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| Europe |
| Islam, divided church will challenge next pope |
| 2005-04-10 |
| ELF Europe, the church's own back yard, is a significant problem. "Some people look at Europe and see it spiritually tired, if not dead," said the Rev. John Wauck, who teaches at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and is a member of Opus Dei, a controversial personal prelature. Christians failed to get a mention of God in the proposed European Union constitution. Rocco Buttiglione of Italy, appointed last year as the European Union's Justice Commissioner, had to withdraw because of his views that homosexuality is a sin and women should stay home to care for their families. And the union seems to be infected with a "radically secular culture," Wauck said, one on the verge of legitimizing gay marriage, abortion and euthanasia. Beyond that, attendance at Mass has declined significantly throughout Europe. Some of the world's great cathedrals stand almost empty Sunday after Sunday. Some cardinals say the church needs more democracy and transparency in the way it is run in order to fit into the modern era and gain acceptance. Others say no: The church must be bolder and less equivocal in stating what Catholicism is all about. What is needed, they say, is not compromise but evangelism. A similar divide exists over how to handle the relationship between the Catholic Church and Islam, each of which has about 1 billion members. John Paul II was the first pope to enter a mosque, the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus in 2001. Some cardinals think the church should continue to reach out to moderate Muslims and take care to do nothing inflammatory. "The next pope will need to be someone capable of dialoguing with the different religions of the world, and particularly Islam," said the Rev. Keith F. Pecklers, a Jesuit professor of theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University. "Islam is on the rise, and Christianity, at least in the developed world, is in decline." But another group, said John Allen, the Vatican correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, is skeptical that there is such a thing as moderate Islam. They think what is needed is "tough love;" their buzzword is "reciprocity." If Muslims are allowed to build the largest mosque in Europe in Rome using Saudi money, this group asks as an example, should not Catholics be allowed to import Bibles into Saudi Arabia? |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #1 I wonder if Jesuits even qualify to be called "Catholic" any more. They are to the Church what the CIA has become to the US government. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-04-10 9:39:42 PM |