Statement of Sydney, Australia's Cardinal George Pell:
It is a sign of hope that no organised violence has flared here in Australia, following Pope Benedict's recent comments.
No one compared the Pope to Hitler or Mussolini (as in Turkey) or called for his murder as Sheik Malin did in Somalia. No group like the League of Jihadists in Iraq promised "that the soldiers of Mohammed will come sooner or later to shake your throne and the foundations of your state".
However the violent reactions in many parts of the Islamic world justified one of Pope Benedict's main fears. They showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence.
Our major priority must be to maintain peace and harmony within the Australian community, but no lasting achievements can be grounded in fantasies and evasions.
The responses of Sheik al-Hilali, Australia's mufti, in particular, and even Dr. Ameer Ali of the Prime Minister's Muslim Reference Group were unfortunately typical and unhelpful. It is always some one else's fault and issues touching on the nature of Islam are ignored.
Sheik al-Hilali often responds to criticism by questioning the intelligence and competence of the questioner or critic. So too with the Pope, whose speech he claimed was not what was expected of a holy person and indeed "the Church needs to re-examine its thoughts about someone who doesn't have the qualities or good grasp of Christian character or knowledge".
Dr. Ameer Ali's published reply was more surprising as it called on Pope Benedict to be more like Pope John Paul II than Pope Urban II, who called the First Crusade. In fact the Pope's long speech was more about the weaknesses of the Western world, its irreligion and disdain for religion and he explicitly rejected linking religion and violence. He won't be calling any crusade.
Today Westerners often link genuine religious expression with peace and tolerance. Today most Muslims identify genuine religion with submission (Islam) to the commands of the Quran. They are proud of the spectacular military expansion across continents especially in the decades after the Prophet's death. This is seen as a sign of God's blessing.
Friends of Islam in Australia have genuine questions, which need to be addressed, not regularly avoided. We are grateful for those moderate Moslems who have spoken publicly. But as Andrew Robb, Parliamentary Secretary on Multicultural Affairs, told Muslim clerics last weekend evil acts done falsely in the name of Islam around the world "need to be addressed, not swept under the carpet".
George Cardinal Pell Archbishop of Sydney
Monday, September 18, 2006
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Commentary on Pope's Comments on Jihad
With the controversy of Pope Benedict's talk in Germany now reaching stupid purportions, two things have immediately stood out to me:
1) How the media has failed to look at Pope Benedict's comments in their proper context. We are so driven in this country for quick sound bites and brief summaries of things, that we fail to take the time to actually absorb the full meaning of anything. I remember seeing a quote just a few days ago that stated Pope Benedict "Goes on vacation after Slamming Islam." Well that is just terrible journalism and just plain lazy if you ask me. The more I observe the way the media works, the more I realize that most media outlets, like the shameful New York Times, are completely useless and far from being trustworthy.
2) I have great respect for Islam. I greatly admire their call to prayer and their fasting. However, Islam must accept its own history, just as we in Christianity have. What do I mean? Well, Islam must realize that for most of their history, particularly in the western world, they were the ones forcing conversion by the sword. In particuler, I would encourage the reader to look up the practices of the Ottoman Empire, who forced Christians in their lands to give up one of their male children to the service of the Sultan. The Janissaries, as they were known, became famous for their military skills, but also because they were staffed by youths conscripted from Christian families in the Balkans. After the conscription they were defined as the property of the sultan, and practically all of them were compelled to convert to Islam. (Now often some will point to the Crusades as Christian aggression, however, it is essential that when one looks at the Crusades to remember that the prior 400 years marked Islamic aggression into Christian lands in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe!)
The Church has in the past repented for those members who have committed sins in the name of the Church. It is time for Islam to do the same! Either Islam is a religion of peace or it isn't. I would just prefer someone to clear that up for me instead of the continued shadows and smoke that cloud this issue. And really, isn't all this burning of pictures and flags getting a bit old and tiresome? Doesn't this whole episode just prove the necessity for both Faith and Reason? Is that not what our Holy Father was talking about to begin with?
Below is some interesting analysis from Vatican insider John Allen:
I have written before that Benedict XVI is not a PC pope. By that, I don't mean that he sets out to give offense; on the contrary, he's one of the most gracious figures ever to step on the world stage. Instead, he simply does not allow his thinking to be channeled by the taboos and fashions of ordinary public discourse.
