of a CIA-hatched conspiracy that was instrumental in having Karol Wojtyla elected to the Papacy.

With Kissinger, the fact that he is German by origin may well be a factor in communicating with this Pope.

A recent book by Bob Woodward (State of Denial) on the politics of the Iraq war claims that Kissinger has become one of the advisers that George W. Bush most listens to, although Kissinger is considered a leading 'realist' as opposed to the so-called neocons who are considered to be the most influential with the President.

Woodward claims however that Kissinger is an advocate of not retreating from Iraq until the prospects for that country are more encouraging.

The Pope and Kissinger may well be discussing a whole range of international issues starting with the Muslim issue and the Pope's coming trip to Turkey. Then there's Iraq, Iran, the Israel-Palestine question, Lebanon, international terrorism, the plight of the poor African countries and trans-Atlantic relations.

[The reporter continues with an account of Kissinger's difficult relationship with Italian Premier Aldo Moro who had wanted to include Communists in his government, against the advice of the United states, and ironically ended up being kidnapped and eventually killed by Red Brigade urban guerrillas in the late 60s.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/11/2006 1.19]

It will be a busy diplomatic month for the Holy Father. Besides his trip to Turkey at the end of the month, he will be receiving several heads of government, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury (Primate of the Anglican Church) at the Vatican in November.

Lella in the main forum shares with us an Italian news agency summary of the announced state visitors to the Vatican so far:

Monday, Nov. 6 - Laszlo Solyom, President of Hungary
Friday, Nov. 10 - Tassos Papadopoulos, President of Cyprus
Saturday, Nov. 11 - Leonel Fernandez, President of the Dominican Republic
Saturday, Nov. 18 - Horst Koehler*, President of Germany
NB: Koehler will return in the afternoon for a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Quartet
for the Pope at the Sala Clementina.
Monday, Nov. 20 - Giorgio Napolitano, President of Italy
Thursday, Nov. 23- Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
Friday, Nov. 24 - Manuel Zelaya, President of Honduras

The Pope leaves for Turkey on November 28, returning December 1.

On December 14, he will meet at the Vatican with Archbishop Christodoulos, head of the Greek Orthodox Church.
==============================================================

*Perhaps appropriately, President Koehler of Germany is far and away the head of state who has met with this Pope most often. He attended the Pope's Inaugural Mass, he welcomed him in Cologne and hosted him at his official residence in Bonn, he visited the Vatican a second time before the Pope's trip to Bavaria, he welcomed the Pope in Bavaria and met with him in private audience afterwards, and now his third visit to the Vatican. Koehler, a Protestant, is a strong and active advocate of ecumenism.

The Pope has met German Chancellor Angela Merkel on three occasions: a private audience in Cologne when she was still head of the opposition, a visit to the Vatican as Chancellor shortly before the Bavarian trip, and a private audience in Munich when the Pope was there in Septmber.

Merkel, daughter of a Protestant minister, shares Joseph Ratzinger's reservations about Turkey entering the European Union and was the first and only European head of government to speak up for the Pope after the first hostile reactions to the Muhammed citation in his Regensburg lecture.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/11/2006 1.27]

This weekend, Lella shares with us two articles in the Italian press which analyze the language that Benedict XVI uses as Pope, as well as Churchspeak in general..

I chose to translate the shorter piece first, which starts out well, but ends up with the analyst - a professor of religious philosophy - speaking philosophical cant to explain Benedict's very understandable language!

He did have a good catchphrase - "Benedict's language is the diametric opposite of the language used in talk shows."
===============================================================

In Benedict, one hears the language
of the Church Fathers and Doctors
By Alberto Griglio
Il Foglio
1 Nov 2006

Papa Ratzinger administers his Magisterium in the name of the faith but also with careful attention to the world and the human beings in all his forms of expression - cultural, historical, philosophical, ethical and moral.

The cultural and theological underpinnings of Ratzinger's thought raise questions for everyone and are meant to provoke thought.

Ratzinger acts as Pope, both in the pastoral and prophetic sense, but he enunciates his thought with great clarity, using a theological language that in many ways is surprisingly unprecedented as a homiletic style.

So what is new in Benedict XVI's words and syntax? We asked this of Prof. Gaspare Mura, phoilosopher and interpreter of religions at the Pontifical Lateran University and the Urbaniana in Rome.

"If one must do a linguistic analysis of the language that is specific to Benedict XVI's teaching, one must first say that it belongs with all the great traditions of the Roman Catholic Church." Mura said.

"Specifically, it is the language of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Like the Doctors, he explains the contents of Revelation and tradition with conceptual clarity, and like the Fathers, he does directly to the heart of the problem, without going around it, and rightly avoiding the habitual rhetoric and words that are commonly used in our contemporary culture, which hides the truth rather than reveal it.

"If we want to say it with a catch phrase, it is a language that is diametrically opposite to that used in talk shows. Maybe this is why some claim not to understand him.

"Benedict places himself in the perspective of what we might legitimately call 'classical philosophy' which we find in that dwscipline called 'perennial philosophy' in Christian terms, according to which reason, Logos, is meant to explain the totality of what is real.

"Unlike the sciences, philosophy means to grasp rationally the causes and principles not of one reality or the other, but of all reality. That is why its purpose - 'free and divine,' according to Aristotle - can be resolved only in a 'total contemplation of the truth.'

"Consequently, it is important that man exercises his reason in trying to know the truth because only from this knowledge can he correctly define his moral behavior.

"For Benedict, the concept of truth - understood in the metaphysical Greek sense and the entire great Christian tradition - has the character of 'absoluteness', in the sense that the truths that arise in the history of philosophy do penetrate Truth in a way that is not simply historical but is
principally metaphysical and metahistorical, and therefore, not dependent on contingency.

"Certainly, absoluteness is a characteristic that Christian philosophy, from Augustine to Thomas to Nicholas Cusano, attributes only to the Being who is 'absolutus' - literally unbound, unlinked to any contingent or material circumstance, therefore, God, the Being who transcends everything.

"Nevertheless, from the moment that man is able, because of his intellect, to penetrate into the truth of being, the metaphysical truths that he learns are no longer simple contingent and historical truths or principles, because these are somehow part of that absoluteness of truth which is the ultimate end of philosophical search.

"And this is the relationship between man's reason, logos, and the Logos of God, as Benedict XVI reminds us. Truth - and this concept has been uninterruptedly valid in Christian philosophy from Augustine to Thomas to Bonaventure to Rosmini and Maritain - comes directly from the truth of being, understood as the created one's participation in the truth of God Himself.

"Thomas of Aquinas says 'The divine intellect is the measure of all things...in that each of them is true, to the degree in which they mirror the divine intellect."

===============================================================

As someone who simply reads and listens to what the Pope has to say, I think it is clear that most people who come to hear him with an open mind have no problem understanding him - not only because he uses simple direct language and always defines his concepts clearly - but because he always relates these concepts to a person's daily experience. Because of this direct connection to everyday experience, he involves his listeners in every sense.

As believers, we accept what he says as the truth not only because he is the Pope, but because, as an evangelist, he always cites God, speaking through the Scriptures and through Christ Himself in the Gospels, as the ultimate authority.

As men possessed of reason, we 'recognize' truth when we hear it, because reason encompasses some sort of universal 'conscience' - a sense of right and wrong - that intuitively discriminates against falsehood and gives us a sense of absolute truth.

Here is a translation of the second article, which contrasts the Pope's language with the usual 'ecclesialese' or Churchspeak - and specifically contrasts the addresses given by Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi of Milan and by Benedict XVI before the delegates to the recent National Convention of the Italian Church in Verona".


The cultural poverty of 'Churchspeak'
The language of Cardinal Tettamanzi does not draw from reality
but elicits the facile applause of sociologists
By Maurizio Crippa

Let us go on record to acknowledge a widespread and explicit awareness of the 'distance' (in the sense of strangeness and/or opposition) that exists between the Christian faith and modern, contemporary mentality in the socio-cultural as well as ecclesial context.

This is not to find fault with the Cardinal who 'declines [as in grammatical declension] the reference to ecclesial communion in universal terms,' as well as "the accumulated ecclesial wealth in a modified social-cultural-ecclesial situation.'

Let us go back to Verona on October 16, 2006 at the opening of the National Convention of the Italian Church, a once-every-decade event.

The speaker is Cardinal Tettamanzi of Milan, Archbishop of Europe's largest archdiocese and secretary of the convention's preparatory committee, like his predecessor in St. Ambrose's Chair, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who had the same role for the convention held in Loreto 20 years ago.

His Eminence Cardinal Tettamanzi speaks about 'the task of elaborating - through an interpretation that knows how to weave together faith and reason, theory and practice, spirituality and ministry, identity and dialog - a a renewed anthropological concept [concept of man?] under the sign of hope."

For the record, there may have been some yawning or impatience among his listeners. But they were in the minority. Most of the 2,700 delegates appeared to be in substantial harmony with such language, with its circumlocutory and rather social-bureaucratic manner of presenting ideas.

One could see it in the next few days, in the general tone of much of the 'group' work that went on, where the ecclesial communion was expressed above all through a common jargon in defining issues and problems.

It wasn't just Cardinal Tettamanzi. It was very much the tone of the report by Paola Bignardi, acknowledged lay leader formerly of Catholic Action, and of the religious men and women who came to the microphone to deliver their 'reflections.'

For the record, too, the rest of Italian lay society and a part of the Church itself have a diffuse sense of alienation that renders them hard of hearing to this kind of language.

Tettamanzi admonishes: "We are aware that to be 'witnesses of the Risen Christ, hope of the world' requires a more compact and dynamic missionary communion among the different categories of the faithful."

Now, what marks the difference - because one only needs to have ears and does not need to have studied theology to see the obvious difference - between Tettamanzi's sentence and a sentence that is almost semantically identical, pronounced by Benedict XVI three days later in his homily at Bentegodi stadium in Verona?

Benedict said: "We need to go back and announce with vigor and joy the event of the death and resurrection of Christ, which is the core of Christianity."

To bear witness to the Risen Christ requires 'a missionary communion among rhe different categories of the faithful" or
rather, 'to announce the event of the death and resurrection of Christ'? What is the difference between the two types of language used?

Which costs great effort for the average person - the estranged Catholic as well as the simple man who goes to Mass every Sunday - who, when hearing a certain ecclesiastical language, feels as if he is hitting his head against a wall, listening to something which puts him off and is ultimately incomprehensible?

Let us examine how and why.

Dionigi Tettamanzi is a moral theologian, former seminary professor and a prolfic author of texts on family morals ("A Dictionary of Bioethics", among other works), as well as the trusted ghostwriter of all the bioethical documents signed by John Paul II. So he is not really one of those fearsome 'progressives."

But as in a well-aged and decanted wine, his listeners can detect in a glass of good Tettamanzi a complex sediment of rumor and aftertaste. But fresher and more recent, a bit superficial but quickly sensed, is a whiff of Sant'Egidio [popular Rome-based church movement].

The affection that binds the Cardinal of Milan to the church movement in Trastevere developed in the past few years. The Sant'Egidians found in him a new protector and an expendable candidate (first for the Papacy, and now to succeed Cardinal Ruini at the CEI) although hardly on the winning side.

And in them, the cardinal has found advocates who can give him the social and international projection that he lacks. When he says things like "a new vision and realization of globality and the the great questions of justice and peace;" when he says that "the other religions have nothing to fear from Christianity" - these are bubbles from Trastevere that are breaking through to tickle a taster's nose.

One must say that Sant'Egidio [main promoters of the Assisi inter-religious 'events'] has for some time now expanded its horizons but well boxed-in within its chosen path of multi-culturalism, and its leader, Andre Riccardi, has come to recognize some secular interests relative to Christianity. Apparently, however, the briefing has not yet reached the Archbishop of Milan.

