The pope perhaps spilled the beans even more than the Vatican realizes.
[T]he pope said the book “explained with great clarity” that “an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible.” In theological terms, added the pope, “a true dialogue is not possible without putting one’s faith in parentheses.”…To some scholars, the pope’s remarks seemed aimed at pushing more theoretical interreligious conversations into the practical realm. “He’s trying to get the Catholic-Islamic dialogue out of the clouds of theory and down to brass tacks: how can we know the truth about how we ought to live together justly, despite basic creedal differences?”
How indeed. By thinking about the subject in secular, rational, human-based terms, that’s how. By bracketing ‘creedal’ matters altogether and thinking about this world and these humans and these issues. But the pope of course won’t have intended to say that…
Comments
15 responses to “The pope says more than he meant to”
Yes, I noticed this too! Isn’t it great?! Of course, he can’t put his faith in parenthesis. He can’t do a creedal epoché! Nice touch, I thought!
So when faith mutates, it will become (faith,) which means terrible (danger) in sight for the pope.
As (faith) (from his standpoint) will lose its value, and he will subsequently be subsumed by it and be reduced to having to hand over power.
‘The pope’s comments came in a letter he wrote to Marcello Pera, an Italian center-right politician and scholar whose forthcoming book, “Why We Must Call Ourselves Christian,” argues that Europe should stay true to its Christian roots’.
I was unaware that Europe had only been around for 2,000 years. I seem to remember reading some stuff about ancient Greek philosophy and pre-Christian paganism. Obviously I was conned.
And no-one’s going to tell me I ‘must’ call myself anything.
But then the (Pope) will be out of a (job).
Unfortunately the joke is on us. What’s behind this is the religious finding an unbreakable political alliance in order to defend the many credal points common to them. Although even these points are coincidental: the final aim is to get a fine point across, human beings need to be herded like sheep.
God inspired him to first win a worldly war against secular people before going for complete world dominance. This type of honesty will go well with Islamists, after all, who wants an ally that isn’t as fanatic as oneself?
I don’t think the pope thinks that the fact that faiths are incompatible is a problem. He just thinks that everyone else is wrong! Well, if you’re infallible, what else could you think?!
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but isn’t Papal Infallibility a relatively new conceit? Pius IX or Leo XIII or summat?
Yes, infallibility was declared at the First Vatican Council on the 18th July 1870. However, infallibility is claimed, in that declaration (Chapter 4 of Session 4) to be the constant teaching of the church, in that it has always been maintained by the holy see, has been the constant custom of the church, and has been declared by the ecumenical councils. It is defined, in the same chapter, in this way:
It was in fact in reference to the decree on infallibility of the pope that John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, wrote his famous words that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
He went on to say that “Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency of certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
He went to Rome in an attempt to prevent the declaration on papal infallibility, but he was unsuccessful. This is unfortunate, since infallibility is a fateful attraction to the journalistic mind. Infallibility is a form of celebrity. People even ask for Sarah Palin’s opinions!
Fortunately, all opinions are infallible in the world of the intertubes… even hers… but thus also ours!
I didn’t know that! I had no idea that was what prompted Acton’s aphorism.
It’s really stunning that grown-up people can write crap like that and others can believe it – stunning and sick-making. Nothing new there of course, but still, looking at the actual words with a cold eye…
well.
Ah, what can I say, Ophelia? I am a snapper up of unconsidered trifles.
More to the point, how do we get the recent draft UN resolution on defamation of religions on the map? How do we say that this is more dangerous than Vatican I’s declaration of infallibility? That our freedoms, and especially the freedom of women, is deeply threatened by what the OIC is trying to do? It’s a horrendous situation, and needs some kind of concerted response. Any ideas?
Howdy Autolycus.
Not a lot of ideas, apart from doing what I’m already doing. Just pass it on pass it on pass it on. It does stagger me that there’s no media coverage.
Eric, I think the pope thinks (& I can distinctly feel such headache as tends to come with said thoughts) that it is a little bit of tactical nuisance this incompatibility thing. So, as the good old catholic he is he’ll have our cake and eat it too: ‘let’s be practical on all this, he says, if we get everybody to be good & piously religious then we just need to scare the hell out of the bad religious like in medieval times – what remains resisting we can bomb, as God after all allowed us progress such we could put it to the good use.
From the NYT article:
But Benedict added that “intercultural dialogue which deepens the cultural consequences of basic religious ideas” was important. He called for confronting “in a public forum the cultural consequences of basic religious decisions.”
From another non-theists blog:
This isn’t just Benedict’s way of ending pointless and pap-filled drone sessions between Catholics, Anglicans, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews and the endless rest, trying to pretend away differences as wide as the Pacific.
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