Yesterday, Il Foglio published a lengthy open letter from a few Catholic writers including bylines familiar to those who follow this Forum like Roberto Di Mattei and Francesco Agnoli, who expressed their apprehensions over 'Assisi-III', the inter-religious meeting that Benedict XVI plans to hold in October to mark the 25th anniversary of Assisi-I, the first World Day of Prayer for Peace organized by John Paul II in 1986.
My initial reaction was indignation because, like some other usually staunch Benedict XVI followers at the time the Pope first announced Assisi-3, they seem to think that 1) Benedict XVI is stepping back from his objections as Cardinal Ratzinger to Assisi-I, and 2) that what he plans in October 2011 will contain some of the equivocal elements or fall into the same theological pitfalls that characterized Assisi-I. Did they really think Benedict XVI needs to be reminded of all this???? ...Well, the dependable Andrea Tornielli has an article in Il Giornale today where he reproves them for the same reason and argues his case citing chapter and verse...
About those professors who seek
to explain theology to the Pope
by Andrea Tornielli
Translated from
January 12, 2011
It takes a certain chutzpah to write an appeal to Benedict XVI - theologian Pope who was the Church's chief doctrinal officer for almost a quarter century - to explain to him the doctrinal reasons why he should cancel an initiative that he himself has already announced: his convocation of the world's religious leaders to meet in Assisi next October in order to raise a concerted call for peace.
But that is what nine historians and journalists did in an open letter published yesterday in
Il Foglio, who after calling themselves "Catholics most grateful for the work you are doing", then proceed to tell the Pope why he should have nothing to do with a meeting he has already called!
And they wished to explain the reasons to him, not merely by citing a series of citations from the Magisterium - which we must presume would not be unknown to someone like Joseph Ratzinger - but also reminding the Pope of the risks from 'this kind of meeting' to which he himself had called attention in the past.
The signatories harshly criticize the first Assisi inter-religious meeting hosted by John Paul II in October 1986. They claim that the event introduced indifferentism and religious relativism into the Catholic Church.
They recall the well-known 'liturgical abuses' that took place then (which were due to the initiative of the Franciscan friars who organized the event for the Pope, and not because he ordered them). Therefore, they call on Benedict XVI to step back from Assisi-III because, they claim, whatever he says there would not be understood, and the meeting would simply result in making it seem to the faithful that all religions are equal and interchangeable.
[Imagine saying this to the author of DOMINUS IESUS! Not to mention that he is Pope and therefore the primary advocate and defender of the 'unam sanctam cattolicam et apostolicam ecclesiam'!]
What is striking about the 'appeal' is its total silence on the second inter-religious meeting in Assisi in January 2002, called by John Paul II shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
In fact, Assisi-II had none of the excesses and abuses of Assisi-I. And riding beside Papa Wojtyla on the train for Assisi-II was Cardinal Ratzinger himself, who upon returning from the event, wrote a beautiful meditation on it for the magazine 30 GIORNI.
"It was not," he wrote, "a self-presentation by each religion as if they were interchangeable. It was not an affirmation of equality among all religions, which does not exist. Rather, it was the expression of a path, a search, a pilgrimage for peace, which is peace only if it comes with justice".
"With their witness for peace, their commitment to peace with justice," he continued, "the representatives of various religions undertook, to the limits of their capabilities, to proceed together on a journey which should be for everyone a journey for purification as well".
In the book
Truth and Tolerance, he would explain that despite 'undeniable dangers' of misunderstanding, "it would nonetheless be equally wrong to have a blanket and unconditional rejection of multi-religious prayer", which must take place under certain conditions and must be
"a sign of extraordinary circumstances in which, so to speak, a common cry of anguish is raised to shake the hearts of men as well as the heart of God".
And just two days ago, in his New Year address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, Benedict XVI reminded the world that "the contribution of the great religions of the world to the development of civilization" cannot be overlooked.
Papa Ratzinger, in repeating Papa Wojtyla's Assisi gesture - the first one, under the threat of nuclear conflict, the second after Al Qaeda's murderous attack - intends this exceptional event, Assisi-III, to take away any justification from those who would exploit the name of God to carry out violence and terrorism. And to belie the idea that religions are necessarily cause for conflict and for a clash of civilizations.
Not surprisingly, Jose Luis Restan wrote a column almost identical in its line of argument as Tornielli's...
Assisi-III is well
worth the effort
Translated from
January 12, 2011
Benedict XVI's invitation to the religions of the world to share a day of prayer for peace in Assisi next October is already grist for debate.
Much was said at the time about the reservations that Cardinal RAtzinger had expressed about what happened at the first Assisi inter-religious meeting convoked by John Paul II 25 years ago. Now, a group of Catholic intellectuals has published in the newspaper
Il Foglio an appeal to the Pope to cancel the event he announced on January 1.
It is curious how some of those who have always cited the doctrinal solidity of Joseph Ratzinger now advise him to be prudent and are warning him in severe tones of the possible consequences to an initiative that he, as the Successor to Peter, has taken in full awareness and freedom!
The signatories of the appeal believe that the event in Assisi - which they now recall to have done much harm (i.e., that it promoted religious syncretism and the perverse idea that all religions are equivalent and interchangeable) - was something that had corroded the fiber of Catholicism and blocked its missionary passion. And they warn Benedict XVI that it will have the same consequences today.
Let us review history. In his book
Truth and Tolerance, dedicated in large part to the dialog between the Christian faith and other world religions, the theologian Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith acknowledged that a gesture like inter-religious prayer carries undeniable perils, but says in the next line that it would be a mistake to reject it totally and unconditionally.