While Sant'Egidio may be Tettamanzi's essential aroma, on the palate, one tastes a Johannine sweetness, a distant memory of a good country curate. But this does not provide Tettamanzi's substance nor the structure of his thought.

His substance derives from a moral technique that is accustomed to looking at things only from trhe standpoint of ethics and its consequences. Very rarely does it concern itself with the essence of things.

Thus, the admonitions of "we must strenghten ourselves", "we can and must recognize" - all of it submerged and dissolved in the curial jargon of church apparatchiks which is their most evident characteristic. even to the most inpexperienced, as abvious as red wine is red.

"Distinguished by eschatological tension, ecclesial communion can rediscover humility and conversion in the face of its different forms of laceration."

Sheer Churchspeak - that, is, the language of a church that is speaking (only) to itself.

Roberto Beretta,a journalist with Avvenire, years ago wrote “Il piccolo ecclesialese illustrato” (The small illustrated Churchspeak, ed. Ancora), a jewel of pungent irony which, in the form of a dictionary, unmasks the commonplaces and fictions devoid of meaning in the language that has taken over the communications of the Roman Catholic Church.

"In the 30 years that church communications abandoned its own canons in an effort to make itself better understood by ordinary persons, it seems people have stopped understanding." And this may be out of laziness, out of fear, or simply because the Church has nothing to say, says Beretta, who has a second book called "Da che pulpito?" [From what pulpit], ion which he takes to task contemporary preaching.

"Above all," he says of present-day homilies, "(priests have) an inability to express themselves, but this is made worse by the fact that the Church actually says too much, too many speeches are being made, and in the end, repetitiveness becomes the norm, along with formulas that say little but give the impression of plumbing the most profound theological depths possible."

A famous saying that "he who talks poorly thinks poorly and lives badly" may well apply to Churchspeak as well, to undertsand which 'you may not need a degree in sociology but it sure will help."

Catholicism today has a communications problem - born of automatism, but not only that. Beretta says, "First of all, one communicates if one has something to say."

And that is why Benedict XVI always finds the words to say what he wants to say, whether he is tracing very narrowly defined doctrinal points in defense of Truth, or when, as in Verona, he circumvents all sociological traps and says plainly and clearly: "Christianity is in fact open to all that is just true and pure in all cultures and civilizations, to all that lightens, consoles and fortifies our daily existence."

Or when on October 6, in speaking to the members of the International Theological Commission, he began by saying, "I have not really prepared a homily but just some just notes to meditate on," and then proceeded to this splendid linguistic expression, "Obedience to the truth should 'chasten' our spirits," going on to say that "to speak in order to seek applause, to speak by orienting oneself according to what people want to hear, to speak in obedience to the dictatorship of common opinion, must be considered a prostitution of words and of the soul."

Churchspeak is likewise characterized by "a reluctance to explain, even to oneself, the reasons for believing."

So where does the Church's aphony - we won't say aphasia, because it does speak and often - come from? Or at least the aphony of those who are always harking back to 'the spirit of VAtican-II' or who, in Verona, were more represented by the 'softness' of the Archbishop of Milan rather than the programmatic bluntness of Cardinal Ruini as president of the Italian bishops conference.

The late journalist Giovanni Fallani, who was among other things, the first editor of SIR, the news agency of the CEI - started taking notes on Churchspeak during the Second Vatican Council, when he first heard the term 'pastoral level.'

He started to note down a whole series of terms and coded locutions which were incomprehensible to him (let alone to his readers!) but which the council fathers seemed to understand as one.

It would be irreverent to say that the Second Vatican Council itself was a linguistic product of the 60s. But the thought reappears like a sour note every time someone speaks of that international council in terms of "the difficulties of a Christianity that is ever more closed in on itself, far from the ends and evolution of society," as did Prof. Giuseppe Alberigo this week, remembering the death of Fr. Giuseppe Dossetti, 'the guerrilla of the Counci' as he weas called by Cardinal Leon Joseph Suenens. [Alberigo is the head of the so-called 'Bologna school' which interprets Vatican-II as a complete break from the past, rather than an updating of the Church in continuity with its traditions.]

Moreover, if there was one point over which the Council fathers knocked their brains out but found substantial agreement on, it was that "addressing the profane world would mean adopting ite language, avoiding jargon" (Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II).

And yet, never as in the past few decades has the primacy of the Word shone as much in the Church. In discerning the various traits of the Tettamanzi bouquet, one notes a direct legacy from his predecessor in Milan, Cardinal Martini.

A Jesuit scholar and an excellent Biblical connoisseur, Martini cut a deep swathe with his 'School of Words" and 'lectio divina', which not only his successor but many of the faithful in all of the dioceses continue to follow - those who found in Martini a reflex antidote to the 'kerygmatic' impact of John Paul II.

Prof. Pietro De Marco, lecturer at the theological faculty for southern Italy, seeks to dig deeper into this issue: "There has been a lengthy period of penetration into the language of the Catholic Church of Protestant theological language, not imputable so much or only to the Council, and which has cascaded into the language of ministry and in the common speech of priests."

It is as though, at a certain point, Catholics had found greater relevance in the heated moralizing language of Protestantism, if only because among Protestants, everything is centered on the Word as "read, prayed, sung, explained", in the words of the theologian Ermanno Genre.

De Marco explains: "It is a style that is highly 'adjectivized,' in which God's call is always 'the powerful call of God', commitment is always 'loyal'; hope is always 'indomitable.' And likewise thick with adverbs and exhortations. Very different from traditional Catholic language, which is much less inflammatory, more concerned with doctrine and the institution rather than with morals." [ Really? Not if I recall the 'fire and brimstone' preachers I heard - and learned to avoid - in the late 50s and the 60s.]

Di Marco notes further: "The Council pivoted on the idea of a non-dogmatic theology which could be made understandable to the world in non-theoretical language."

The average language of the Italian Chruch that was mostly heard in Verona is the result of decades of drift. Even if few will admit so openly, many can recall that in the seminaries, for a long time, it was more 'natural' to read the Calvinist theologian Karl Barth or Rudolf Bultmannn, the theologian of 'demythification' - and their words and ideas inevitably flowed over into the framing of pastoral plans and even in the catechism taught in the parishes.

But what a substantive difference form the words of Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who said: "We should not think of Christianity as needing to justify itself to the present time, but of justifying the present time relative to the message of Christianity."

"Where one finds oneself before the claims of Christ, that is the present." These were words said in the 1930s, but which today would be considered not in the spirit of dialog, and which a great number of the delegates to Verona in the Church of the third millenium would not have applauded.

It is a problem of form as well as content.

What a world of difference there is between saying, "Certainly none of us can even minimally negate or attenuate the existence of so many evils, dramas and growing if not unprecedented dangers in the present historical moment," and Papa Ratzinger's words: "In our time, despite all the progress we have achieved, evil has not been defeated at all; rather, its power seems to be growing stronger, and soon all efforts to hide that will be unmasked."

In the latter, a Christianity that expresses fearlessly what it is without proposing to adapt itselt to the world. And in the former, to use the words of Sandro Magister, "a meek and friendly Church, silently merged with the forces of progress, invisible like yeast in the dough, focused on the primacy of individual conscience."

That is the famous 'kenosis' or 'emptying' - a word that is replaging in eccesiastical fashion the word 'parresia', or speaking clearly - a word so dear to the prior of Bose, Enzo Bianchi, prophety of a 'a Church that listens before it speaks.'

The difference is ontological. There has been a certain tendency over the long term on the part of the Church - specifically, its hierarchy - to leave ontological questions within parentheses, strangely enough, those related to reason: from reflections on the cosmos, a passionate Ratzingerian theme, to the fact that "Christ's resurrection is a historical event, of which the Apostles were witnesses and not inventors," as Papa Ratzinger said in Verona, cutting short all 'interpretations.'

Quite the opposite, theologians and catechists have castled themselves in a defense of Catholic ethics, with the tedious and hardly ever effective ploy of invoking not the faith as it is ,but what the faith should be.

The result has been to involve the Church in a meta-language - as the semioticists of the 1960s would say - which no longer speaks about reality (that which happens to man and in which he is interested) but becomes a discourse referring to other theological discourses 9in the best scenario, a reflection on Scriptures).

On the one hand, political correctness is the ideal: "Precisely in the church, in a new and revitalized way, we can and should realize the most variegated and possibly the most difficult communion - for instance, that between men and women, youth and adults, rich and poor, students and teachers, the healthy and the sick, the powerful and the weak, neighbors and strangers, ctizens of the village and citizens of the world." And so, in whatever parish you go to, you always end up talking about 'welcoming' and 'listening', 'dialog' and sacrifice.' Or how to "better recognize the face of the other'.

On the other, there are those who would dust off an optimistic attitude that rests, more than on the Council, on the 'adaptability' of the faith. A return to "the decidedly optimistic spirit of Vatican-II," Tettamanzi said, which "instead of depressing diagnoses, sowed encouraging remedies; innstead of dire predictions, messages of truth."

For Prof. Di Marco, the problem basically is not what this language could say - no one could find anything wrong in it, even the orthodox. The problem is 'what things it becomes impossible to say. Against optimism, against welcoming diversity, against 'common ways to conversion,' one cannot pose an objection, one cannot say they are contrary to the faith nor to the Church as an institution.

"But even worse, one cannot speak of reality: we see how difficult it is for believers to propose a debate on questions of public interest, for instance, on bioethical issues, discussed on the basis of reason rather than on ethical terms."

One time, a supersecularist like Enrico Ghezzi said of Giovanni Testori that "his supreme courage' lay in 'using the word sin without anyone getting the urge to laugh.' Testori, for his part, said that when he wrote for Corriere della Sera his most stinging words on the condition of the faith in the world today, "no bishop, no cardinal, no Christian Democrrat ever contacted me."

Words that have instead provoked a wide range of concessions from the Church. In his eulogy of Dossetti, published Monday in Repubblica, Prof. Alberigo explained how at the basis of Dossetti's positions - vanguard of Conciliar 'progressivism' - was "the necessity for the Church to choose 'cultural poverty,'
meaning to renounce power based on doctrinal certainties from the Enlightenment."

The reference to the Enlightenment and to the rational certainties of the faith is not at all casual, but pertinent and central to the Pope's appeal for an encounter 'between reason and faith, between authentic enlightenment and religion,' in his Regensburg lecture. It is also a reference to so many laymen who felt alluded to, or at least have shown interest, in the words of the professor-Pope - if only because they did understand what he said.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/11/2006 23.22]

As to both the NCR and George Weigel I would be a little cautious. We already know that the writers of NCR are arguably "Catholic," and I myself would argue that they are, on the whole, not Catholic. George Weigel, on the other hand, along with his friend, Richard John Neuhaus, has another agenda, i.e., to prove that there is no discernable difference between Benedict XVI and John Paul II, when there are substantial differences between the two. Weigel, in fact, wrote a column three weeks ago, which Neuhaus cribbed in the last First Things, that Pope Benedict's view of Islam is no different from John Paul's. The problem with Weigel/Neuhaus is that there are salient differences between the two, not only on Islam, but on inter-religious dialogue in general, ecumenical dialogue, secularism, and a host of other issues, and not simply on presentation, but on content.

Report: Vatican No. 2 asks for prayers for Benedict's trip to Turkey

The Associated Press

The Vatican's secretary of state on Sunday asked the faithful to pray for Pope Benedict XVI's pilgrimage later this month to Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country where anger lingers over the pontiff's remarks linking Islam and violence, Italian news agencies reported.

Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, speaking in Tuscany, described the trip as an "important and delicate pastoral visit" by the pontiff, the ANSA and Apcom news agencies reported.

The trips officials focus will be Benedict's meeting with the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who is based in Istanbul.

"I invite you to pray for Pope Benedict XVI's voyage in Turkey toward the patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I," Bertone was quoted as saying, using the ancient name for Istanbul. Benedict has been trying to improve relations among Christian denominations.

Bertone pointed out to faithful in the cathedral of the town of Pienza that the Nov. 28-Dec. 1 pilgrimage was also a visit "to a Muslim country, (a visit with) religious authorities and political authorities," ANSA and Apcom reported.

"May the dialogue with other religions be fruitful, to build together ... humanity in peace and in harmony with the will of the Creator," Bertone was quoted as saying.

On Thursday, police in Istanbul detained a man who fired shots into the air outside the Italian consulate to protest the visit, which would be Benedict's first to a predominantly Muslim country since becoming pontiff last year.

Benedict sparked widespread anger in the Muslim world when he quoted, during a speech in Germany on Sept. 12, the words of a medieval emperor who had characterized the Prophet Muhammad's teachings as "evil and inhuman."

Benedict has since expressed regret for offending Muslims and called for dialogue with Islam.

John Allen's dialy column today gives an overview of the Muslim issue as Pope Benedict XVI and the West must deal with.

The Cross and the Crescent
Posted on Nov 6, 2006
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Dallas

Thursday through Saturday, I was in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I spoke Thursday night to a meeting of the Dallas chapter of Legatus, the association for Catholic businessmen, and Friday I gave a series of presentations on church communications for the “Ministerium” of the Diocese of Fort Worth, an annual gathering of parish and diocesan ministers, ordained, religious and lay, along with Bishop Kevin Vann.

Saturday night, I delivered the Landregan Lecture at the University of Dallas on “The Cross and the Crescent: The Relationship between the Church and Islam under Benedict XVI.”

The heart of my argument in that lecture is that Pope Benedict XVI may well be the last, best hope for serious dialogue between the West and the Islamic world, because he is the lone figure of global standing in the West with the spiritual and theological credentials to address Muslims from within their own thought world.

Hence when Benedict challenges Muslims to embrace reason and to respect religious freedom, he does so from within a shared space of commitment to religious truth.

I think I can say that this argument met with enthusiasm from many Catholics desperate for some sign of hope in the relationship with Islam – as well as fairly deep skepticism from others, who believe that the pope finds himself addressing people largely closed to his voice.

Given Benedict’s upcoming Nov. 28-Dec. 2 trip to Turkey, it’s a discussion with obvious topicality.

Excerpts from that lecture are below.

* * *

There are four points which I believe are important to make about the relationship with Islam under Benedict XVI.

(1) Violence and Reciprocity
Benedict will continue to press Muslims, in a far more explicit fashion than John Paul II, on two points: the rejection of religious violence, especially terrorism; and the need for Islamic states to respect the religious freedom of their minorities, a cause which in the Vatican is known as “reciprocity.”

Though this story is woefully under-reported in the West, the effort to convince moderate Islamic leaders to denounce terrorism has recorded some progress.

In the wake of 9/11, for example, Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo – sometimes known as the “Vatican of the Islamic world” – dismissed Osama bin-Laden’s credentials as a jihadist and warned young Muslims against heeding his call to battle in Afghanistan.

The Egyptian militant group Al-Jama’a, which fielded more than one hundred thousand fighters in Islamic causes around the world in the 1990s, condemned the 9/11 attacks on the grounds that Islamic law “bans killing civilians,” and denied the hijackers the status of martyrs, among other reasons, because the U.S. government had admitted them as guests, and hence they had broken the obligations of hospitality.

Polls conducted in Muslim nations found broad majorities that would agree with the sentiment. Such data suggests the battle here may not so much be conceptual as political, of galvanizing Islamic governments to take serious action against extremist movements, and of resolving the foreign policy imbroglios such as the conflicts in the Holy Land and in Iraq that sometimes give those extremist movements cover.

Reciprocity may prove a tougher nut to crack, because it does pose a direct doctrinal challenge to the mainstream Muslim understanding of what we in the West would call church/state relations. The track record in majority Muslim states is not encouraging. Consider the following examples:

• Saudi Arabia: In the 1990s, the Saudi government spent $25 million to build the largest mosque in Europe, in Rome, with the full support of John Paul II. Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia today, the Koran is officially the country’s constitution, with public religious expression other than the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam prohibited. This ban is backed up by the mutawaa, or religious police.

Christians cannot build churches anywhere in the country, and area five times the size of Texas, and they cannot worship in public or private. In 2005, the mutawaa conducted at least four raids of Christian “house churches,” according to the Center for Religious Freedom.

Christians cannot import Bibles or wear religious symbols, and clergy cannot wear religious dress. Capuchin priests charged with pastoral care of several hundred thousand Catholics, mostly Filipino, Vietnamese and Korean guest workers, cannot minister openly.

• Iran: The constitution proclaims Shi’a Islam the official religion. It recognizes Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians as protected minorities, but all face discrimination in education, government, and the armed services.

Common law applies the death sentence for trying to convert Muslims. Over the past 13 years, at least eight evangelical Christians have been killed by government authorities, and more than 20 are reported “disappeared.”

Last year, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, secretary general of the powerful Council of Guardians, stated that “non-Muslims cannot be described as human beings, but as sinning animals come to earth to disseminate corruption.”

• Sudan: Everyone in the north of the country, Muslim or not, is subject to Islamic law. Although permits are regularly granted to build mosques, permission to build churches is denied.

The death penalty for apostasy from Islam remains the law, even if it’s rarely enforced. Converts typically cannot remain in Sudan. Since President Omar El Bashir came to power in 1989, alcohol has been forbidden, which makes use of wine illegal even in the Catholic Mass.

• Egypt: The constitution guarantees freedom of worship, but Islam is the official religion and shariah the main source of legislation.

Coptic Christians, who represent 15 percent of the population, are limited to roughly one percent of positions in parliament, military and police academies, the judiciary and diplomatic corps, and teaching.

Family law is also an issue. If a Christian father converts to Islam, his minor children must follow suit. The mother’s custody rights, which otherwise take precedence, are ignored.

Recently, a civil court ruled that the Coptic Church must remarry a divorced person, despite church teaching to the contrary. Another court ruled that polygamy is permissible in Christianity.

• Nigeria: Since October 1999, 12 northern Nigerian states have extended sharia into the state’s criminal courts. Some states have sanctioned quasi-official Hisbah, or religious police, to enforce violations.

Christians suffer discrimination in building or repairing churches, access to education and media, representation in government, and employment. In August 2005, the Hisbah forced 15 Christian churches to close in one state alone.

• Turkey: Although officially tolerance is the law of the land, religious services without authorization are illegal, and religious communities cannot own property. The government often deposes religious leaders not to its liking.

Seminaries of the Armenian Apostolic and the Greek Orthodox churches were closed in the 1970s, and the government has resisted attempts to reopen them. Foreign religious workers face harassment, and religious communities are under state surveillance.

To be sure, the motives for such repression are political and ethnic as much as religious, and the primary victims are often other Muslims. Yet the lack of a developed Islamic theology of pluralism certainly contributes to the mix.

Benedict XVI, along with a broad cross-section of opinion inside and outside the Catholic Church, sees all this as an intolerable violation of human dignity, and will continue to demand a reckoning.

(2) Committed to Dialogue
Despite all this, Benedict is deeply committed to dialogue with Muslims, so that any exploitation of his Regensburg remarks to promote a politics of xenophobia misses the mark.

The fundamental “clash of civilizations” Benedict sees in the world today is not between Islam and the West, but between belief and unbelief – between a culture that recognizes the supernatural and a role for religion in shaping both public and private life, and one which does not.

In that struggle, Benedict regards Muslims as natural allies. He has said repeatedly over the years that he admires their moral and religious seriousness, and he believes the West has something to learn from Muslims about resisting secularization. He believes that the Church and Islam can also be partners in the social, cultural and political arena.

The experience of the Holy See in building coalitions with Islamic governments in the mid-1990s at United Nations conferences in Cairo and Beijing, successfully resisting the attempts of the Clinton administration and others to create new entitlements to abortion and other “reproductive rights” under international law, certainly buttresses this conviction.

It is in this sense that I believe Benedict XVI is the last, best hope of the West for a serious dialogue with Islam. Benedict is the lone figure of global standing in the West who speaks from within the same thought world that Muslims who are sympathetic to the strong religious identity of the jihadists themselves inhabit.

Thus when he challenges Islam to reject violence and to embrace a healthy form of pluralism and the lay state, at least potentially he does so from within a common space of traditional moral values and deep religious commitment. He lays down his gauntlets as a concerned friend, pushing Islam to realize the best version of itself.

It is important to make this point, because in some quarters Benedict has been enlisted as an intellectual patron of a rising tide of anti-Islamic sentiment, a sort of chaplain for a new anti-Muslim “Cold War.”

While Joseph Ratzinger is certainly a reality, and while he harbors his doubts about the capacity of Islam to develop a culture of rational theological reflection given the basic commitment to a literal reading of the Qu’ran, he nevertheless also believes the stakes are too high, and the potential contribution of enlightened Muslims to the global debate are too important, to succumb to a zero/sum dynamic of permanent conflict. What Benedict XVI hopes to stimulate, in other words, is an Islamic reform, not a new Crusade.

(3) The Turkey Trip
The upcoming Turkey trip, Nov. 28-Dec. 2, looms as an important watershed in this regard. Among other things, it will likely be the most-covered papal trip since John Paul II visited Israel in 1999, and in this case it will be widely followed not just in the West but all across the Islamic world.

Benedict’s visit will be carried live, virtually bell-to-bell, on Al Jazeerah and other television networks. It will therefore be the first time that millions of Muslims have the opportunity to hear the pope speak live, in his own voice, rather than filtered through after-the-fact media accounts.

In that sense, it is a crucial test of his capacity to redirect the dialogue with Islam down a frank but constructive path. While obviously the work of an Islamic reform is obviously one for Muslims themselves to carry out, Benedict’s Turkey trip could provide an important stimulus. The trip merits your careful attention and, if I may dare suggest, your prayerful support.

(4) The United States
Fourth and finally, a word about what we in the United States can do. Catholics in the United States, I believe, may be in a unique position to help advance the kind of “sincere and frank” dialogue Benedict has advocated.

While estimates vary, there are said to be around four million Muslims in the United States, and that number is rising. Two-thirds of the mosques in this country are supported directly or indirectly by the Saudis, meaning by the Wahabi form of Islam – which has long provided much of the intellectual, spiritual and logistical infrastructure for Islamic radicalism.

Yet in the wake of Regensburg, there was no violent Muslim backlash in the United States analogous to what one saw in parts of Europe. What this suggests is that Muslims in America may be going through a transition analogous to that of American Catholics, who prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) had an official doctrine of church/state relations they couldn’t reconcile with their experience of living in a pluralistic society in which religion nevertheless thrived.

American Catholics led the way for the universal Church towards a new understanding of religious freedom, and perhaps American Muslims, in their own fashion, can make an analogous contribution to the global Islamic debate. Since Catholics have walked this path before, we may be in a special position to encourage American Muslims to find their voice.

* * *
I concluded with this thought:

In the wake of Regensburg, the climate for Muslim/Christian exchange, I would submit, has been made more poisonous. If many Muslims harbor unresolved resentments about the pope’s language, many Christians and others in the West are experiencing a kind of fatigue about Muslim outrage.

