Here is a belated commentary from CNS - with a rather snarky headline - on Pope Benedict XVI's Assisi 2011 initiative. It extends the observations made by Andrea Tonrielli in his Jan. 3 editorial from La Bussola Quotidiana to include the Pope's visit to the Blue Mosque in istanbul and the Western Wall in Jerusalem...
Back to Assisi: Pope Benedict
to commemorate event he skipped
By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY, Jan. 7 (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI said he would go to Assisi in October to mark the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's inter-religious prayer for peace, but
he did not actually say anything about praying with members of other religions.
[In fact, we know nothing so far of the format he has in mind for the October 2011 event.]
Announcing the October gathering, he said he would go to Assisi on pilgrimage and would like representatives of other Christian confessions and other world religions to join him there to commemorate Pope John Paul's "historic gesture" and to "solemnly renew the commitment of believers of every religion to live their own religious faith as a service in the cause of peace."
While Pope Benedict may be more open to inter-religious dialogue than some of the most conservative Christians would like, he continues to insist that dialogue must be honest about the differences existing between religions and that joint activities should acknowledge those differences.
In the 2003 book,
Truth and Tolerance, a collection of speeches and essays on Christianity and world religions, the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger dedicated four pages to the topic of "multi-religious and inter-religious prayer."
As a cardinal and prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he was one of the very few top Vatican officials to skip Pope John Paul's 1986 meeting in Assisi. He later said the way the event was organized left too much open to misinterpretation.
His chief concern was that the gathering could give people the impression that the highest officials in the Catholic Church were saying that all religions believed in the same God and that every religion was an equally valid path to God. [In other words, the kind of erroneous impression and fuzzy faith encouraged by Vatican-II progressives, which made it necessary for the Roman Catholic Church to issue the declaraton Dominum Iesus in the Jubilee eyar of 2000 that makes it unequivocally clear that the Catholic Church is the only church instituted by Jesus, Son of God, who is the only way to salvation - even if 'some truths' are inherent in non-Christian religions]
A few years later -- and after having participated in Pope John Paul's 2002 inter-religious meeting in Assisi -- he wrote in
Truth and Tolerance that with such gatherings "there are undeniable dangers and it is indisputable that the Assisi meetings, especially in 1986, were misinterpreted by many people."
He wrote that Church leaders had to take seriously the possibility that many people would see Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus and others gathered together for prayer in the Umbrian hilltown and get the "false impression of common ground that does not exist in reality."
At the same time, he said, it would be "wrong to reject completely and unconditionally" what he insisted was really a "multi-religious prayer," one in which members of different religions prayed at the same time for the same intention without praying together.
In multi-religious prayer, he wrote, the participants recognize that their understandings of the divine are so different "that shared prayer would be a fiction," but they gather in the same place to show the world that their longing for peace is the same.
U.S. Jesuit Father Thomas Michel, who was an official at the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue in the 1980s and was involved in organizing the first Assisi meeting, said, "It wouldn't make a lot of sense to pray together when you don't believe in the same God," but Catholics believe there is only one God and he hears the prayers of whoever turns to him with sincerity and devotion.
In an e-mail response to questions, Father Michel said,
"The only confusion (surrounding the 1986 Assisi meeting) was among those who did not understand Vatican II teaching and subsequent magisterium. They expressed their confusion before the event, boycotted the event itself, and expressed more confusion afterwards." [This Jesuit continues to be as perverse as ever. This is the person who, right after the Regensburg lecture, wrote a commentary for a Turkish paper assailing the Pope and then agreed to host a Muslim website on Muslim reactions against the Regensburg lecture.]
Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council document on relations with other religions,
affirmed that Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in, worship and pray to the same God. [That is a simplistic and inaccurate reduction of Nostra aetate - a very short declaration, www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate... which says very carefully in Paragraph 2:
"One is the community of all peoples, one their origin, for God made the whole human race to live over the face of the earth. One also is their final goal, God...."
When Pope Benedict went to Istanbul's Blue Mosque in Turkey in 2006, some people believed he blatantly contradicted what he had written in 2003 about the impossibility of praying together.
At the mosque, a place of prayer for Muslims, the Pope stood alongside an imam in silent prayer.
Days later back at the Vatican, the Pope said it was "a gesture initially unforeseen," but one which turned out to be "truly significant."
"Stopping for some minutes for reflection in that place of prayer, I turned to the one God of heaven and of earth, the merciful father of all humanity," the Pope said.
Muslims were touched by the Pope's gesture, but
some Christians went to great lengths to insist that the Pope's "turning to God" was not the same thing as prayer, especially in a mosque. [This hair-splitting is absurd. We are taught that God is everywhere, so one can pray anywhere. The theological argument against 'inter-religious' as opposed to 'multi-religious' praying has to do with the the manner of praying, i.e., various faiths can pray together on a common occasion but not in a 'common prayer service' as it is possible among Christian confessions.]
People found it easier to accept the fact that Pope Benedict stopped for prayer in Jerusalem at the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site.
After visiting Jerusalem, Pope Benedict told visitors at the Vatican that faith demands love of God and love of neighbor; "it is to this that Jews, Christians and Muslims are called to bear witness in order to honor with acts that God to whom they pray with their lips. And it is exactly this that I carried in my heart, in my prayers, as I visited in Jerusalem the Western or Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock, symbolic places respectively of Judaism and of Islam."
In a message commemorating the 20th anniversary of Pope John Paul's Assisi meeting, Pope Benedict said the 1986 gathering effectively demonstrated to the world that "prayer does not divide, but unites" and is a key part of promoting peace based on friendship, acceptance and dialogue between people of different cultures and religions.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/01/2011 20:19]