With his habitual precision, Cardinal Ratzinger explained that inter-religious prayer must be
"a sign of extraordinary circumstances in which, so to speak, a common cry of anguish is raised to shake the hearts of men as well as the heart of God".
So, let us ask ourselves: In view of the brutal threats from fundamentalism and the growing hostility from secularism, are we not in such circumstances now? Benedict XVI obviously thinks so.
On the other hand, one must narrate history completely. In 2002, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, John Paul II repeated his historic call to Assisi - and this time he was accompanied quite visibly by Cardinal Ratzinger.
I have a photo showing them smiling and content, hands clasped as they sat together in the train that took them to Assisi. After that occasion, Ratzinger wrote a beautiful meditation in which he said that "Assisi was the expression of a path, a search, a pilgrimage for peace, which is peace only if it comes with justice".
The Pope who has raised his voice - with tones that are perhaps unique in history - to defend his most vulnerable children believes that an act of common prayer for peace, which respects the demands of truth and justice, can be an important signal in this historical moment, in order to delegitimize the abominable justification of violence by fundamentalists and to show the secularized West the capacity of the major religions to generate coexistence.
Against the protesting intellectuals, I will stay with the wisdom of Peter.
Another reliable Italian Catholic commentator has his say on this issue, rather eloquently, published on the ideological website of Silvio Berlusconi's political coalition...
That 'Catholic right' that is
more Popish than the Pope
by Gianteo Bordero
Translated from
January 12, 2010
What a disappointment, to say the least, is the 'appeal' to Benedict XVI against the 'spirit of Assisi' published by some Catholic intellectuals and journalists in Tuesday's
Il Foglio!
They want to teach Papa Ratzinger how to be Pope and how to respect Tradition without falling into syncretism and relativism! They want to teach the man who, more than anyone else in recent years, has denounced with absolute rigor 'the dictatorship of relativism' - which rules with absolute rigor - as the dark evil of our time and as a subtle but terrible threat to 'the faith of simple folk'.
They would be more Ratzingerian than Ratzinger himself, warning the former prefect for the doctrine of the faith against the progressive drift inherent in every inter-religious meeting!
They want him, to use a euphemism, not to follow the road of his predecessor John Paul II, but they do not have the courage to name the future Blessed as having tolerated some instances of the worst religious syncretism
(ie, the pagan rituals introduced on occasion by his liturgical MC, Mons. Piero Marini, into papal liturgies in the name of 'inculturation').
Something must be understood - but not justified - in this tendency by some on the Catholic right to judge everything from the heights of their pre-conciliar snobbery, of their ideological traditionalism which treats Christianity - and the fact of being Christian itself - as if it was just a list of abstract doctrinal enunciations, something outside history, disembodied, and totally extrinsic to human existence with all its tragedies and its drama of the here and now.
They had thought, these signatories and their kind, that Benedict XVI would be the Pope who would step back in time, who would restore a 'golden past' and deligitimize the
nouvelle theologie, consigning such as Von Balthasar, De Lubac and Guardini to a new Index of prohibited reading, when they were the theologian Ratzinger's own models during his formation.
They misread the Ratzinger who is proudly conciliar. The Ratzinger who chose the medieval wisdom of St. Bonaventure against the neo-Thomism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Ratzinger who has rescued traditional liturgy not by way of the schismatic Mons. Lefebvre but through the German new liturgical movement.
The same Ratzinger who wrote for John Paul II one of the documents that has been most rigorous against the myth of the veritable equivalence of all religions - the declaration
Dominus Iesus which, in the Grand Jubilee Year of 2000, provoked such an outcry from the politically and ecclesiastically correct progressivists in the Church.
The same Ratzinger who, as Pope, would liberalize the pre-Conciliar Latin rite and revoke the excommunication of the bishops consecrated illegally by Lefebvre.
Finally, the same Ratzinger who criticized the 1986 Assisi meeting not per se, but for the equivocations that it generated in public opinion and within the so-called 'Catholic world' itself.
But to the zealous self-proclaimed 'custodians of genuine Tradition' all that is not good enough: dialog with representatives of other faiths should simply be shelved, despised, annulled. Because in their view, the Christian - as the repository of a syllogistic, deductive and, we must repeat, seemingly extrinsic 'truth' such as that professed by the maitres-a-penser of the Catholic right - does not need anyone or anything.
It doesn't seem to cross their minds that
perhaps it is the world itself, and the other religions, who need Christians, who need their embodied hope, their love for neighbor, their self giving in imitation of Christ, in order to build a society that is more human, more respectful of human dignity and human rights, and therefore more free, as Benedict XVI himself pointed out Monday in his remarkable address to the Vatican diplomatic corps.
The world needs Christians today more than ever, at a time when fundamentalism (particularly Muslim and Hindu) seeks to perpetrate the idea - as we have seen lately in Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria and other nations - that there is a legitimate anti-human violence that can be carried out in the name of God and that the 'infidel' can be deprived of his dignity and freedom under the direct orders of the Most High!
And this is what Ratzinger the Catholic has fought against all these years. This remains the great misunderstood and/or ignored lesson in the Regensburg lecture which was not an Occidentalist manifesto but
a serious proposal to re-establish religious dialog on the basis of a logos that is common to all men.
And this is what is not seen by the signatories of the letter which is not an 'appeal' at all but a true and proper 'preemptive' critique of Benedict XVI. The Pope who in their narrow-minded view should have been the anti-Assisi, the anti-John Paul II, the anti-Vatican II, but who is, instead, simply a faithful disciple of Jesus, who gives his life in service to the Church in order to make Christ known and to respond to his call and his love.
He responds to Christ, not to the labels or categories which from time to time have been stuck on him by this or that theological or intellectual current.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/01/2011 16:12]