History
The duellists and the Council that still instils fear
Hans Küng and Joseph Ratzinger. Just like duellists in a film, it seems, at times, that the two grand old men of international theology, the Pope and the rebel, are the only ones in the Church still addressing the Second Vatican Council. The Second Vatican Council and its defenders have in turn ended up in the dock, both within and outside of the Church. The ideology in vogue during the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, 1968 and thereabouts, when Christ without the Church was fashionable, has been replaced, often with the blessings of the highest ecclesiastic authorities, by Christianity reduced to a Western ideology. A Church without Christ, and hence an atheist one.
When the Pope disillusions me
It was the Swiss theologian Hans Küng, the great critic of the Church’s Roman Curia’s perspective, who placed Joseph Ratzinger in the chair that was the key to his career, that of dogmatic theology in Tubingen. “Yes, I was the one who proposed him as the ‘unico loco’ (a straightforward candidature, without the usual procedures involving academic competitions) for the chair parallel to my own, because he was the most qualified person in Germany – he explains – and I wanted someone influential who would work with me. And in fact, we did cooperate for three years”. The eighty-year–old intellectual and man of the church, known all over the world for his counciliar, ecumenical outlook, open to dialogue with other religions, in favour of responsible procreation, against the dogma of infallibility, the author of an important trilogy on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is visiting Italy to present the first volume of his autobiography, My Battle for Freedom. Memoirs.
“Küng is mistaken, in the Church this tradition is still very much alive”
“It is a great tragedy for today’s Church that it is incapable of moving along the path indicated by the Second Vatican Council and that in Rome they continue to do everything possible to block renewal” said Hans Küng when interviewed by Giancarlo Bosetti for the daily newspaper La Repubblica, once again deploring the Church of Rome’s abandonment of the Council’s spirit. So, has the Church really shelved the Second Vatican Council as an expression of a past “spirit of the age”? Kung’s accusations are answered by Catholic theologian Piero Coda, professor of Systematic Theology at Rome’s Lateran University and recently appointed Dean of the Sophia University Institute for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Dialogue (Loppiano, Florence).
A great opportunity for the Muslim world
Nowadays it has become impossible too to not show interest in the Oriental Christian world. This because it has become impossible to ignore the Middle East. This interest has increased because Oriental Christians are experiencing a difficult transition; their numbers are dwindling through emigration, hence their percentages are decreasing compared to their Muslim compatriots, their survival is at risk. It would be a serious mistake to envisage an attitude involving a modern version of the protection provided by Christian powers to Oriental Christians. These are policies that often led to a process involving Christians becoming estranged from their own environments. These Christians are not only the victims of Muslim intolerance, but also a great opportunity for the Muslim world not to be self-absorbed.
The Copts, from Nasser to Mubarak
Giuseppe Scattolin has been a Combonian priest since 1968, and a missionary in the Lebanon, in Sudan and in Egypt where he has lived since 1980. He teaches Islamic mystical theology at the PISAI (Pontifical Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies) in Rome and has published many books on Islam and spirituality: “We need a new dialogue between Muslims and Christians, based on the a convergence of our shared values and in the name of humankind’s common good. I believe that 14 centuries of conflicts and invective between these two religions are more than enough. We must be capable of turning over a new leaf – he says, talking to Resetdoc from Cairo – It is only together that we will really be able to protect the young from the dangers of extremism, which is where they take refuge when reacting to globalisation”.
"A message to the Left: Israel has the right to exist"
"You have to make a choice: does the state of Israel have the same right to exist as other states or is it to be demonized like none other? If you believe it has a right to exist, then it is perflectly legitimate to criticize this or that government policy. It is another matter if your goal is really Israel's abolition rather than a real compromise between Israelis and Palestinians," says Mitchell Cohen, professor of political science at Bernard Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center and co-editor of "Dissent," in his comments on left-wing and Muslim criticism of the selection of Israel as guest of honour at this spring's International Book Fair in Turin. In response to Ramadan's call to boycott the event, Cohen adds, "I have the impression that too many people on the left have a romance with Ramadan. It reminds me a little too much of romances with Stalinism seventy years ago."