Seeing images of the pope burned in effigy, of Muslims irrationally associating Benedict XVI with the foreign policy of President George Bush despite the Vatican’s long track record of opposition to both Gulf Wars, and of violent attacks against churches and missionaries, many in the West may be tempted to conclude that dialogue with these people is impossible, that the best we can hope to do is to prepare for the cataclysmic showdown that seems to be looming.

If Benedict XVI is to lead us out of this blind alley, that project will require the energy and imagination of committed women and men of good will, including all of you in this room tonight. It is a challenge that all of us together must face – but one we must pray, along with Pope Benedict, that all of us together can face.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/11/2006 0.36]

VATICAN CITY, Nov. 6, 2006 (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI is to buy bonds in support of vaccination programs for children in poor countries.

Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino will travel Tuesday to London on behalf of the pope to buy bonds issued last month by the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm).

"Through this gesture, Benedict XVI wants to offer his full support to the initiative," Martino said Monday in a note to Vatican correspondents, without disclosing the amount of the purchase.

IFFIm, created by British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, has the support of Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Norway and Sweden.

It aims to accelerate the flow of funding for immunization programs and help prevent five million child deaths between 2006 and 2015 by protecting more than 500 million children against measles, tetanus and yellow fever.

Martino heads the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

===============================================================
Too bad it is not clear whether Benedict is buying the bonds personally, or whether it is through one of the papal charities, or both. Royalties from his writings as Cardinal Ratzinger have usually gone to charities and will continue to go to charities now that he is Pope.

Vatican academy to ponder evolution;
Pope addresses limits of science

VATICAN CITY, nOV. 6, 2006 (AP) — Scientists advising Pope Benedict XVI told the pontiff on Monday that they will study scientific insights into evolution, reflecting his special interest in the subject.

Nicola Cabibbo, a physics professor at Rome's La Sapienza University and president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said in a speech to the pope that academy members shared the pontiff's view that "faith and reason need to come together in a new way."

No date has been set for the meeting exploring "scientific insights into the evolution of the universe and of life," which Cabibbo noted was of "special interest" to the pope. Generally, the plenary session of the academy meets every two years.

Benedict's predecessor, John Paul, told the academy in 1996 that Charles Darwin's theories on evolution were sound as long as they took into account that creation was the work of God and that Darwin's theory of evolution was "more than a hypothesis."

Evolution has come under fire in recent years by proponents of "intelligent design" who believe that living organisms are so complex they must have been created by a higher force rather than evolving from more primitive forms.

In the United States, supporters of both camps have often clashed over what students should be taught in public schools.

The academy is currently grappling with predictability in science. It is an advisory body of scientists, researchers and scholars who help shape papal pronouncements.

Benedict praised science for contributing to the protection of the environment, the progress of developing nations, the fight against epidemics and an increase in life expectancy.

"It become clear that there is no conflict between God's providence and human enterprise," Benedict said.

Still, "man cannot place in science and technology so radical and unconditional a trust as to believe that scientific and technological progress can explain everything and completely fulfill all his existential and spiritual needs," Benedict told academy members.

"Science cannot replace philosophy and revelation by giving an exhaustive answer to man's most radical questions."

Exploring the relationship between faith and reason has been a theme for Benedict, a former theology professor, since he became pope last year.
===============================================================

The full text of the Pope's address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, delivered in English, may be found in HOMILIES, DISCOURSES, MESSAGES. Too bad the wire-service story above gave little attention to the Pope's address. With this Pope, you're always better off going to his full text!

Among other things, it had this precious line about evolution and creation: 'evolution as the origin of a succession in space and time, and creation as the ultimate origin of participated being in essential Being'.

In the FAITH AND SCIENCE thread, Benefan posted a CNA story about the Pope's speech. But the writer also missed the beautiful juxtaposition of evolution vis-a-vis creation cited above.

Incidentally, let us not forget that last September, it was announced that the texts (and discussions?) of the Ratzinger Schuelerkreise summer seminar at Castel Gandolfo on evolution would be published this month. It would be the first such publication in more than 25 years of the Schuelerkreise annual seminars. Definitely something to look forward to.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/11/2006 6.28]

Do check out Christopher Blosser's BENEDICT BLOG for October for a few English articles we missed.

www.popebenedictxvifanclub.com/blog/2006/11/pope-benedict-roun...

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/11/2006 17.49]

Pope says Catholics can't choose which teachings to follow or ignore

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Catholics, whether laypeople or priests, cannot choose which teachings of the church are important to follow and which can be ignored, Pope Benedict XVI said.

"The basic duty of the bishop -- pastor and teacher of the faith -- is to invite the faithful to accept fully the teaching of the church," said the pope in a Nov. 7 address to the bishops of Switzerland.

The bishops were in Rome for meetings with Vatican officials and the pope as a delayed conclusion to their February 2005 "ad limina" visits. Those visits, which bishops make every five years, were interrupted by the illness and death of Pope John Paul II.

Pope Benedict said he knows that it is a "painful experience" for the bishops to see practicing Catholics and "sometimes even priests" question some of the doctrines and disciplines taught by the church.

"Some have assumed a right to choose, in matters of faith, those teachings that, according to them, should be accepted and those that can be refused," he said.

In countering such positions, the pope told the bishops they must "proclaim the Gospel with courage and serenity," trusting that Christ will assist them even when people do not seem ready to hear the truth.

Pope Benedict said Switzerland faced the same problems as much of the rest of Western Europe: declining Mass attendance and people questioning the moral teaching of the church.

"I am thinking particularly of the profound crisis in the institution of marriage and the family, of the growing number of divorces, the growing number of abortions and the possibility of unions between persons of the same sex: All of these are an evident sign of de-Christianization," he said.

But even while secularization is spreading, the pope said, people are asking questions about the meaning of life and the proper way of behaving individually and as a society. People will listen to the bishops if they are "united and unanimous" in the positions they take on theological and moral questions, he said.

The pope also asked the bishops to exercise more vigilance over the way the Mass is celebrated in their diocese, ensuring that the church's norms are followed exactly and that the priests celebrate the liturgy "with great dignity."

Although Switzerland is struggling with a shortage of priests, the pope asked the bishops also to ensure that the celebration of the Eucharist is offered in every parish every Sunday, rather than letting them be replaced by celebrations of the Liturgy of the Word.

Puzzling pope? – Author explores continuing enigma of Benedict XVI

By Father Andrew M. Greeley
11/7/2006
Commonweal Magazine: A Review of Religion, Politics and Culture

CHICAGO, Ill. (Commonweal Magazine) – Recently, Vatican postage stamps, adorned from time immemorial with the papal triple crown, conveyed a different note: “Episcopus Romae,” Bishop of Rome. An ecumenist in the curia explained to Zenit News Service that it was a nod to the Orthodox, who prefer that title. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.

Yet a year and a half after his election, Papa Benedetto remains an enigma. Who is he really? After the generally hostile reaction to his election in the European and American media, he does not seem to fit their initial fears. Nor does he fit the happy dreams of observers, like Father Richard John Neuhaus or George Weigel who waited eagerly for the purges that have not happened.

Instead, the pope suspended the founder of the Legionaries of Christ because of sexual-abuse charges, and replaced Joaquin Navarro-Valls, head of the Vatican Press Office, with a Jesuit, Frederico Lombardi of Vatican Radio, a change, one hears, stoutly resisted by Opus Dei.

Is Benedict the liberal conciliar adviser to Cologne’s Cardinal Joseph Frings? Or the disciple of St. Augustine who was horrified at the Vatican II document, The Church in the Modern World, because he believed modern secularism constituted the greatest threat to the church?

Is he the frightened scholar who fled Tübingen and its unruly students in 1968, convinced of the need for order in the church? Or the zealous hammer of heretics who presided over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), née the Inquisition? Or the theologian who argued that the council did not really represent drastic change in the church? Does the new pope really want a “smaller and purer church”? Or is he the author of the first half of the extraordinary encyclical Deus caritas est (God is love)? Will the real Benedetto please raise his hand? When is the other Prada slipper going to drop?

David Gibson, author and onetime reporter for Vatican Radio, wrestles with these questions in The Rule of Benedict, a sympathetic yet not uncritical examination of the pope’s career. Gibson traces Joseph Ratzinger’s life through the Hitler years in Germany (Ratzinger was 5 years old when the Nazis took power), his seminary training, his choice of Augustine’s pessimism over Aquinas’ optimism as a theological paradigm, his disillusion following the Second Vatican Council, his brief term at Munich, and then the long years at the CDF.

Augustinianism, Gibson contends, resonates with Raztinger’s pessimistic personality and his deep skepticism about modernity.

I don’t doubt this, yet it would be a mistake to overlook the grief in Germany in the decades after the war. In Jazz Age Catholicism, Jesuit Father Stephen Schloesser reminds us that the great Catholic writers (literary and musical) in France during the 1920s lived and worked in an atmosphere of profound sorrow over the terrible losses of the Great War. Yet they retained a spirit of engagement with their times and a sense of Christian hope. A sensitive young man who grew up in the much deeper pain in Germany after 1945 might have found it difficult to be optimistic about the modern world. (Is Mozart part of the modern world? “The Magic Flute” is an Enlightenment opera, and Benedict is known to be a Mozart aficionado.)

Benedict, Gibson suggests, sees the modern world as a dark, dangerous place for the church and for Catholics.

Gibson also seems to understand Cardinal Ratzinger’s dislike of liberation theology, but is unsympathetic toward his attack on it. Still, Marxism and Christianity don’t blend well, and by now it seems clear that Marxism doesn’t work. The romance with Marxism in South America and among some political theologians in Europe, one might argue, was a perilous fad. Social democracy may be a difficult course, but the only one that has even a remote chance of working.

The cardinal’s suspicion about dialogue with Eastern religions seems to reveal the same fear of contamination. Doubtless, there were some shallow faddists in that field, though Jacques Dupuis was not one of them. The persecution of Dupuis by the CDF was hardly one of Ratzinger’s finest hours, even if Dupuis was cleared, more or less.

The most interesting chapter in the book – “Pontifex Maximus, Pontifex Minimus” – compares the papal styles of John Paul II and Benedict, the latter far more low-key than the former. There will be no cult of personality during the present incumbency, and many will think this an improvement. Benedict seems to understand his role as that of telling the truth, not, as he says, his personal opinions, but the agreed Catholic truth. He sees himself preaching as a pastoral minister rather than as a theologian, a task that would require tact and self-discipline of any theologian who was also pope.

It would also appear that Benedict’s vision of a smaller church is not a prediction, much less something he will create by a purge, but rather something that he fears as possibly an inevitable development. After his election, as I pondered in Rome the hit lists that Weigel and Father Neuhaus were probably preparing, I read on the net Father Hans Küng’s remarkable plea that we give the new pope a chance, especially to produce his first encyclical. Since Father Küng knew him well as a friend, colleague, rival and adversary, I figured that we too ought to give Benedict a chance. Two events since then have confirmed that inclination: Benedict’s reconciliation with Father Küng, a remarkably gracious event; and Deus caritas est, Benedict’s astonishing first encyclical.

The latter, which Gibson dismisses as not new and not pertinent to reform and renewal, astonishes, especially as perhaps a theme-setting document for Benedict’s time in office. In the erotic love of husband and wife, the pope sees an image of the love between God and humankind, a hint of the presence of grace in the dark and threatening modern world. Given St. Augustine’s disgust with sexual love, this hopeful view of the human condition can hardly be described as Augustinian pessimism. It could provide a perspective through which, over the long run, Benedict and his successors could charm Europe back to the faith. The idea does not originate with Benedict. St. Paul clearly understood it. Moreover John Paul II in his early audience talks developed a similar theme. But the clear and lapidary style of Deus caritas est made it a document for the modern world.

