These are fierce theological times...

Imi place cum suna introducerea la articol ...
Da, am mai gasit un articol despre papa Benedict, extrem de interesant si documentat (nu ca panselutele emise de mine intr-o alta postare). Se prezinta contextul teologic in care se afla lumea de azi, labirintul istoric prin care s-a ajuns aici, si incercarile de a desluşi caile pe care acest papa misterios urmareste sa indrume catolicismul, d'aci incolo ...
Articolul se intituleaza "The Pope and Islam", ... textul e destul de lung, asa ca spicuiesc doar citeva paragrafe de pe ici colo.

"It is well known that Benedict wants to transform the Church of Rome, which is not to say that he wants to make it more responsive to the realities of modern life as it is lived by Catholic women in the West, or by Catholic homosexuals, or even by the millions of desperately poor Catholic families in the Third World who are still waiting for some merciful dispensation on the use of contraception. He wants to purify the Church, to make it more definitively Christian, more observant, obedient, and disciplined—you could say more like the way he sees Islam. And never mind that he doesn’t seem to like much about Islam, or that he has doubts about Islam’s direction. (His doubts are not unusual in today’s world; many Muslims have them.) The Pope is a theologian—the first prominent theologian to sit on Peter’s throne since the eighteenth century. He views the world through a strictly theological frame, and his judgments about Islam, however defiant or reductive they sometimes sound, have finally to do with the idea of Theos—God—as he understands it. Those judgments have not changed much, in character, since he left Germany for the Vat-ican, twenty-six years ago.
Islam has been in Europe for thirteen hundred years. Arab armies were at the gates of Poitiers, in central France, in 732—only a hundred years after the Prophet died and more than three hundred and fifty years before the start of the First Crusade—and southern Spain was still under Islamic rule in the fifteenth century, some two hundred years after the knights of the Ninth Crusade straggled home. But Benedict is the first Pope to have developed what could be called an active theological policy toward Islam, as opposed to, say, a military or political one—“the first really functioning Pope in the post-September 11th world,” Daniel Madigan calls him.
Read More...
[...] Joseph Ratzinger and his predecessor Karol Wojtyla were the first “foreigners,” as Italians still call them, to be elected to the papacy since 1522, when a priest from Utrecht began twenty uneventful months as Pope Adrian VI. The forty-five Pontiffs who followed Adrian were not only reliably homegrown; they were rarely driven to extremes of Christian ardor, and Italians liked them that way—for their self-interest and their discretion. Popes were not expected to transform Catholicism. Their job was to look after their land, their coffers, and their clergy, support the wars against Protestants, and dazzle Europe’s Catholic peasants with earthly displays of the heavenly pomp awaiting them once the misery of their indentured lives was past. The Church lost the last of its Papal States in 1870, with the Risorgimento, and, after years of wrangling with the capricious new entity called Italy, it settled into a fairly comfortable role. It delivered the Catholic vote to the Christian Democrats and kept the Communists at bay, and in return was assured that no unseemly new laws would disturb the patriarchal sanctity of the Catholic family. (It eventually lost on contraception and divorce.)

[...] Ratzinger and Wojtyla shared this: an exceptionally narrow view of what constitutes a morally acceptable Christian life. That view is reflected in the daily decisions of bishops who in the past few years have denied the sacraments to pro-choice politicians (St. Louis); refused to allow Muslims to pray at a church that was once a mosque (Córdoba); and denied Catholic burial to an incurably ailing man who, after years of suffering on a respirator, asked to die (Rome).
But the resemblance ends there. Ratzinger did not really think that theological dialogue with non-Christians was useful, or meaningful, or even possible. John Paul II did. His papacy, he said, was going to be a peace papacy—a papacy of bridges. Unlike Ratzinger, he was not much concerned about whether a Trinitarian faith with an anthropomorphic God was “comprehensible” to a Muslim whose God is never manifest. He would talk to anyone about God. In twenty-six years as Pope, he made a hundred and two trips abroad, many of them to Muslim countries, and it didn’t matter whether the understanding of God was the same from one airport to the next.

(mai mult despre diferendele intre cei 2 papi, in articol ...)
[...] Benedict, who is nearly eighty, is said to have set himself two goals for what he knows will be a short papacy. Neither of them involves Islam theologically, but they do involve it in very practical, political ways. His first goal is ecumenical. It has to do with reinvigorating, and perhaps enforcing, what he sees as Christianity’s nonnegotiable moral precepts. In other words, he wants to temper and constrain Western secularism with his own brand of Christian morality; he wants the leaders of other Christian fellowships to join him; and he wants to put the world on notice that, with more than fifteen million Muslims living in Western Europe, the only analogous mission in the West today is an Islamist one.
[...] Benedict’s second goal is reciprocity with Islam. He wants to use his papacy to restore to Christian minorities in Muslim countries the same freedom of religion that most Muslims enjoy in the West. The question of reciprocity is hardly new, but it was never a priority at the Vatican before Benedict’s reign. John Paul II avoided it, on his travels, by saying, in effect, “I go for the country, not the religion.” Benedict has pretty much made it a precondition for relations between the Vatican and the Muslim world. He clearly thinks that the JudeoChristian West has been self-destructively shortsighted in its concessions to the Islamic diaspora, when few, if any, concessions are made to Christians and Jews in most of the Middle East.

(mai mult despre intentiile lui papa, in articol ...)

[...] For some Catholic theologians, the issue isn’t Benedict’s idea of Islam, or his notion of a purer Church, or his dismissal of the possibility that doctrine can evolve. It is his conviction that Christian faith is demonstrably “rational.” That was the argument of his Regensburg speech, and, much more impressively stated, of his long dialogue with Habermas about reason, religion, and the “dialectics of secularization.” Habermas has always maintained that secular morality—morality negotiated in and by civil society—can, and should, provide humanity with a governing ethos. Benedict, in the course of their conversation, maintained that “the rational or ethical or religious formula that would embrace the whole world and unite all persons does not exist; or, at least, it is unattainable at the present moment.” By that definition, almost any dialogue that does not include a shared definition of the rational, the ethical, or the religious becomes impossible. And it precludes any attempt at theological dialogue with Islam. "

"The Pope and Islam" by Jane Kramer, Illustration: Mark Ulriksen
The New Yorker, April 2, 2007