The Visoki monastery and the imposition of tolerance
The Orthodox monastery in Visoki, in Kosovo, is the most important religious museum in the Balkans, as well as a place of pilgrimage for followers all over Serbia. “Outside” the walls of Visoki, the area around Decani has been stage for a Certosina work of counter-ethnic cleansing: in this way Visoki is like a dot in the ocean, it is a small Serbian bastion sinking right in the middle of ethnically pure and monolithic territories. The ex UN envoy Ahtisaari’s plan has provided extra-territorial status for Serbian churches and monasteries, similar to those given to embassies, with the aim of embanking possible devastations and of guaranteeing free worship. Kosovan Albanians are against this. But extra-territorialism helps “impose” tolerance.
Benjamin Franklin and Chinese Civilization
No other figure has had such a clear vision concerning the future of American civilization and how American civilization could grow out of European civilization. In the long process of “the breaking of the old world,” Benjamin Franklin wanted to turn himself from being a European “to be American.” Franklin’s efforts to draw positive elements from Chinese civilization in the course of building an American civilization carried much weight in Franklin’s contribution to the formation of American civilization. His correspondence and miscellaneous papers throughout his life indicate that he was amazed in Chinese culture. He explored almost every aspect of Chinese civilization, from spiritual to material. He believed that China was “the most ancient, and from long Experience the wisest of Nations”.
France, Algeria and the challenge of forgiveness
“Is Algeria a democracy on the face of things? It seems to me to be over the top. It is a society which has changed a lot in the past ten years, and which is having difficulty developing its democratic space”. Khaled Fouad Allam, born in Tlecem in Algeria, professor of sociology of the Muslim world at the University of Trieste in Urbino, and since last year minister of the Italian parliament, sustains that Algerian society is fundamentally democratic. The problem – he says – “is transporting these values from the sociological level to the political one”. Another crucial point, the theme of forgiveness, which neither France nor Algeria has the courage to face but which “is essential in leading two peoples towards friendship”.
A history dating back to Muhammad’s death
Today, Shiites represent about 10-15% of the Muslim population. They constitute a religious majority in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Azerbaijian and Bahrein and are a significant minority in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and UAE. As a matter of fact, far from being unitarian, the Muslim world is riven with divisions , the most prominent being the one between Sunnis and Shiites, which dates back to Muhammad’s death. But what is it that makes Sunnis and Shiites different, although they are still sides of the same moon? The answer lies in Islamic history.
Coexistence is an inevitable destiny
Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China. But also London and the French banlieues. Is it possible to live together? Globalization speeds up, migrations increase, more and more cultures find themselves in the same territories. Is there an alternative to war and conflict? Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio and a member of Reset DoC Scientific Committee, explores the topic in his latest book, in which he draws a map of the cultural, religious and ethnic conflicts that stain the world with blood.
When Arafat protected the Jews
Nowadays there are just one hundred, but once Jews were a vital part of Lebanon. In the '50 and '60, "Jews, Druzes, Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, everyone lived in peace and was neighbourly and friendly". By that time, there were some 14,000, and once the Lebanese Jews were also protected by Fatah, Arafat's group. Their heirs have decided to stay. They have also survived this war and its hate. Even though the Maghen Abraham synagogue, in Beirut, is now the ruined temple of a lost people.
The Middle Ages, when the West wanted to learn from the East
The West and the East grew up together. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the West needed to translate scientific Arab texts in order to fill lacunaes “in three principal areas in which the Latins were felt to be particularly lacking: mathematics (especially geometry and astronomy), physics and medicine”. Charles Burnett, a Professor of History of Islamic Influences in Europe at the Warburg Institute, London, he reminds us that during the Middle Ages “the Jewish and Islamic world shared with Christendom a common knowledge of science and philosophy” and that “a commonwealth of scholars had come into being, which transcended political and linguistic borders”. A time when the West and the East knew they needed each other.