Nor does Gibson consider Father Neuhaus’ cri de Coeur in First Things against Benedict’s failure to be more vigorous in ridding the church of homosexual priests and seminarians, especially if they are Jesuits. If First Things and even more conservative perspectives, represented by groups like the Remnant, are disappointed in the pope, there are grounds yet to suspend judgment.

The Rule of Benedict is a more sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the new pope than many others. Unfortunately, it does not leave room for the possibility that the papacy changes the man who occupies it, a prospect that Father Küng suggested a year and a half ago. Room should be left to consider that the data might fit such a model. For example, Benedict’s mix of discretion and firmness during his visit to Spain, where the government behaves as if the loyalists had won the civil war, suggests that the pope is not one who looks for fights (though his remarks about Islam at Regensburg – pulled out of context as they were – might better have been left unsaid). The returns, it seems, are not in yet. Perhaps they never will be. Benedict may always be an enigma. That wouldn’t be all bad.

Gibson’s least successful chapter is about the church in America. He subscribes to the media analysis that sees the church in this country as deeply polarized with only a small center remaining. But the polarization model fits neither the American nation as a whole nor the church in particular. The center still holds, and strongly. American Catholics are not divided between, say, First Things and Commonweal (alas, most U.S. Catholics have heard of neither).

While there have been some losses to the church in the last several decades, it seems impossible to drive out most of the laity, no matter how much the leadership tries. At every level-pope, curia, diocese, parish – the leadership does not understand the faith and the spiritual depth of its people. Hence the laity become an inkblot onto which those in power can project their personal opinions and biases. Social research might be a help, but who needs social research?

In a similar vein of empiricism, I would hope (perhaps foolishly) that as the pope and his colleagues ponder a long-term strategy for winning Europe back to the faith – a contest for which the church has enormous resources, if it would only recognize them – they might postpone faulting the laity for the decline of faith and reifying abstractions, such as secularism, materialism, relativism, Marxism.

Instead, they might begin, in prayerful and humble examinations of conscience, to wonder how they themselves or their predecessors might have contributed to the loss of Europe (should it really be lost). They might even ask quietly, “What have we done wrong?”

- - -

The Rule of Benedict, by David Gibson. HarperSanFrancisco (San Francisco, 2006). 400 pp. $24.95.

- - -

Father Andrew M. Greeley, a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, is the author of The Catholic Revolution: New Wine in Old Wineskins, Priests: A Calling in Crisis and The Truth about Conservative Christians, with Michael Hout.

Bishops say Catholics anxiously awaiting papal visit to Turkey

Istanbul, Nov. 07, 2006 (CNA) - “The Church in Turkey awaits the encounter with Benedict XVI. We are preparing for the celebration in December, when the Pontiff will meet with the Catholic faithful and their pastors at the Cathedral of Istanbul,” said Father Georges Marovitch, the official spokesman of the Bishops’ Conference of Turkey.

Father Marovitch said hundreds are requesting to attend the liturgy but “space is limited.” “Therefore we have decided to set up a huge television screen in the Church of San Antonio so that everyone can follow the celebration.”

According to the Italian news agency SIR, Father Marovitch also explained that after the Pope’s speech in Ratisbona, “the Turkish newspapers wrote that the President of Turkey would not meet with the Pope, but rather another government official would take his place. At that time we were surprised, but later the news was clarified. President Necdet Sezer will receive the Holy Father without his Prime Minister, Erdogan, who will be in Riga for the NATO summit.”

Turkish Catholics are also excitedly anticipating for the meeting between the Holy Father and the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I. “Nothing has been leaked about the joint declaration they will sign. I think it will be a surprise,” Father Marovitch.

[Modificato da benefan 07/11/2006 19.26]

I read "The Rule of Benedict" and it was mostly a view of Benedict through a "liberal" Catholic lens. Having bought it, I wouldn't recommend anyone do likewise. If you can get a library copy, I would do so, but don't spend your money on it.

Encourage Individual Confession, Pope Urges

Reminds Prelates of Norms for General Absolution

VATICAN CITY, NOV. 7, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI is asking priests to rigorously observe the Church's norms on the sacrament of penance, in particular, those affecting general absolution.

The Pope said this today when addressing the bishops of Switzerland, who are in Rome concluding their five-yearly visit, which began in February 2005 and was interrupted when Pope John Paul II's health deteriorated in his last days.

Referring to "the crisis the sacrament of reconciliation is going through" in Switzerland, the Holy Father urged the prelates "to relaunch in your dioceses a penitential pastoral program which encourages individual confession."

"Ask your priests to be assiduous confessors," the Pontiff advised, "generously offering the faithful appropriate times for personal confession; encourage them, themselves, to approach this sacrament frequently."

Benedict XVI said: "Exhort the faithful to frequent the sacrament of penance regularly, which enables one to discover the gift of God's mercy and pushes one to be merciful as he is toward others."

Confession "helps us to form our conscience, to fight against our evil inclinations, to allow ourselves to be healed by Christ, to progress in the life of the Spirit," the Holy Father said quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The Pope invited priests "to observe rigorously the Church's norms concerning collective absolution ... which calls for truly exceptional situations for one to be able to take recourse to this extraordinary form of the sacrament of penance."

The Bishop of Rome added that the conditions for granting general absolution and the concept of "grave necessity" are clarified in John Paul II's 2002 letter "Misericordia Dei."

In reference to the above story, it seems that all the Catholic news services came out yesterday with a similar story based on a text published online by the Vatican Press Office and actually distributed to the press. Only to be taken off the site and officially 'recalled' by the same Press Office a few hours later.

Having been away from the Internet for most of yesterday (didn't get a chance till late last night), I became aware of the 'flap' only when checking out the Vatican website early this morning to find a brief announcement saying the Press Office was going to publish the actual text of what the Pope said extemporaneously to the Swiss bishops during a homily at Mass in the Redemptoris Mater chapel yesterday. What he actually said, not the published-then-recalled text.

Here is how CNA reports the 'mishap'.

Holy See’s press office recalls
“speech” never delivered by Pope

Vatican City, Nov. 07, 2006 (CNA) - A “speech” allegedly delivered by Pope Benedict XVI to the Swiss bishops was released and few hours later recalled by the Vatican Press Office on Tuesday.

The “Sala Stampa” released a speech allegedly given by Pope Benedict in the context of the Ad Limina visit of the Catholic bishops of Switzerland (scheduled from November 7-9).

According to the Swiss press, the alleged “speech” released by the press office, and even summarized by the Vatican Information Service (VIS), was one prepared by the late Pope John Paul II, but never delivered, since the Ad Limina visit of the Swiss bishops was suspended in February 2005, when the Pope’s health became more precarious.

The speech was posted for few hours on the Vatican web page and was also released in Switzerland by the press office of the Swiss Bishops’ Conference. Both recalled the text without further comment.

The Vatican Information Service plans to release portions of Pope Benedict’s actual speech, which was reportedly improvised, on Wednesday morning....

Here is the story as reported by CNA yesterday based on the 'wrong' release. It is actually a very good hard-hitting speech, and although it may have been prepared for John Paul II, it sounds very Ratzingerian in content. Who knows? The then-Prefect of the CDF may well have drafted it.

Vatican City, Nov. 07, 2006 (CNA) - Meeting with members of the Conference of Swiss Bishops today, Pope Benedict XVI urged a continued battle against the advance of secularization and relativism in the Church and noted a few key areas of concern for the Catholic Church in Switzerland.

"The advance of secularization and of relativism means not only that the Sacraments, especially participation in Sunday Mass, are reduced in frequency, but also that the moral values proposed by the Church are put in doubt," said the Pope.

The Pope, who said the meeting was, in some way, "the conclusion of their 'ad limina' visit of February 2005," which was cut short due to the failing health of Pope John Paul II, also wanted to take time for, "considering certain aspects of the current situation of the Church in Switzerland, identifying those elements worthy of being intensified and promoted, and those in need of correction and purification."

After highlighting the fact that many people live "as if God does not exist," the Pope called upon the prelates "to ensure that the Word of God and the Christian message are understood," and insisted they should adopt unanimous positions on theological and moral questions.

"The fundamental duty of the bishop, pastor, and master of faith," he recalled, "is to invite the faithful to a full acceptance of Church teaching."

Mass and Reconciliation

Turning to the liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI affirmed that "it is a right and duty of everyone to ensure (the Mass) be celebrated in accordance with the rules laid down by the Church." As for Sunday Mass, he stressed the need, "to avoid its being substituted, if there are no important reasons to do so, by a celebration of the Word," and "to ensure the homily remains an important moment of doctrinal and spiritual formation ... reserved to the priest or the deacon."

The Holy Father also addressed what the Swiss bishops called a “crisis being suffered by the Sacrament of Penance," in their five-yearly reports. Benedict XVI identified the need "for dioceses to re-launch pastoral activity aimed at encouraging the faithful to individual confession... Call upon priests to be assiduous confessors, generously offering the faithful appropriate times for individual confession; encourage the priests to avail themselves frequently of this Sacrament."

Moreover, he continued, "priests must rigorously observe Church norms concerning collective absolution ... which can only take place under truly exceptional circumstances."

Priestly ministry and lay collaboration

Turning to consider the collaboration of lay people in priestly ministry, Benedict XVI explained that "care must be taken to ensure,... in parishes and pastoral centers, that the priest remains the pastor and that lay people help the priest, collaborating with him in the various sectors of pastoral life.

“The importance of the laity's role must not bring us to underestimate the ministry of priests, so indispensable for the life of the Church," the Holy Father said.

However, in this context the Pope called for, "an intensification in the formation of lay people to increase their faith and doctrinal knowledge, and grant them spiritual energies."

Benedict also turned to the question of priestly and religious vocations, which he said are, "a constant concern for the Church in your country."

"For the future of the Church in Switzerland, it is important to oversee the organization and orientation of seminaries and of the various faculties and schools of theology ... with a view to discernment and to the profound human, spiritual, cultural and pastoral formation of candidates to the priesthood.”

“Be equally attentive," he told the bishops, "to the initial and permanent formation of future priests, deacons and pastoral lay workers. A sure and faithful teaching of the tradition and Magisterium of the Church will ensure that everyone discovers the richness of Catholic faith."

Finally, the Pope concluded, "ecumenism is a sector in which the Catholic Church is irrevocably committed. The religious history of your country and your later experiences give you a special responsibility and mission in this field. Encourage your communities to commit themselves to an ecumenical journey based on the principles expressed in the Conciliar Decree 'Unitatis redintegratio' and in the 'Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism'."
==============================================================

Now, this 'mishap' is no major tragedy, according to the Hippocratic dictum "first do no harm". The problem is that it is yet another indication of inefficiency in the Vatican Press office - in this case, not just simple inefficiency but serious irresponsibility on the part of whoever authorizes the release of which text and when.

It is bad enough that there appears to be no SOP for monitoring the Pope's spoken messages as delivered in order to be able to make corrections or changes later to any pre-released text. In last Sunday's Angelus, for instance, it took an Italian priest with a radio program to point out that the Pope did not say what the pre-released text said he did, namely, that death is a dream from which we shall all wake up. Instead, he said "perche, sia che viviamo, sia che moriamo, siamo del Signore" - "because, living or dead, we belong to the Lord."

The change is significant because, according to the priest, Padre Livio of Radio Maria, the statement that 'death is a dream from which we shall all wake up' may have misleading or confusing theological connotations, i.e., to imply that there is an interval between corporal death and the life beyond...

