Roman Pope’s Australian visit a disaster

When the Pope of Rome visited Australia for World Youth Day recently, some people were deeply disappointed at the result.

Faith and Theology: A miracle on World Youth Day:

according to a report in The Weekend Australian, the hundreds of thousands of Catholic pilgrims have been a major economic disappointment: “The deathly retail silence contrasts with optimistic predictions of a ‘bumper week’ of trade by the state Government and the local chambers of commerce. A jewellery shop reported one sale in the week: a cross. New South Wales Business Chamber chief executive Kevin MacDonald had predicted a $231 million boost for business, or $1155 per expected visitor. But traders reported pilgrims unwilling to spend, even haggling over the price of one banana. Clothing store John Serafino said the Pope’s visit was ‘a disaster’.”

As Ben Myers reports, Pope Benedict XVI spoke against the worship of the “false gods” of “material possessions, possessive love, or power.” And he asked: “How many voices in our materialist society tell us that happiness is to be found by acquiring as many possessions and luxuries as we can? But this is to make possessions into a false god. Instead of bringing life, they bring death.”

So really, what did the Mammon cultists expect? Faith and Theology: A miracle on World Youth Day

The pope, Bush, and the "Battle hymn"

From the Institute for Public Accuracy

After the Pope and President George W. Bush spoke at the White House this morning, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was played and broadcast on major U.S. networks. The lyrics were written by Julia Ward Howe, who would later write the first Mother’s Day Proclamation, a call for peace.

VALARIE ZIEGLER, author of Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe, said today:

“It’s fascinating to add the papal visit to the list of ‘Battle Hymn’ performances. … Howe was absolutely committed to the Civil War. Inspired by ‘John Brown’s Body,’ she wrote ‘Battle Hymn’ — an incredible theological document and also a stirring
call to arms — so that people would devote themselves even to the last measure to get rid of slavery.

“But after the Civil War, she was repelled by wars between nations, like the Franco-Prussian War. Peace and women’s rights became central to her. She began thinking about what might be possible for women to do on behalf of humanity. In 1870 she wrote the first Mother’s Day Proclamation, an impassioned call for peace.
[See: http://www.codepink4peace.org/article.php?id=217]

“Howe held that women were inherently more loving and nurturing than men, particularly if they were transformed by motherhood. This notion was propelled by women’s clubs across the U.S. at the time, which were dedicated to pacifism and women’s suffrage.

“Throughout her life, Howe contended with her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, who did not want her to have a public life. One line in ‘The Battle Hymn’ — ‘glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me’ — may be a reference to a novel about a hermaphrodite that Howe had written to examine the role of gender in limiting people.”

Ziegler is professor of religious studies at DePauw University in Indiana.

Media spin on the Vatican’s sins

I keep getting new confirmation of the thesis that the media just don’t “get religion“, or perhaps that they are out to “get religion”.

There have been numerous reports with moronic headlines like “Recycle or go to hell” about “the Vatican’s” or “the Pope’s” new “list of seven deadly sins”.

Hat-tip to A conservative blog for peace: More bad religion reporting for this corrective.

Taki’s Magazine, edited by Taki Theodoracopulos:

To everyone who got exercised about the “Vatican’s” new so-called “list of deadly sins” for the modern age, I have some good news–or bad news, if you’re a jaded secularist looking to pick a fight: The Vatican didn’t publish anything of the kind. In fact, if I might explain a little about how things work here in Rome (just a few blocks away from where I’m sitting now, over at St. Peter’s): “The Vatican” rarely issues anything, other than parking tickets and stamps; that name refers to the government of the micro-state known as Vatican City, created in 1929 by the Treaty of the Lateran, to guarantee the Church’s independence of the Italian State.