For example, any PR consultant would have told the pope that if he wanted to make a point about the relationship between faith and reason, he shouldn't open up with a comparison between Islam and Christianity that would be widely understood as a criticism of Islam, suggesting that it's irrational and prone to violence. Yet that is precisely what Benedict did in his address to 1,500 students and faculty at the University of Regensburg on Wednesday, citing a 14th century dialogue between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a learned Persian.
News headlines immediately focused upon the pope's use of the term jihad and its implied swipe at Muslim-influenced terrorism, shaping up as something of a replay of the Danish cartoon controversy.
Promoting conversation through imagery and symbols.Yet he brought up the dialogue between Paleologus and the Persian to make a different point. Under the influence of its Greek heritage, he said, Christianity represents a decisive choice in favor of the rationality of God. While Muslims may stress God's majesty and absolute transcendence, Christians believe it would contradict God's nature to act irrationally. He argued that the Gospel of John spoke the last word on the biblical concept of God: In the beginning was the logos, usually translated as word, but it is also the Greek term for reason.
The lecture, titled "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections," ran to almost 4,000 words (more than a half-hour of speaking time), and its main concern was with what Benedict sees as an artificial truncation of human reason in the West. Since the Reformation, he argued, Western thinkers have come to regard theology and metaphysics as unscientific.
That is problematic, Benedict said, on two counts.
First, it leaves reason mute before the great questions of life and death, questions about why we are here and how we should act.
"This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity," the pope said, "as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate."
Second, its logically self-defeating for science itself, which depends upon the assumption of order and reason in the universe, but cant explain why things should work that way in the first place.
"The question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought to philosophy and theology," the pope said. "For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding."
Ultimately, Benedict argued, a form of reason which rejects religious and philosophical thinking cannot promote dialogue with other cultures.
"In the Western world, it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid," he said. "Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."
Whatever the merits of Benedict's argument, it is a subtle and carefully modulated analysis of Western intellectual history head and shoulders above the standard fare most leaders offer on the stump. Of course, that's not what the world is talking about right now, raising the question of whether Benedict could do with a dash more sensitivity to how wires in today's hair-trigger world are tripped.
1) How the media has failed to look at Pope Benedict's comments in their proper context. We are so driven in this country for quick sound bites and brief summaries of things, that we fail to take the time to actually absorb the full meaning of anything. I remember seeing a quote just a few days ago that stated Pope Benedict "Goes on vacation after Slamming Islam." Well that is just terrible journalism and just plain lazy if you ask me. The more I observe the way the media works, the more I realize that most media outlets, like the shameful New York Times, are completely useless and far from being trustworthy.
2) I have great respect for Islam. I greatly admire their call to prayer and their fasting. However, Islam must accept its own history, just as we in Christianity have. What do I mean? Well, Islam must realize that for most of their history, particularly in the western world, they were the ones forcing conversion by the sword. In particuler, I would encourage the reader to look up the practices of the Ottoman Empire, who forced Christians in their lands to give up one of their male children to the service of the Sultan. The Janissaries, as they were known, became famous for their military skills, but also because they were staffed by youths conscripted from Christian families in the Balkans. After the conscription they were defined as the property of the sultan, and practically all of them were compelled to convert to Islam. (Now often some will point to the Crusades as Christian aggression, however, it is essential that when one looks at the Crusades to remember that the prior 400 years marked Islamic aggression into Christian lands in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe!)
The Church has in the past repented for those members who have committed sins in the name of the Church. It is time for Islam to do the same! Either Islam is a religion of peace or it isn't. I would just prefer someone to clear that up for me instead of the continued shadows and smoke that cloud this issue. And really, isn't all this burning of pictures and flags getting a bit old and tiresome? Doesn't this whole episode just prove the necessity for both Faith and Reason? Is that not what our Holy Father was talking about to begin with?
Below is some interesting analysis from Vatican insider John Allen:
I have written before that Benedict XVI is not a PC pope. By that, I don't mean that he sets out to give offense; on the contrary, he's one of the most gracious figures ever to step on the world stage. Instead, he simply does not allow his thinking to be channeled by the taboos and fashions of ordinary public discourse.
