Pope Benedict's Interfaith Outreach

[Bubba_Switzler]

In this Umbrian hilltop city 25 years ago, Buddhists chanted to the accompaniment of gongs and drums, Zoroastrians tended a sacred fire, and an American Indian medicine man in traditional headdress smoked a peace pipe and called down the blessings of the “Great Spirit.” In a moment that produced the day’s most famous image, robed leaders of the world’s major religions sat side by side under a sign bearing various translations of the word “peace.”

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This year’s gathering did draw another group traditionally resistant to the appeal of interfaith activity: those who profess no religion at all. Among the guests chosen to speak in Assisi’s Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, along with the patriarch of Constantinople and the archbishop of Canterbury, was the Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, one of four nonbelievers in attendance.

Benedict’s decision to include agnostics, to whom he dedicated the conclusion of his address, was the choice most revealing of his priorities. In acknowledgment of their presence, Thursday’s official program called for “reflection and/or prayer,” and the day itself was rechristened one of “reflection, dialogue and prayer.” Thus at a gathering of religious leaders, worship had become optional.

This change, redefining the group as united not by faith but by the desire for peace and justice, ruled out any interpretation of their meeting as an advertisement for religious syncretism. Even more importantly, opening the dialogue to nonreligious “seekers of the truth” underscored one of the major themes of Benedict’s pontificate: the need for Western culture to restore its dialogue between faith and reason, and thus to rehabilitate the concept of objective truth in the realms of metaphysics and ethics.

This audacious goal has unsettling implications for Catholicism’s relations with other faiths. After all, if religion is of more than merely subjective value, and if its many varieties are not just different expressions of the same reality, it follows that some religions are truer than others. And Benedict has never hidden his conviction of where the truth in its fullness lies.

However undiplomatic it may seem in certain contexts, Benedict’s emphasis on objective truth is, by his lights, essential to the agenda for which he prayed in Assisi. As he told a European ambassador last week, social justice is based on norms accessible to all, derived not from divine revelation but from “reason and nature”—that is, from “universally applicable principles that are as real as the physical elements of the natural environment.”

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[Pfaffenhoffen]

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This Pope has a different idea of John Paul II. John Paul was the Pope I loved. But today, Benedict is my Pope.

 

[Dee_S]

Pope says Assisi meeting shows desire for peace is real

Vatican City, Oct 28, 2011 / 02:18 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Benedict XVI met this morning with delegates who participated in yesterday’s Assisi gathering and said that the meeting showed how genuine the desire for peace and the good of others is.

“In a certain sense, this gathering is representative of the billions of men and women throughout our world who are actively engaged in promoting justice and peace,” said the Pope.

He told them the day had also been “a sign of the friendship and fraternity which has flourished” because of the work of those engaged in dialogue. He expressed hope that such friendships would “continue to grow.”

Pope Benedict praised the foresight of Pope John Paul II in calling the first Assisi meeting in 1986 and said that the gatherings are a “vivid expression of the fact that every day, throughout our world, people of different religious traditions live and work together in harmony.”

“It is surely significant,” he continued, that so many people are committed to working for the good of the human family.

“As we go our separate ways,” the Pope said as he bade them farewell, “let us draw strength from this experience and, wherever we may be, let us continue refreshed on the journey that leads to truth, the pilgrimage that leads to peace. I thank all of you from my heart!”

We should be proud of our Pope and of our Faith which is a 'light to all the world". Anyone who chooses to criticise the mission of the Church in the world, should first read and understand the precise nature of this ‘mission’.

Encyclical - Charity in Truth can be found at this link:
vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html

Speaking at his weekly audience in St Peter’s Square on 7 June 2006, Pope Benedict asserted that Jesus himself had entrusted the leadership of the Church to his apostle Peter. “Peter’s responsibility thus consists of guaranteeing the communion with Christ,” said Pope Benedict. "Let us pray so that the primacy of Peter, entrusted to poor human beings, may always be exercised in this original sense desired by the Lord, so that it will be increasingly recognised in its true meaning by brothers who are still not in communion with us."