Russian President says
'We want better ties
with the Vatican'
VATICAN CITY, July 5 (AP) – Russia's president says Moscow plans to improve its ties with the Vatican.
Tensions between the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches over property disputes and other issues have so far made it impossible for any Pope to visit Moscow.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told Italian reporters in an interview ahead of the G-8 summit in Italy this week that relations between his country and the Vatican will "in all likelihood be developed further." He also said the possibility of diplomatic ties is under discussion.
He declined to say if Pope Benedict XVI will travel to Russia anytime soon.
[Not going to happen unless Patriarch Kirill tells the government the Russian Orthodox Church is OK with it! That doesn't seem likely any time soon!]
The previous pontiff, Polish-born John Paul II, was frustrated in his desire to go to Russia.
Part of the interview was shown Sunday on Italian state TV.
One will perhaps better appreciate the significance of Russia's interest in having diplomatic ties with the Vatican when one considers that with an area of 17-million square kilometers, Russia is by far the largest country in the world (its expanse can be appreciated by looking at how it spans the globe, in the inset photo), and the Vatican is the smallest. Its 110 acres is just a bit larger than the area of the Moscow Kremlin (left photo).
Indeed, the first time I saw the Kremlin, the first thing that came to my mind was the Vatican, a similar medieval walled city with a number of churches within. The Moscow Kremlin has six major cathedrals inside it, and Cathedral Square is considered the heart of the Kremlin. Footnote: The Kremlin walls were built by Italian masons in the early 16th century! The Kremlin became a UNESCO World Heritage site in the early 1990s, but I am not too happy at the addition of so many modern government buildings after the end of the Soviet regime (when the only modern building added was a so-called Palace of Congresses that also housed an opera houce and concert hall.)
Now is the time to post David Goldman/Spengler's insightful blog in FIRST THINGS about the prospects of Vatican ties with China, now that the Chinese PM Hu Jintao is in Italy for the G8....It's one of those items I mentally earmarked last week...
Hu Jintao in Italy:
'China’s Catholic Moment'?
by David P. Goldman
An Asia Times dispatch today from Francesco Sisci, author of the essay “China’s Catholic Moment” in the June-June issue of
First Things, observes that Chinese premiere Hu Jintao next week embarks on a state visit to Italy, the first for a Chinese leader in a decade. The visit, Sisci argues, may portend a breakthrough in relations between China and the Vatican:
Hu will come as close as possible to breathing the air around one of the pillars of Western civilization – the Papacy, the Holy See, the Vatican, the headquarters of the largest unitary religion in the world.
For centuries, the Vatican has been part of the very way of thinking in the West. The idea of balancing powers came from the Roman republican tradition of two consuls, the democracy of the Greek city-states, preventing a concentration of power; it continued with the balancing of clashes and friction between the emperor and senate during the Roman Empire, and for centuries it was embodied in the talks and dialogue between European kings and the popes – the political and religious powers of the Western world.
During all that time, China had only the idea of concentration of power in the hands of the emperor. If the emperor failed to hold on to power, the empire would break up (as happened many times in the past 22 centuries) or the dynasty would fall.
Religious leaders simply had to obey to the emperor, in one way or another. But since the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, China has forfeited the idea of an emperor, a single paramount leader.
China’s decision-making process is developing fast and learning from the West, and China is looking around for inspiration. As the Vatican is part of this Western tradition of balancing powers, it is inescapable for the Chinese leaders.
Jiang, at the turn of the 21st century, started the process of normalizing ties with the Vatican, a process that stalled for a few years after the Holy See decided to canonize 120 Chinese martyrs on October 1, 2001, the PRC’s 51st National Day, the first PRC’s National Day in the new millennium.
After a few years, the process re-started. Two years ago the Pope issued a groundbreaking letter to Chinese Catholics that, for the first time since the beginning of the Cold War, recognized the legitimacy of the PRC and thrashed the old hostility between Catholic believers and the officially communist Chinese government. It said that a good Chinese Catholic ought to also be a good Chinese citizen.
Comments on Sisci’s “Catholic Moment” essay were overwhelmingly negative, even hostile; a number of posters accused Sisci of parroting the Chinese Communist line and acting as an apologist for a murderous regime.
My own view is that such outbursts betray a sort of cultural illiteracy that is sadly typical of Americans, who assume that if the rest of the world simply acted as they do, all would be well. They forget that America called out from among the nations a tiny percentage of individuals who wished to make a new start at the price of abandoning their own ethnicity.
Many of my conservative friends seem to think that if we jump up and down on the table and scream about China’s lack of democracy, we would improve the situation. I can’t decide if ignorance or petulance dominates in this attitude.
China always has been a empire, never a nation state. It holds together a welter of difference ethnicities speaking different languages through a common system of ideograms and a common culture, and always has opposed a centralizing power to centifugal tendencies.
It is an inherently unstable system. Communism erased China’s traditional culture, the Confucian system that linked the “little emperor” at the head of an extended family to the “big emperor” in Beijing through a set of analogous filial obligations.
In the midst of the greatest social upheaval in modern history, the largest popular migration in all of history, Chinese leaders are painfully aware that a great empire cannot survive merely on the impetus of consumerism.
That is why China’s leaders are looking to the West for more than methods of business administration. It is impossible to predict, of course, how this will proceed, but potentially it could be one of the most momentous developments of our time.
Those in the United States who want China to fail should be careful what they wish for. Iraq, Iran, or Belarus could sink into the ground without a trace and the world would carry on regardless; an unstable China would make the world security situation unmanageable, not to mention the world economy.
My mystical intuition tells me that Hu’s decision to visit Italy implie something more than the Chinese passion for Italian cuisine (the regional cuisine of Shanghai is Italian, judging from the number of restauarants operating their from Pizza Hut to haute cuisine, and the city’s signature dish is osso buco alla gremolata).
My mystical intuition thinks that
Hu’s presence in Italy has something to do wtih the fact that the Vatican is located in Italy. We will see; my mystical intuition gets it wrong a good deal of the time.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/11/2009 17:59]