For example, any PR consultant would have told the pope that if he wanted to make a point about the relationship between faith and reason, he shouldn't open up with a comparison between Islam and Christianity that would be widely understood as a criticism of Islam, suggesting that it's irrational and prone to violence. Yet that is precisely what Benedict did in his address to 1,500 students and faculty at the University of Regensburg on Wednesday, citing a 14th century dialogue between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a learned Persian.
News headlines immediately focused upon the pope's use of the term jihad and its implied swipe at Muslim-influenced terrorism, shaping up as something of a replay of the Danish cartoon controversy.
Promoting conversation through imagery and symbols.Yet he brought up the dialogue between Paleologus and the Persian to make a different point. Under the influence of its Greek heritage, he said, Christianity represents a decisive choice in favor of the rationality of God. While Muslims may stress God's majesty and absolute transcendence, Christians believe it would contradict God's nature to act irrationally. He argued that the Gospel of John spoke the last word on the biblical concept of God: In the beginning was the logos, usually translated as word, but it is also the Greek term for reason.
The lecture, titled "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections," ran to almost 4,000 words (more than a half-hour of speaking time), and its main concern was with what Benedict sees as an artificial truncation of human reason in the West. Since the Reformation, he argued, Western thinkers have come to regard theology and metaphysics as unscientific.
That is problematic, Benedict said, on two counts.
First, it leaves reason mute before the great questions of life and death, questions about why we are here and how we should act.
"This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity," the pope said, "as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate."
Second, its logically self-defeating for science itself, which depends upon the assumption of order and reason in the universe, but cant explain why things should work that way in the first place.
"The question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought to philosophy and theology," the pope said. "For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding."
Ultimately, Benedict argued, a form of reason which rejects religious and philosophical thinking cannot promote dialogue with other cultures.
"In the Western world, it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid," he said. "Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."
Whatever the merits of Benedict's argument, it is a subtle and carefully modulated analysis of Western intellectual history head and shoulders above the standard fare most leaders offer on the stump. Of course, that's not what the world is talking about right now, raising the question of whether Benedict could do with a dash more sensitivity to how wires in today's hair-trigger world are tripped.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Theology for an Age of Terror
I found this article at Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine. It is definitely worth a read....particularly on this 11th of September.
September 11, 2001, is frequently compared to December 7, 1941, as a day that will "live in infamy." But a more appropriate analogy might be August 24, 410, when the city of Rome was besieged and pillaged by an army of 40,000 "barbarians" led by the Osama bin Laden of late antiquity, a wily warrior named Alaric. One can still see the effects of this cataclysmic event when walking through the ruins of the Roman Forum today. The Basilica Aemilia was the Wall Street of ancient Rome, a beautiful structure in the Forum with a marble portico. One can still see the green stains of copper coins melted into the stone from the conflagrations set by Alaric and his marauders.
Before then, Roman coins bore the legend Invicta Roma Aeterna: eternal, unconquerable Rome. It had been more than 800 years since the Eternal City had fallen to an enemy's attack. In many ways, Rome was like America prior to 9/11, the world's only superpower. But in 410, Rome's military power could not prevent its walls being breached, its women raped, and its sacred precincts burned and sacked............for the conclusion goto: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/009/1.78.html
September 11, 2001, is frequently compared to December 7, 1941, as a day that will "live in infamy." But a more appropriate analogy might be August 24, 410, when the city of Rome was besieged and pillaged by an army of 40,000 "barbarians" led by the Osama bin Laden of late antiquity, a wily warrior named Alaric. One can still see the effects of this cataclysmic event when walking through the ruins of the Roman Forum today. The Basilica Aemilia was the Wall Street of ancient Rome, a beautiful structure in the Forum with a marble portico. One can still see the green stains of copper coins melted into the stone from the conflagrations set by Alaric and his marauders.
Before then, Roman coins bore the legend Invicta Roma Aeterna: eternal, unconquerable Rome. It had been more than 800 years since the Eternal City had fallen to an enemy's attack. In many ways, Rome was like America prior to 9/11, the world's only superpower. But in 410, Rome's military power could not prevent its walls being breached, its women raped, and its sacred precincts burned and sacked............for the conclusion goto: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/009/1.78.html
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