And here’s the heart of the matter:

The list of new “deadly sins” came from none of these sources. In fact, it was compiled by a journalist, Nicola Gori, who was interviewing a bishop, Gianfranco Girotti, for the quasi-official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. In the interview, published March 9, the journalist teased out from Bishop Girotti his ideas on how to apply Catholic morality to contemporary questions, such as economics and the environment. Bishop Girotti has some competence to address these issues; as regent of the tribunal of the Apostolic Penitentiary, he is in charge of offering guidance to priests around the world when they hear Catholics’ confessions. But the good bishop has no (and would claim no) authority to update the moral theology of the Church and re-orient it toward social issues, instead of one’s personal moral life. That’s just how the media spun it. It’s as if a prominent rabbi in Israel, in an interview, spoke about a serious moral issue, and the secular media presented it as “Jews Add 11th Commandment.”

But I think John Zmirak underestimates the media’s propensity for spin; that’s just how they would spin it.

Muslim initiative in interfaith dialogue

Islamica Magazine reports

In an unprecedented move, an open letter signed by 38 leading Muslim religious scholars and leaders around the world was sent to Pope Benedict XVI on Oct. 12, 2006. The letter, which is the outcome of a joint effort, was signed by top religious authorities such as Shaykh Ali Jumu‘ah (the Grand Mufti of Egypt), Shakyh Abdullah bin Bayyah (former Vice President of Mauritania, and leading religious scholar), and Shaykh Sa‘id Ramadan Al-Buti (from Syria), in addition to the Grand Muftis of Russia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Slovenia, Istanbul, Uzbekistan, and Oman, as well as leading figures from the Shi‘a community such as Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Taskhiri of Iran. The letter was also signed by HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal of Jordan and by Muslim scholars in the West such as Shaykh Hamza Yusuf from California, Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Professor Tim Winter of the University of Cambridge.

All the eight schools of thought and jurisprudence in Islam are represented by the signatories, including a woman scholar. In this respect the letter is unique in the history of interfaith relations.

The letter was sent, in a spirit of goodwill, to respond to some of the remarks made by the Pope during his lecture at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12, 2006. The letter tackles the main substantive issues raised in his treatment of a debate between the medieval Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an “educated Persian”, including reason and faith; forced conversion; “jihad” vs. “holy war”; and the relationship between Christianity and Islam. They engage the Pope on an intellectual level concerning these crucial topics—which go well beyond the controversial quotation of the emperor—pointing out what they see as mistakes and oversimplifications in the Pope’s own remarks about Islamic belief and practice.

But like the Patriarch of Moscow’s address to the Council of Europe, the Western press seems to be reporting an entirely different letter, unless there are two different letters, and the reporting has got mixed up.

Can anyone clarify this?

Well he would, wouldn’t he?

No surprises here: Vatican: Non-Catholics ‘wounded’ by not recognizing pope.

A 16-page document, prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Pope Benedict used to head, described Christian Orthodox churches as true churches, but suffering from a “wound” since they do not recognize the primacy of the Pope.

But the document said the “wound is still more profound” in the Protestant denominations — a view likely to further complicate relations with Protestants.

If it weren’t so, we’d all have been Uniate long ago. That’s one of those areas of disagreement that still has to be hammered out before the churches can be reunited. The Orthodox, of course, see it from a different viewpoint. The “wound” is the claim of the Pope of Rome to “universal ordinary jurisdiction”, and perhaps his claim to be “the” Pope. We have a Pope in Alexandria, and as far as we are concerned, he is “the” Pope. The one in Rome is just the head of a non-Orthodox denomination.

All sorts of people seem to be getting their knickers in a knot over this document. But that’s just silly. Would they rather that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith pretended to be what they are not, or that their ecclesiology is other than what it is? How can we have dialogues and discuss differences in ecclesiology if everyone is pretending that their ecclesiology is something else? Christian unity is not brought about by papering over the cracks and pretending that differences don’t exist. We need to face the differences honestly. Let’s face it: Roman Catholic ecclesiology is dffierent from Orthodox ecclesiology, and different from most Protestant ecclesiologies. The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith is just being honest. Would we prefer it if they weren’t?

Ecumenical encounters

For those interested in the recent meetings of the Roman Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch, this web site is giving a running commentary.