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(Written for Newsweek.)
Is Pope Benedict XVI determined to restore the Latin Mass that many Catholics thought had been consigned to the dustbin of history?
The answer, in short, is both “yes” and “no.” But neither the “yes” nor the “no” quite fits the conventional speculations in several recent media reports, following off-the-cuff remarks to a small Catholic association in Great Britain by a Vatican official.
In unraveling this, it helps to begin at the beginning.
Bertolt Brecht's "Galileo" and that deeply misleading staple of high school English courses, "Inherit the Wind," have thoroughly confused our understanding of the relationship between biblical faith and the emergence of modern science. To clear the cobwebs, ask yourself a question: Why did the scientific method, which assumes that the natural world is rationally knowable, arise in the West, and not elsewhere? Other cultures had made important advances in mathematics and technology, but it was the West that invented the scientific method. Why?
The Dalai Lama is an entirely admirable defender of religious freedom and a moving advocate for the people of Tibet, whose past and present travails under communism are too often forgotten by westerners enamored of the dynamism of the Chinese economy.
Still, no one familiar with C.S. Lewis's masterful little book, The Abolition of Man, will imagine that the Dalai Lama has said something original by noting that the world's major religious traditions all teach similar moral messages. In the 1940s, Lewis went into some detail examining the parallels, which to him constitute a kind of fundamental human moral patrimony. Such commonalities also point toward a moral foundation for the assertion of "universal human rights," a point made by the sociologist of religion Peter Berger in 1977.
That the great world religion's share certain moral borders does not mean that they are simply variations-on-a-theme, however. Here is a suggestive quote from The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea, by the eminent French scholar, Remi Brague:
"In the Bible and in Christianity...the presence of the divine does not comport an immediate demand for obedience. A space opens up in which God manifests Himself, thus offering Himself to a gaze that might risk something like a description. The divine shows itself, or rather givs itself, before asking anything of us and instead of asking. Not only is it true that 'God owes us nothing' (Leszek Kolakowski), but he does not ask anything of us. Although God does indeed expect something of hi creatures (that we develop according to our own logic), He does not, in fact, demand anything, or rather, He asks nothing more than His gift already asks, thanks to the simple fact that it is given: to be received. In the case of man, that reception does not require anything but humanity."
Other world religions conceive God, and our relationship to God, very differently. And those are the differences that can make a considerable difference.
Six year after 9/11, we certainly should have learned that the threat that made itself lethally clear that day was not generic -- "religious extremism" -- but very specific: global jihadism.
Nor ought we think that what we "say to" the jihadists will have much of a soothing effect on their passions, as if they were overwrought teenagers and we were high-school guidance counselors armed with reassuring words and a prescription for Prozac.
The current press conniption over Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta amounts to a tempest in a teapot, although one that illustrates the media's ignorance about the spiritual lives of saints far more than it does the life and struggles of Mother Teresa.
That the diminutive Albanian nun and Nobel Peace Prize winner had, for decades, experienced a sense of living in a spiritual desert had been well known to those paying attention, ever since excerpts from the "positio," the critical biography prepared on behalf of her beatification cause, were published before her beatification by Pope John Paul II in October 2003; those interested may wish to consult Carol Zaleski's insightful and sensitive article, "Mother Teresa's Dark Night," in the May 2003 issue of First Things. So there is, in fact, no news here (except, perhaps, the "news" that religion reporters an editors should put www.firstthings.com into their computers).
To those for whom religious "preference" is of no more consequence than any other lifestyle choice -- something like Saab or Volvo, Nationals or Orioles, medium-rare or rare, chardonnay or chablis -- the recent document from the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, clarifying once again the self-understanding of the Catholic Church vis-a-vis other Christian communities as that self-understanding was expressed at the Second Vatican Council, can only sound strange, even offensive. To those who take seriously Christ's promise that he would preserve his Church in truth through the power of the Holy Spirit, the CDF clarification (approved by Pope Benedict XVI) is an invitation to serious theological conversation. That conversation emphatically includes theologically serious Christian believers in non-Catholic Christian communities. So let's try a little theology.
With all due respect to the blogosphere, this is precisely the kind of question that can't be answered briefly.
An important dialogue between a believer and a non-believer has developed in the past two years in the conversation between Pope Benedict XVI and Marcello Pera, a member of the Italian Senate and a distinguished philosopher of science.
If Benedict XVI and his principal host in Turkey, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, had their way, I suspect that the storyline here wouldn’t be, “Pope’s First Visit to Islamic Country Since Inflammatory Regensburg Address,” but rather, “Peter Meets Andrew to Consider the Unity of the Christian Church.”
Asked once to name the most important word in the Gospels, the late Pope John Paul II quickly replied, “Truth.” That the man the world came to revere as an icon of tolerance -- the first pope to pray at the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem, the first pope to enter a mosque -- should have given that particular answer suggests that this business of truth-and-dialogue is a bit more complicated, and thus a bit more interesting, than we might otherwise imagine.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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