Well, these 'little' inefficiencies in the Vatican Press Office are certainly building up,and I do not understand how a Jesuit director like Fr. Lombardi cannot assign a responsible deputy to look after simple things like monitoring what the Pope actually says against the written text they release and making the necessary changes later... or the even simpler thing of not releasing any text which the Pope did not actually use! This, on top of the translation lags and lapses, is just too inexcusable in a press office that serves a German Pope - or any Pope, for that matter - when both Germans and Jesuits have a reputation for efficiency and authority!

How much longer will this mess go on?

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/11/2006 1.30]

Web attacks planned against Holy See


Islamist hackers will again try to shut down the website of the Holy See, AKI reports.

Muslim hackers allegedly supporting al-Qaeda have announced - for the second time in a month - a planned attack on the Vatican's official website. The assault has been planned by Islamist cyber-rogues for Thursday 9 November at 12 am Mecca time (10 am in Italy). The announcement was made on Wednesday through the creation of an ad hoc site where hackers can download programmes to start the internet attack. "The leadership of the electronic Jihad has decided to undertake a grand attack against the official Vatican site following the insults by the Pope against our Prophet," read a statement.

The Islamist site also called for such attacks on the 11th and 15th of this month. A similar event on 11 October involved, evidently, dozens of hackers who failed to interrupt the services at the Holy See's site.

I must apologize for my own translation lag!

I haven't been able to do any Forum work since this morning, so I don't even have a translation yet of the catechesis at the audience. Plus I find that the Press Office has now released the text of the extemporaneous homily delivered by the Holy Father in German to the Swiss bishops yesterday morning at Mass in the Redemptoris Mater chapel and a later text, also in German, which was his address to them at the Sala Bologna later in the morning.

I will finish the audience translation first and then work on the German texts.

P.S. I did manage to post all three translations by early morning 11/10/06. See AUDIENCE AND ANFELUS TEXTS and HOMILIES, DISCOURSES, MESSAGES.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/11/2006 0.26]

Pope asks young people to be messengers of peace

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI asked a group of young people from different religious traditions to be messengers and witnesses of peace, tolerance and dialogue.

Speaking Nov. 8 during his weekly general audience, the pope offered special greetings to 90 young people from 29 countries at the end of their five-day conference on dialogue and peacemaking.

The young people, representing 13 religions, had met in Assisi, Italy, at the invitation of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

Pope Benedict told the young people that the world needs prayers for peace.

"Genuine prayer transforms hearts, opens us to dialogue, understanding and reconciliation," he said. "It breaks down the walls erected by violence, hatred and revenge."

The pope asked the young people to return to their own religious communities "as witnesses to the spirit of Assisi, messengers of the peace which is God's gracious gift and living signs of hope for our world."

Zeynep Ozbek, 24, a Muslim participant from Istanbul, Turkey, said she thought it was important for the Vatican to convoke young people to discuss faith and peacemaking because "young people are more open to different ideas, to differences, and they have more hope for the future."

Ozbek and three other Muslim participants at the Assisi meeting are studying Christianity and dialogue at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University. Their studies are supported by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

French Cardinal Paul Poupard, president of the council, told the young people that a willingness to dialogue is a sign of spiritual maturity.

Ozbek told Catholic News Service she agreed with the cardinal: "I think being spiritually mature means being at peace with yourself, your faith and your God. If you do not have a good relationship with God, you cannot be at peace with others."

The fact that the conference left ample time for prayer was important, she said.

"The spiritual side of our religions gives us common ground," she added. "Peace and justice are the basic principles of all religions."

While almost half of the participants were Catholics or other Christians, the conference also included 11 Muslims. Ozbek said some of them were hesitant to accept the Vatican's invitation after Pope Benedict's remarks about Islam in Germany.

In the German speech, the pope quoted a medieval emperor's statement that the founder of Islam, the prophet Mohammed, had brought "things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith."

The pope later clarified that he did not agree with the emperor's assessment and said he was sorry that Muslims had taken offense.

"I think Catholics do not understand why that was so offensive," Ozbek said. "They do not understand what great love we have for our Prophet. When his name is mentioned, we send blessings and greetings to him."

Ozbek said the fact that the conference was held is a positive and reassuring sign.

"It affirmed for me the good intentions of the Catholic Church in dialogue," she said. "Especially after the death of Pope John Paul II, many Muslims thought the dialogue would be frozen, but this (conference) confirms Pope Benedict's intentions."

On the other side, she said, "our responsibility as young Muslims is to make practical efforts at dialogue from the Muslim side."

Omar Sillah, a 30-year-old Muslim from Gambia and a student at Gregorian University, said the conference would be "very helpful for peacemaking if we act on what we discussed."

Although many of the participants are training to be leaders in their communities, he said, "I think I have a role to play already. I can communicate with the people I am in contact with.

"My peace is meaningless without linking it to the peace of another; my joy is meaningless without the joy of another," he said.

Sillah said the participants recognized that members of their religious communities often are manipulated for political purposes, but added that religion is not the problem.

"No religion teaches hatred, fighting and discrimination," he said.

Jean Nicolas Nammour, a 25-year-old Maronite Catholic from Lebanon, said the key to peacemaking "is simple for me: We do not have to change the world first. We have to change ourselves. Others will see this and follow our example. This is how we build peace every day."

Jan Horyna, a 26-year-old board member of the European Union of Jewish Students, said, "The basic thing you need for dialogue is tolerance."

Horyna, who lives in Prague, Czech Republic, said that in Europe and other Western societies it probably is time to start dialoguing with atheists and secularists, because they have the least tolerance for religion.

He also said that while interreligious dialogue is important peace is impossible without political action to defend human rights and prevent discrimination.

"Most problems and conflicts are not religious, but religion is used as an easy tool to promote political agendas," he said. "Peace is not just a religious thing; it's also political."

Baptism, good works not enough for true Christian living, says pope

By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Baptism and good works are not enough for true Christian living; it requires daily and total giving of oneself to Jesus with humility and adoration, Pope Benedict XVI said.

During his Nov. 8 weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, Pope Benedict continued a series of talks about important personalities of the early Christian community by focusing on the life of St. Paul.

St. Paul had been a pious, even fanatical, observer of God's laws before his conversion from Judaism after meeting the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, the pope said.

But, he said, after meeting Christ, St. Paul suddenly realized his piousness had been marked by a search to improve and "build himself" into a righteous person. He had been living for himself and his own justification, the pope said.

But with Christ, the apostle Paul came to understand the importance of self-giving and that his life should be dedicated to living for Christ, not for an improved form of himself.

St. Paul said how people are made just in God's eyes and saved by Jesus is "pure grace, an unmerited gift of God's radical love" and is not dependent on performing good works, the pope said.

To be justified means to be embraced by "God's merciful justice and to enter in communion with him and, as a consequence, to be able to establish a much more authentic relationship with all our brothers and sisters," he said.

The pope said St. Paul's writings help define Christian identity as being about "receiving Christ and giving oneself to Christ," not about searching for oneself.

Pope Benedict recalled St. Paul's words, "It's not enough to say that Christians are baptized or believers" in Christ. The pope said it is also important that the faithful are in Jesus, bound up in a "mystical union" that does not erase the distinction between Christ and the faithful.

Christians are called to be a part of Christ's life daily, and one's "faith must be marked by a constant attitude of humility before God, indeed adoration and praise," said Pope Benedict.

Belonging to God ought to instill a spirit of "total trust and immense joy," he said.

He said St. Paul taught that nothing can separate the faithful from God's love and that Christian life "rests on the most stable and surest rock imaginable."

It is from God's unwavering love that "we draw all our energy" and strength and are able to face life with all its ups and downs, he said.

FOR THOSE WHO ARE INTERESTED, I have posted my translations of the Wednesday catechesis and of the Pope's homily and succeeding talk to the Swiss bishops in AUDIENCE AND ANGELUS TEXTS and in HOMILIES, DISCOURSES, MESSAGES, respectively.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/11/2006 3.23]

To prepare for Quebec congress, pope urges emphasis on Eucharist

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- In preparation for the 2008 International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec, Pope Benedict XVI asked Catholics around the world to deepen their appreciation of the value and importance of the Eucharist in their lives.

"How great is the need of modern humanity to rediscover in the eucharistic sacrament the source of its hope," the pope said Nov. 9 during a meeting with members of the Pontifical Committee for International Eucharistic Congresses and with the organizers of the June 15-22, 2008, gathering in Canada.

Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec, host of what will be the 49th International Eucharistic Congress, participated in the meeting and illustrated the work accomplished to promote the theme "The Eucharist, Gift of God for the Life of the World."

Pope Benedict said he hoped that as the Quebec congress draws near, more and more Catholic parishes would teach their members about eucharistic adoration and make time for parishioners to contemplate, adore and spend time with Jesus present in the sacrament.

The pope said the preparation also should be helped by his forthcoming document on the Eucharist, a document containing his reflections on points raised during the 2005 world Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist. He did not give a publication date.

Eucharistic congresses, he said, are important celebrations for the entire church and occasions for Catholics to show the world how they respond "to the love of the Lord supremely manifested in the eucharistic mystery."

The congresses are occasions to help people better understand "the most holy Eucharist, which is the most precious treasure left to us by Jesus," the pope said.

Because Jesus gives himself in the Eucharist, Pope Benedict said, it is a sign of his great love for all men and women, a love that Catholics are called to share with the world.

Thanks to Lella as usual, we have the full article of Joaquin Navarro-Valls's interview with the Italian magazine Panorama, and before I post a translation (which I still have to do), let me assure everyone that the APCOM item about the interview was a bit misleading.

It quoted a sentence from Navarro-Valls which he did say, as is, but without further elaboration. (Perhaps the interviewer should have pressed him on it, in order to avoid equivocal interpretations, but he did not. Typical, probably, of newsmen with an agenda.) The interview was conducted by Ignazio Ingrao, who has not been exactly sympathetic to Benedict.

Thankfully, however, on every other direct question that Navarro-Valls was asked about the Pope, his answers were excellent, including what he thought of the immediate aftermath to Regensburg. I am certainly glad he remains the gentleman I thought him to be.

I will post here a translation of the part that relates to Benedict XVI. The rest of the interview is about Navarro-Valls's personal plans. I may add it here later, or post it
separately in PEOPLE AROUND THE POPE (if only because he was around this Pope for at least 15 months).
==============================================================

How did you experience the controversy that followed Benedict's lecture in Regensburg?
With sadness, but without exaggeration. It was a magnificent text which some agencies and Al-Jazeera reported with the wrong and incorrect 'framing' (he uses the English term) before the Pope had even finished delivering it.

None of those present, among them some Muslims, at the lecture hall of the University of Regensburg thought of interpreting the lecture in the manner it was made out to be.

At that time, two political leaders in the Muslim world made intolerant comments, but it was obvious they were for internal consumption - both are known to have problems with their most radical Islamist elements. [He was perhaps referrign to Ali Bardakoglu, Turkey's religious affairs minister, and Prime Minister Erdogan himself, who made the most stinging and even personal remarks against the Pope.]

A few days later, I received a telephone call from a Middle Eastern leader with a high international profile. He told me he had read the text of the lecture and he considered it as a fundamental basis for a new framing of inter-religious dialog. And he asked me to transmit his opinion to the Pope. Which I did.

[If you were interviewing Navarro-Valls, wouldn't you have asked him at this point - Did you speak to the Pope yourself? What did you talk about? Does he call you? Are you free to call him if you have something to say? etc....]

Do you think the Pope's words were exploited?
Worse than exploited - they were used dishonestly for self-serving ends. Academics often have an experience like this - someone isolates a citation from their text in order to promote or support a personal theory that has nothing to do with the author's original thought. Probably all intellectuals are victim to it.

And yet, all one has to do is to read what Joseph Ratzinger has written about Islam in more than 20 years to confirm how absurd is the interpretation that his critics passed off as 'authentic.'

