Interreligious dialogue impossible, pope says, but intercultural dialogue good

[jfhh]

Marcello Pera is the former president of the Italian Senate and also a professor of philosophy at the University of Pisa. Intellectually, Pera is a disciple of Karl Popper. He’s perhaps the leading example of a peculiar phenomenon on the cultural right in today’s Europe – self-professed atheists and secularists who nevertheless support a revival of the Christian roots of the Old Continent. In 2004, he co-authored a book on Europe with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger called Without Roots. Pera’s new book, which comes out tomorrow and is called Why We Must Call Ourselves Christians, travels much the same ground.

What makes the book remarkable is that, apparently for the first time, it carries a brief introduction written by a sitting pope. Benedict’s letter to Pera has made a stir in the global media, in part because the pope repeats his well-known conviction that dialogue among religions in the strict sense is logically impossible, because it implies a suspension of one’s own faith commitments, but that dialogue among cultures shaped by those religions is not only possible but urgently necessary.

The following is the full text of Pope Benedict XVI’s letter about Pera’s book, in an NCR translation from the Italian original.

ncrcafe.org/node/2298

Some please explain the nuance in the text. This concerns me greatly. I hope we are not going backwards.
Pope Benedict XVI:

Dear Senator Pera:

Recently I was able to read your new book Why We Must Call Ourselves Christians. It was for me a fascinating experience. With a stupendous knowledge of the sources and a cogent logic, you analyze the essence of liberalism beginning with its foundations, demonstrating its roots in the Christian image of God that belongs to the essence of liberalism: the relationship with God of which man is the image, and from which we have received the gift of liberty. With incontestable logic, you show that liberalism loses its basis and destroys itself if it abandons this foundation.

No less impressive are your analyses of liberty and of ‘multi-culturalism,’ in which you illustrate the self-contradictory nature of this concept and hence its political and cultural impossibility. Of fundamental importance is your analysis of what Europe can be, and of a European constitution in which Europe does not transform itself into a cosmopolitan reality, but rather finds its identity in its Christian-liberal foundation.

Particularly meaningful for me too is your analysis of interreligious and intercultural dialogue. You explain with great clarity that an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the term is not possible, while you urge intercultural dialogue that develops the cultural consequences of the religious option which lies beneath. While a true dialogue is not possible about this basic option without putting one’s own faith into parentheses, it’s important in public exchange to explore the cultural consequences of these religious options. Here, dialogue and mutual correction and enrichment are both possible and necessary.

With regard to the importance of all this for the contemporary crisis in ethics, I find what you say about the trajectory of liberal ethics important. You demonstrate that liberalism – without ceasing to be liberalism, but, on the contrary, in order to be faithful to itself – can link itself to a doctrine of the good, in particular that of Christianity, which is in fact genetically linked to liberalism. You thereby offer a true contribution to overcoming the crisis.

With its sober rationality, its ample philosophical information and the force of its argument, the present book, in my opinion, is of fundamental importance in this hour for Europe and for the world. I hope that it finds a large audience, and that it can give to political debate, beyond the most urgent problems, that depth without which we cannot overcome the challenge of our historical moment.

With gratitude for your work, I heartily offer God’s blessings.

 

[requiemaeturnum]

Deo Gratias!! Finally a Pope that recognises the uselessness of false ecumenism. Nay, we are not going backwards- but forwards!! Next step…normalisation of SSPX for the win!!

 

[Man]

It simply isn’t possible to say what I would believe if I was “actually a Muslim.” If you are actually a Christian, it is impossible to understand Islam as if you were a Muslim, however, it is possible to understand the good within Islam from the eye of a Christian.

Similarly, the Pope underlines the necessity of cultural dialog, especially important throughout the developed world. We see problems cropping up when laws, carelessly or not, object or attack the Catholic world view. Why does this happen? It happens because we are trying to be more accepting of others religious views, BUT also because our roots, in the West, are Catholic ones.

Our legal system simply acknowledges that agreement.

Often, rather than finding a way to accept another world view in the law, however, the legislature enacts a reform that ends up attacking the generally good pre-existing conditions and assumptions of the society. This makes no sense, but is done, either from carelessness, spite, or laziness.

I think a lot of times its sheer laziness. There simply is no reason to have the Church become a target because some was granted legal protections. This happened in Canada, for instance, with gay marriage and some hate speech regulations.

The government decided, essentially, to reject its own roots, or possibly just ignore them, in part, I believe, because the necessary torte and other reform would have been too much of a burden.

There is often much resistance to good regulation and much support for bad regulation.

We need to expect our governmental leaders to reject legislation which attacks positive world views and corresponding organizations, and is sensitive to the basic needs of all of the people.

 

[jfhh]

More

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[rosetta_stone]

an honest question here
How can the pope say Catholicism and liberalism are genetically related when liberalism was condemned in Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors?