IN BRIEF
Democracy ‘unlikely’ in Arab world The Chaldean Archbishop of Kirkuk, Louis Sako, has warned that the so-called Arab Spring will not lead to European- style democracy. The Iraqi cleric said that for Muslim-majority nations, state and religion “walk hand in hand”. The head of Lebanon’s Maronite Catholics, Patriarch Beshara Butros Rai, warned that an end to Syria’s current regime would threaten Christians across the region. President Bashar al-Assad should be allowed to implement reforms, he said, adding that the fall of “regimes described as dictatorial … could lead to civil war, in which Christians would be the biggest victims”.
Appeal for whistleblowers The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests and the Centre for Constitutional Rights have urged current and former Vatican employees to report anything they know about a cover-up of abuse cases to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague. The groups made the appeal on Tuesday in Rome at the end of a 12-city tour aimed at gaining support for a formal complaint they lodged earlier at the ICC against high-ranking Vatican officials, including the Pope.
President to veto abortion reform Chile’s Sebastián Piñera has said he will veto any legislation designed to legalise therapeutic abortion in the country. The senate medical committee has voted in favour of decriminalising abortion in cases including rape and when the pregnancy threatens the mother. All abortion is banned in Chile, a position the Chilean Church has argued should be maintained.
Teachers go back to school Catholic school teachers at 17 Philadelphia high schools returned to the classroom on Tuesday after voting to ratify a new contract with the archdiocese. They had been on strike for two weeks. The new contract gives administrators greater flex- ibility in introducing new programmes and hiring teachers.
Nuncio transferred to Prague Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, the papal nuncio the Vatican recalled from Ireland over tensions surrounding the Church’s handling of priest sexual-abuse cases, has been formally reassigned to represent the Pope in the Czech Republic.
Pope on The Tablet website Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to Germany this weekend is covered on The Tablet’s web- site. Visit
www.thetablet.co.uk for live TV coverage and texts of papal speeches.
For daily news updates visit
www.thetablet.co.uk
30 | THE TABLET | 24 September 2011
Letter from Rome P
ope Benedict XVI is in Germany this weekend for what his aides have called one the most ambitious
pastoral visits of his pontificate. Without fanfare, Vatican officials quietly cancelled his general audience the day before the trip, evidently in an effort to preserve the 84-year-old pontiff ’s strength for the four-day sojourn. Instead, he had a few brief encounters at Castel Gandolfo, including one in which he gave the pallium to Cardinal Angelo Scola, who is to be ceremoniously installed tomorrow as Archbishop of Milan. Der Papst, on the other hand, is to be
celebrating the final Mass of his German visit in the city of Freiburg. Ironically, that’s the birthplace of Karl Rahner SJ (1904-84), the most influential Catholic theologian in the first decades following the Second Vatican Council. Though they worked together at Vatican II, Joseph Ratzinger would later say that he and Rahner lived on different theological “planets”. And on what planet do most of their fellow Germans dwell? Opinion polls would indicate that it’s not the Pope’s. Over 80 per cent of the population said his visit was irrelevant, which prompted local church officials to urge them at least to give him a fair hearing. Meanwhile, a scathing report that
appeared in the national magazine Der Spiegel suggested that Benedict was shutting his ears to the majority of German Catholics and unleashing a takeover of their Church by ultra-conservatives. It said this left the more moderate among the German bishops defeated and weary. Not entirely. They successfully overruled the papal master of ceremonies so that at tomorrow’s Mass the Eucharistic Prayer will be in German rather than Latin.
A
bbot Timothy Wright, the former head of Ampleforth Abbey, is convinced that one of the keys for
building better relations between Christianity and Islam is through a more intense dialogue between monks of the Benedictine tradition and Muslim scholars. Fr Timothy is the “delegate” for monastic-
Muslim relations for Rome-based abbot primate, Notker Wolf. And since 2004 Fr Timothy has been at the centre of a series of dialogue gatherings with Shia Muslims from Iran. The fourth such session took place last weekend at Sant’Anselmo and included 11 Christians (10 Catholics and a Mennonite) and nine Shia Muslims. In his lecture – “Muslim-Monastic Dialogue: the Challenge and the Premise” – the Benedictine priest presented the murdered Cistercian community of Tibhirine, Algeria, as an example of how believers of the two monotheistic traditions can become fellow
pilgrims on the journey towards God. He noted that both religions shared three things in common – belief in a God of the Word, communal prayer and the practice of lectio divina. He described believers of the two faiths as climbing up different sides of the same mountain towards God – Word- made-flesh for one, the Word-made-speech for the other. Dr Mohammad Ali Shomali of the
International Institute for Islamic Studies in Qom, Iran, spoke afterwards. He said that for him, dialogue with Christians was an “obligation”, just like prayer or fasting, done without concern for reciprocation. “When you do things unconditionally, you always get a good response,” he said, adding that the emphasis must always be on listening carefully to the other. Several ambassadors attended the 16 September gathering, including Great Britain’s new man at the Vatican, Ambassador Nigel Baker.
T
he Catholic hierarchy in Italy (including the Vatican itself) has come under fire for remaining silent in the face of growing disgust both here and abroad over the reckless political and personal behaviour of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. “What more does the head of the Government have to do before the custodians of Catholicism say in plain terms: ‘Enough is enough’?” wrote Barbara Spinelli this week in the Rome daily, La Repubblica. “What more does the Church need before it stands up and proclaims this person – precisely because, undeterred, he boasts of being a Christian – is a scandal and is causing immense harm to the faithful and to the unified democratic state that so many lay Catholics helped to build?” the columnist roared. Mr Berlusconi has spent most of his 17 years at the helm of Italy battling charges of corruption, abetting prostitution and tax evasion, with a string of claims that the premier regularly paid a pimp to stock his night-time parties with girls-for-hire. Ms Spinelli and her left-leaning paper are not the only ones to express astonishment at the hierarchy’s silence. Famiglia Cristiana, Italy’s largest-selling Catholic weekly magazine, has begged the bishops to speak up for at least two years. But their only response has been a series of generic appeals for decorum and decency in public service. Now Italy is on the brink of financial collapse and most people are blaming Mr Berlusconi for being too preoccupied with his own legal woes to devote sufficient attention to the crisis. The prime minister says this is all a media conspiracy to ruin him and Italy’s image. And the bishops are saying nothing. Robert Mickens
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