Is there a problem of communications with the media?
Yes, there have been problems in different areas, even with the media, but not just with them. [So, Mr Ingrao, you should have asked - For example?]

Does the Pope need a spokesman or is a director of the Vatican Press Office enough?
It's not something I wish to talk about at this time, having spent so many years doing both.

Is the media attention less on the current Pope than on his predecessor?
Actually, the Regensburg episode would seem to demonstrate the opposite. Certainly, the conceptual richness in Benedict XVI goes beyond any gestures he may perform. It is easier to communicate with gestures, but his speeches are being read in full. I understand that a simplification of such texts is always possible, but this is not a risk for the Pope as much as it is for the media who have the duty to report his message.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/11/2006 3.26]

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict urged his fellow German Catholics on Friday to discuss their faith in Jesus Christ openly with Muslims living there.

Addressing visiting German bishops, he said Catholics conducting a dialogue with Muslims should have enough knowledge of Church history and languages to explain their faith convincingly.

Benedict caused an uproar in the Muslim world with a speech in September hinting that Islam was an irrational and violent religion. He has since apologized and stressed the need for Catholics and Muslims to get to know each other better.

The Pontiff said the Roman Catholic Church viewed Muslims "with respect and good will."

"They mostly hold on to their religious convictions and rites with great seriousness and have a right to see our humble and strong witness for Jesus Christ," he said after noting that modern German society had been largely secularized.

"To do this convincingly, we need to make serious efforts. So wherever there are many Muslims, there should be Catholics with sufficient knowledge of languages and Church history to enable them to talk with Muslims."

Benedict said these spokespeople should have a solid knowledge of Catholic teachings.

Germany has 3.2 million Muslims, many of them of Turkish background who went there as foreign guest workers. The Berlin government launched an official dialogue with Muslim organizations in September to promote their integration.

Teresa - There is certainly no need for you to apologize for any 'translation lag'! We know that you, like all of us, also have a life outside of the Forum. We do appreciate your translations, whenever they appear!
I'm glad you posted that bit from the Navarro-Valls interview. I had suspected his criticism was aimed more at the people around Benedict rather than at Benedict himself.

This weekend, it will be two months since the Regensburg lecture. John Thavis of Catholic News Service gives us his overview of how things stand after the Pope challenged Muslims to a dialog about faith based on reason.

This, even as those of us who follow Papal news are still trying to understand what in the world drove th Jesuits of the magazine La Civilta Cattolica to write an editorial that is nothing less than a gratuitous total surrender to all the premises that fuel radical Islamism today [see Sandro Magister's 11/9 piece in REFLECTIONS ON ISLAM - It's a must-read, and even after you've read it again and again, you'll still find it hard to believe the cravenness and unreason behind it! ]


Pope takes on hard questions
in new chapter of dialogue with Muslims
By John Thavis
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI's remarks on Islam in Regensburg, Germany, opened a new chapter in the Vatican's 40-year dialogue with the Muslim world and brought the pope's own views on Islam into clearer focus.

In the controversy that followed his speech, the pope told Muslim leaders there should be no doubt about his commitment to the dialogue launched by the Second Vatican Council or of his "esteem and profound respect" for Muslim believers.

At the same time, the pope is not hesitating to raise some uncomfortable questions about the religious foundations of Islam and its cultural and political influences today.

"It is important that (inter-religious) dialogue take place with much patience, much respect and, most of all, in total honesty," the pope wrote several years ago.

For the pope, the honest approach to dialogue with Muslims means not simply talking about the shared belief in one God but also facing sensitive issues like that of violence and religion. Against a backdrop of global tensions, the pope believes that question cannot be ignored and that moderate voices must be heard.

"Many people, including the pope, are asking whether there is not perhaps a link between certain interpretations of the foundations and sources of Islam, and what is being done by Islamic extremists," said Jesuit Father Christian W. Troll, professor of Islamic studies at the Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology in Frankfurt, Germany.

While the pope would not fall into the mistake of overly generalizing about radical Islam, he would like Muslim dialogue partners to take a closer look at the interpretation of the Islamic heritage, in particular those elements that can be misused in the direction of violence, Father Troll told Catholic News Service.

In his first major encounter with Islamic representatives in 2005, the pope asked Muslim elders to make sure their young are formed in attitudes of tolerance and cooperation.

"I am profoundly convinced that we must not yield to the negative pressures in our midst, but must affirm the values of mutual respect, solidarity and peace. The life of every human being is sacred, both for Christians and for Muslims," he said.

During his first 18 months in office, Vatican officials say Pope Benedict has adopted a new style of dialogue with Islam, but without setting off in an entirely new direction.

"Pope Benedict XVI is carrying on the work of John Paul II with a style of his own: It's a work of continuation, not imitation," said Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

In fact, over the course of his pontificate, Pope John Paul frequently spoke to Muslims about interreligious tolerance, cultural cooperation and reciprocal respect for religious freedom.

Pope Benedict has touched on the same points, but with more direct language. He has also tended to avoid the public gestures of interreligious friendship that were a trademark of his predecessor -- like addressing a soccer stadium full of Muslim youths in Morocco, praying in a Syrian mosque or riding in a "peace train" to Assisi with Muslim representatives.

"We are facing two different approaches to dialogue," Father Justo Lacunza Balda, an official of the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome, told CNS.

For Pope John Paul, Father Lacunza said, encounters with Muslims were a key part of papal travels abroad and special ceremonies at the Vatican. Pope Benedict is less a "stage person" and more analytical, he said.

"His approach is one in which you have to identify issues that are absolutely relevant and important to discuss in our modern times," Father Lacunza said.

"Today, these problems include the relationship of faith and reason, the link between religion and violence in the minds of some supposed religious leaders, the question of religious liberty, and questions about science, democracy and freedom," Father Lacunza said.

"He is putting all these issues on a plate for the church and the Muslim world to discuss," he said.

At the University of Regensburg in September, the pope touched on several of these themes in language that he later acknowledged was open to misinterpretation.

Most of the Muslim criticism focused on the pope's quotation of a medieval Byzantine emperor, who said the prophet Mohammed had brought "things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith." The pope afterward clarified that he was not endorsing the emperor's words.

Much less attention was given to a broader question the speech posed about Islam: whether God is absolutely transcendent for Muslims and therefore not bound up with "any of our categories, even that of rationality."

That echoed a question that arose last year, when the pope hosted a two-day, closed-door seminar on Islam with some of his former graduate students: If Muslims understand the Quran's revelation as literally divine and unadaptable, can Islam really engage the modern world and accept concepts like democracy?

According to one participant, Jesuit Father Samir Khalil Samir, the pope believes Islam and democracy are compatible, but not without difficulty.

Father Troll, the German Islamic scholar who gave a presentation at the papal seminar, said the pope avoided categorical judgments about Islam. But he said the pope understands that the traditional, mainstream theology of Islam may make it difficult for Muslims to critically evaluate how their faith interacts with history.

The pope has long held that Islam's all-encompassing approach makes it a challenging dialogue partner. As he said in the 1997 book, "Salt of the Earth," the Quran is "a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political and social life and insists that the whole order of life be Islamic."

Father Samir, an Egyptian-born expert on Islam, said in a recent article that Pope Benedict is one of the few figures to have understood Islam's struggle to find a place in modern society.

He said this awareness has led the pope to broaden Christian-Muslim dialogue, emphasizing cultural issues above strictly religious aspects.

"The essential idea is that dialogue with Islam and with other religions cannot be essentially a theological or religious dialogue, except in the broad terms of moral values; it must instead be a dialogue of cultures and civilizations," Father Samir said.

That interpretation would explain why the pope, as one of his first reorganizational acts at the Vatican, made Cardinal Poupard, who is president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, the head of the interreligious dialogue council.

Cardinal Poupard told CNS that this was a natural move, given the complementary nature of religion and culture.

"There is a close connection between faith and culture and, therefore, between cultural dialogue and interreligious dialogue. The faith is not 'born' in a vacuum, but inside a culture," Cardinal Poupard said.

In promoting what he calls a "dialogue of cultures and religions," the pope also has outlined a potential area of Christian-Muslim cooperation -- the struggle against secular trends in contemporary society.

As the pope said in Regensburg, it's a society that risks becoming "deaf to the divine" and that "relegates religion to the realm of subcultures."

Cardinal Poupard said the pope was, in effect, offering "an outstretched hand" to Islam in the battle against an oversecularized global culture.

But the pope has also made it clear that for Christians, the struggle against a godless society is based on a rational approach, one that rejects violence, that does not see faith and reason in conflict, and that affirms the centrality of the person. His Regensburg speech, then, could be viewed as an invitation for Muslims to clarify the teachings of Islam on the same points.

The strong initial criticism of the Regensburg speech has given way to more thoughtful evaluation by Islamic scholars. Even though the Muslim commentary is still largely unfavorable, Vatican officials now say the papal speech may turn out to be providential in promoting a frank, in-depth look at Christian-Muslim issues.

One problem demonstrated by the controversy, however, was that Islam speaks with many voices. In the absence of a Muslim hierarchy, a small group burning an effigy of the pope may make a greater global impact than a group of Islamic scholars calmly dissecting the pope's arguments.

That's something the pope has long recognized. In "Salt of the Earth," he said the currents of Islam run from "noble Islam" to "extremist, terrorist Islam." The Islamic religion as a whole should not be identified with a militant minority, he said.

"I think that first we must recognize that Islam is not a uniform thing. In fact, there is no single authority for all Muslims, and for this reason dialogue with Islam is always dialogue with certain groups. No one can speak for Islam as a whole; it has, as it were, no commonly regarded orthodoxy," he said.

An important issue the pope and his aides have raised with diverse Muslim audiences is the need for mutual respect for religious rights, including those of minority Christian populations in majority Muslim countries.

But reciprocity is not seen at the Vatican as a prerequisite for dialogue, nor is it a Pope Benedict invention. Pope John Paul repeatedly raised the issue, notably in his 1985 speech in Morocco -- at the same soccer stadium appearance where he was cheered by 70,000 Muslim youths.

Pope Benedict has said he wants to build on the work of his predecessor and the relations of trust that have developed between Christians and Muslims. He has described his own approach as recognizing with joy the shared religious values and respecting "with loyalty" the differences.

His recent prodding on some of the differences, his aides say, only illustrates the crucial importance he gives to this dialogue.

As the pope told Muslim leaders in 2005: "Interreligious and intercultural dialogue between Christians and Muslims cannot be reduced to an optional extra. It is, in fact, a vital necessity, on which in large measure our future depends."
================================================================

Lily, Thanks for your kind words. My concern about coming out with the translations as soon as possible comes from the fact that wire service stories, when they do report what the Pope says, are very unpredictable in their choice of what to pick out from the many things he says.

Sometimes, they may miss out the most important things because they try to look for something 'topical' - in their sense, something about current international affairs - and many times, they miss out on particularly striking expressions that highlight not only this Pope's masterful way with words but epitomize a principle of faith or its practice memorably. [For instance, the few sentences he said to the Swiss bishops about the liturgy and how the homily is an integral part of the liturgy were literally awesome!]

Or sometimes they may completely ignore a significant story. After the much-publicized flap over the 'mistaken' text release about which the news agencies had written about, they then went on to ignore what he actually told the Swiss bishops in his homily and his subsequent address!

Moreover, for this Pope, it is really always best to look at his complete text, because even when chunks of it are used in a story, as AsiaNews does, such chunks are necessarily reported out of order - and in some cases, this can place the ideas out of context, as well. And that just does not do justice to the spontaneous natural flow of Benedict's thought.

So, call it my itsy-bitsy token of commitment to spreading the Good Word via the good words of our beloved Pope.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/11/2006 3.20]

Speaking of MSM, I had been looking in vain for any English-language report on the meeting this morning between the Holy Father and the President of Cyprus. I had supposed, in view of the forthcoming Papal trip to Turkey that MSM would grab at the chance to play up the Turkish connection... But so far, I've only found an AP report carried in the International herald Tribune. Why it does not even appear among the wire-service stories in Yahoo's papal news round-up - or why the other wire services did not report on it - is puzzling!



VATICAN CITY, Nov. 10 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI held a private audience Friday with Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos, who gave the pontiff an album of photographs of destroyed churches in northern Cyprus under the Turkish occupation.

After Benedict welcomed the Cypriot at the entrance to his library in the Apostolic Palace, the president showed the leather-bound album to the pontiff, who looked upset as he leafed through the pages. Some of the pictures showed churches reduced to rubble, while others had been converted to restaurants, shops or other secular uses.

"Such destruction ... incredible," Benedict uttered, according to pool reporters who covered the greeting before the pontiff and the president began their private talks.

A Vatican statement singled out "with satisfaction" that Catholics on the island enjoy religious freedom. The Greek Cypriot population of Cyprus is largely Orthodox.

"The pope was very upset and expressed feelings of deep concern," Papadopoulos later said of Benedict's reaction to the photographs. "We all know his concern and deep interest in the preservation of churches and freedom of religion."

In Northern Cyprus, Ahmet Okan, adviser to Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat on political and cultural issues, said that while there were destroyed and converted churches on the Turkish side there were also several destroyed Ottoman Turkish buildings in the south.

In a telephone conversation with The Associated Press, he contended that Turkish Cypriot calls for joint projects to restore Christian and Ottoman buildings were constantly being rebuffed by the Greek Cypriots.

Turkish Cypriots were working toward restoring some of the churches but had limited resources to do it, Okan said.

After years of ethnic violence, Cyprus was partitioned in 1974 when the Turkish army invaded the northern third of the island after a coup by Greek Cypriots who supported union with Greece. Turkey keeps some 40,000 troops on Cyprus and supports the northern Turkish Cypriot breakaway state.

Cyprus, a Mediterranean island, joined the European Union in 2004.

The Vatican said that the pontiff and the Cypriot president "dwelled above all on topics dealing with the integration of the (European) continent and dialogue between cultures and religions which favors both sides getting closer."

The Vatican statement did not mention any particular cultures or religions in the context of integration.

Speaking to reporters in Rome, Papadopoulos said the talks did not address the pope's Nov. 28-Dec. 1 trip to Turkey or the predominantly Muslim country's efforts to gain EU membership.

Touching on the problems of the divided island, the pope "listened to our views and, of course, as it was expected, His Holiness gave me his advice based on the need for reconciliation of disputes," Papadopoulos told reporters.

Earlier in the week, Papadopoulos said that Turkey risked creating a rift with the European Union unless it lifted a trade embargo on Cyprus.

The EU says that Turkey, which is officially secular and predominantly Muslim, must improve democratic rights and normalize ties with Cyprus to avoid stalling accession talks with the 25-nation bloc.

Associated Press writers Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, and Marta Falconi in Rome contributed to this report.

Earlier, Lella posted the Italian news agency APCOM's report on the meeting, which had additional details. Here is a translation.

VATICAN CITY, Nov. 10 (Apcom)- Less than three weeks from a delicate trip to Turkey (Nov. 28-Dec. 1), Pope Benedict XVI received the president of Cypus, Tassos Papadopoulos, at the Vatican today.

The main stumbling block in Turkey's bid to join the European Union, the island republic of Cyprus has been split in two since 1974 when the Turkish army occupied the southern half of the island.

The Cypriot embassy in Rome said: "The visit is an acknowledgement of the position of the Holy See on the Cyprus problem, which must be considered on the basis of respect for international law and of the various resolutions pasased by the Security Council of the United Nations."

They also discussed the destruction of most Christian churches in the Turkish-occupied 'North Cyprus', an entity that is recognized only by the government of Turkey and by no other government in the world. The embassy said both the Vatican and the Cyprus govenment 'deplore the profanation and destruction" of Christian churches and monasteries.

Papadopoulos later told journalists thathe and the Pope discussed Turkey "in general terms."

His embassy added: "The President made clear that Cyprus is not prejudiced against Turkey's entry into the European Union but asks only that it follow the rules of Copenhagen, fulfilling all the obligations of Turkey to the European Union and its member countries, including recognition of such countries."

The Pope's positions about Europe are well known. REceiving the new Austrian ambassador to the Holy See on September 18, 2006, the Pope said: "Neither a more or less well-functioning economic union nor a bureaucratic regulation of coexistence among nations will fully satisfy the expectations of European citizens. The deepest sources of European 'living together' that s solid and crisis-proof are much more the common convictions and values of humanistic Christian history and tradition on the Continent."

In a few days, a critical report by the European Commission on the shortcomings in Turkey's application to the EU is expected to come out. Turkey meanwhile has postponed for another month (to December 14-15) announcing whether it will at this point suspend negotiating for admission to the EU.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/11/2006 4.19]

Here you have authentic article written by Turkish media about visit of Cypriot president.

Papadopoulos laments churches' destruction
Saturday, November 11, 2006

ANKARA - TDN with AP

Pope Benedict XVI held a private audience yesterday with Greek Cypriot leader Tassos Papadopoulos, who gave the pontiff an album of photographs of churches destroyed in northern Cyprus under the Turkish intervention.

After Benedict welcomed the Greek Cypriot leader at the entrance to his library in the Apostolic Palace, Papadopoulos showed the leather-bound album to the pontiff, who looked upset as he leafed through the pages. Some the pictures showed churches reduced to rubble, while others had been converted to restaurants, shops or other secular uses.

?Such destruction ... incredible,? Benedict uttered, according to pool reporters who covered the greeting before the pontiff and Papadopoulos began their private talks. A Vatican statement singled out ?with satisfaction? that Catholics on the island enjoy religious freedom. The Greek Cypriot population of the divided island is largely Orthodox.

In the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (KKTC), Ahmet Okan, adviser to Turkish Cypriot President Mehmet Ali Talat on political and cultural issues, said that while there were destroyed and converted churches on the Turkish side there were also several destroyed Ottoman Turkish buildings in the south.

In a telephone conversation with the Associated Press, he contended that Turkish Cypriot calls for joint projects to restore Christian and Ottoman buildings were constantly being rebuffed by the Greek Cypriots. Turkish Cypriots were working toward restoring some of the churches but had limited resources to do it, Okan said.

The Vatican said that the pontiff and the Greek Cypriot leader ?dwelled above all on topics dealing with the integration of the [European] continent and dialogue between cultures and religions which favors both sides getting closer.? The Vatican statement did not mention any particular cultures or religions in the context of integration.

Earlier in the week, Papadopoulos said that Turkey risked creating a rift with the European Union unless it lifted a trade embargo on Greek Cyprus. The EU says that Turkey must normalize ties with Greek Cyprus and open its sea and air ports to traffic from Greek Cyprus to avoid stalling accession talks with the 25-nation bloc.

After years of ethnic violence, Cyprus was partitioned in 1974 when the Turkish army intervened in the island after a coup by Greek Cypriots who supported union with Greece.

VATICAN CITY, Nov. 11, 2006 (ap): The Vatican on Saturday released details of Pope Benedict XVI's Nov. 28-Dec. 1 trip to Turkey, including a meeting with a top Islamic cleric and a visit to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

[There were not really new details in the stripped-down program that was released, except the number and occasions at which the Pope will be making an address or homily. Go to the thread APOSTOLIC VOYAGE TO TURKEY for really new details as compiled by korazym. org]

Following anger in the Muslim world over a Sept. 12 speech in which Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor's remarks about Islam and violence, there had been some concern that the trip might be called off. But the Holy See last month officially confirmed that the pilgrimage would take place, and on Saturday gave details about Benedict's meetings with political and religious leaders.

The pilgrimage was born out of Benedict's desire to meet with the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who has his headquarters in Istanbul, once ancient Constantinople. The pope, who is trying to foster better relations between the Orthodox and Catholics, will have a private meeting with him on Nov. 29, the second day of the trip.

Immediately after arriving in the early afternoon of Nov. 28 at the airport of Ankara, Turkey's capital, Benedict will visit the mausoleum of Ataturk, the founder of the modern, secular Turkish state.

A week ago, thousands of nationalist Turks demonstrated there, vowing to defend Turkey's secular government against radical Islamic influences while urging their political leaders not to make too many concessions in order to gain European Union membership.

Benedict will meet with Turkey's president for religious affairs, Ali Bardakoglu, a top Islamic cleric. Bardakoglu was among the first prominent Muslim figures — and one of the most vehement — to denounce Benedict for the speech.

Benedict has since expressed regret that the remarks caused offense and has stressed they did not reflect his personal opinion. He has also expressed esteem for Islam.

Bardakoglu had called the pope's remarks in the Sept. 12 speech "extraordinarily worrying, saddening and unfortunate." Benedict will deliver a speech during his meeting with the religious affairs official.

The pontiff will also have a meeting with Turkey's deputy premier. Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has already said he won't be meeting the pope because he will be attending a NATO summit in Latvia but denied he was trying to avoid an encounter with the pontiff.

Erdogan's Islamic-rooted party faces elections next year.

The Vatican also confirmed that Benedict will pay a courtesy call on Turkey's president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, who as head of state had issued an official invitation to the pontiff to come to Turkey.

Benedict will also meet Turkey's chief rabbi during the pilgrimage as well as with other religious leaders.

Other details of the trip were given previously, including a stop in Izmir, a port city near Ephesus, which is an ancient Christian community.
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The thread APOSTOLIC VOYAGE TO TURKEY is up and running, with many background stories already posted.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/11/2006 23.17]

VATICAN CITY, Nov. 12, 2006 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI lamented Sunday that hundreds of millions of people around the globe do not have enough to eat, saying it was a scandal which must be combatted by changes in consumption and fairer distribution of resources.

Speaking from his studio window overlooking St. Peter's Square, Benedict noted that the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization recently reported that more than 800 million people are undernourished, and that many people, especially children, die from hunger.

The U.N. agency, in a report late last month, said that 10 years after global leaders had pledged to halve the number of the world's hungry, almost no progress has been made.

Benedict called for efforts to "eliminate the structural causes tied to the system of governing the world's economy, which earmarks most of the planet's resources to a minority of the (Earth's) population." The pontiff described that situation as an "injustice."

"To make an impact on a large scale, it is necessary to convert the model of global development," the pope said. "Not just the scandal of hunger demands it, but also the environmental and energy crises."

The pope said everyone must face the problem.

"Every person and every family can and must do something to alleviate hunger in the world, adopting a style of life and consumption compatible with safeguarding creation," Benedict said.

Benedict urged the faithful to join him in "committing ourselves concretely to defeat the scourge of hunger" and promote justice and solidarity.
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A full translation of the Pope's Angelus message today is in AUDIENCE AND ANGELUS TEXTS.

Additionally, in HOMILIES, DISCOURSES, MESSAGES, I have posted a translation of the Pope's concluding address to visiting Swiss bishops last week - the third of three remarkable discourses that he extemporaneously delivered to them during their 3-day visit.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/11/2006 17.28]

Top Vatican officials to confer on policies

Nov. 13 (CWNews.com) - Pope Benedict XVI will gather the leaders of the Roman Curia for a meeting on November 16, to discuss critical questions including the bid for broader use of the traditional Latin Mass.


According to the Italian ANSA news agency, the items for discussion will also include the case of Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, who was excommunicated in September; and the call to ordain some married men as priests.