France’s long-awaited programme of university training for Muslim prayer leaders and chaplains was launched this week — at the Catholic university in Paris. We wrote about this not too long ago when the project was announced. It was third time lucky for Dalil Boubakeur, head of the French Muslim Council and rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, who had earlier tried in vain to get the Sorbonne and another section of the University of Paris interested in the project. The Institut Catholique de Paris finally stepped up to take on the project, which the French government has been encouraging for several years now as a way to ensure imams in France are properly educated. It thinks the fact that 3/4 of the 1,200 imams in France are not French citizens, 1/3 of them don’t speak French and almost all have little or no real religious training is a potential source of radical ideology.

According to Sophie de Ravinel in Le Figaro, the average age of those on the programme is about 40 and just over half of them are French citizens. The rest come mostly from North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa. Three women — two of them wearing headscarves — are among the students. “Twenty of the 25 students come from the Grand Mosque of Paris. Among them is Abdelkader Khali, a 52-year-old computer specialist born in France. This future chaplain, son and grandson of French officiers, wants to defend ‘an open, tolerant and enlightened Islam’ in the army.”

The imam training project never got off the ground at the Sorbonne and the other section of the University of Paris because professors there thought it would violate laïcité, France’s legal separation of church and state. But from the start, the project foresaw all theological training at the Grand Mosque of Paris. The university was meant to teach secular subjects, such as French law, history and sociology. The idea was that the university education would round out the Islamic training the imams got at the Grand Mosque and give them a recognised university degree. It sounded like a reasonable idea, but laïcité got in the way.

Not all Muslims like the idea of future imams studying at a Catholic university, either. The large Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF) declined to send students, saying it preferred a “neutral academic framework” for the courses.

Pierre Cahné, rector of the Institute Catholique de Paris, made very clear in an interview with La Croix that the programme at his university “has nothing to do with theological training. Our guidelines are clear: we have foreigners who will live in France and hold leading social and religious functions. Our duty is to see that they can accomplish this in the most efficient and humane way possible, with the least conflict. French society has a certain number of values. Why should we refuse to transmit them?“

Pope Benedict made an interesting comment at the consistory installing 23 new cardinals on Saturday. He warned against “careerism” in the Church and noted that the disciples James and John who asked Jesus to give them seats to the right and left of him in Heaven (Mark 10:37) had “a crude conception of merit.” Here’s his sermon (in Italian). Now, I don’t want to get into a game of “spot the careerist at the Vatican” — others do that well enough — and I don’t want to cast any doubts about the new cardinals or any Vatican officials. But reading through the biographies of the new cardinals, I had a kind of sociological interest in seeing if any single factor stood out in their pasts.

And yes, one did.

About three-quarters of the new cardinals studied at one or more of the pontifical universities in Rome. There are a dozen of these Catholic universities here specialised in theology, canon law, scripture and philosophy, with students from around the world. They used to teach in Latin, but gave that up in 1967. Most of the students are bright young seminarians sent over to Rome because their superiors spotted their potential. Others are ordained priests doing graduate work, again often sent by bishops with an eye for talent. While they’re here, they not only study, they see how the Vatican works, make contacts among professors, Vatican officials and other students and they learn Italian, an advantage for any cleric on his way up the career ladder.

The numbers said a lot. Of the Europeans who got the red hat, 7 had studied in Rome and 5 had not. That’s not so surprising, since Catholic universities in Spain or France or Belgium can provide just as good an education (if not better, some say). But among the non-Europeans, there was no contest. Ten had a Roman degree and only one didn’t.

So clerics should not be careerists … but one who wants to start his career the right way might be advised to do it in Rome.

The southern German state of Bavaria is one of those areas, like southern Poland, that are known for their fervent folk Catholicism. It was on full display last year when Bavaria’s favourite son, Pope Benedict, visited his native state. But Catholicism is changing even in Bavaria, as his successor as archbishop of Munich and Freising has admitted. Cardinal Friedrich Wetter told fellow Bavarian bishops on Thursday that so many candidates for the priesthood have such insufficient knowledge of Catholic teaching that seminaries will have to introduce remedial courses to bring them up to standard.

“Candidates for the priesthood increasingly come from various backgrounds and apply for the admission to the seminary with sometimes quite different prior experiences of faith and the Church,” he said in a statement (here in German). “With a propaedeutic course inserted before normal theology studies in the seminary, the Bavarian bishops want to add an educational phase that fosters the seminarians’ spiritual growth and personal discernment, … transmits basic theological knowledge and allows insight into the real situation of the Church through participation in social and pastoral work.”

A further translation of that translation would be: “we need a remedial course because the incoming seminarians don’t know enough about the Catholic Church.”

The one-year course will start in the fall of 2008 and all entering seminarians will have to take it at the Catholic theology faculties in Passau or Bamberg, Wetter said. He added that the bishops hoped this would not lengthen the overall length of study required before ordination.

According to a Bavarian newspaper, the Augsburger Allgemeine, “professors at the universities often complain about their students’ sketchy knowledge. Professors don’t want to teach catechism, they want to give theology lectures. Even Christian Hartl, regent of the Augsburg seminary, told this newspaper about students who before entering the seminary ‘were not so rooted in their parish’ and had ‘more distance to the faith’ than their predecessors just a few years ago.”

Several other dioceses in Germany have introduced remedial courses at their seminaries in recent years. Neighbouring Austria launched one for all entering seminarians in 2000, after the Vatican advised it following an inspection visit there.

Europeans are circling the wagons to keep creationism and intelligent design out of their schools. The latest development came on Monday when Sweden announced it wanted to tighten rules governing private religious schools to ensure they do not teach creationism. This is a new twist. Private schools across Europe usually have to follow some kind of national curriculum but can add other elements such as religious views. Creationism is certainly a religious view and a very large majority in Europe says ID is too.

“This is naturally brought about by the fact that different viewpoints are being discussed, for instance about the creation of the world - one based on science and one on religious views,” Swedish Education Minister Jan Bjorklund said while announcing the new policy. “Teaching in school must have a scientific basis.”

The Council of Europe made the headlines two weeks ago with a resolution firmly opposing these views and urging member countries to keep them out of their science classes. It defined ID as a form of creationism. That resolution entitled “The Dangers of Creationism in Education” was based on a long report with an interesting country-by-country list of cases where creationism has become an issue in Europe (see report pages 9-14). This was a non-binding resolution but it expressed the widespread mood of lawmakers who until recently thought creationism and ID were such simplistic U.S. religious views that they would never cross the Atlantic.

The issue has been around in Britain for a while now. Two weeks ago, a professor of science education in Britain made waves by suggesting that creationism should be discussed in science classes to better equip pupils with arguments to confront it.
“There are lots of pupils who come to science lessons from families where they very seriously believe the world was created in a few days 6,000 or 10,000 years ago,” said Michael Reiss, who is a professor at London’s Institute of Education, an Anglican priest and an evolutionary biologist. “I want to try and not ridicule those students but to help them understand the scientific way in which we can also understand the universe.”

Britain’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority issued new guidelines in January of this year saying that creationism and ID belonged in religion classes alongside evolution, not in science class. French education authorities and scientists have been warning against creationism and ID since a lavishly produced Muslim creationist book, Atlas of Creation by the secretive Turkish writer Harun Yahya , mysteriously began appearing in the mail free-of-charge at schools around the country.

Several large churches have also spoken out against putting a religious spin on science. In Germany, the Lutheran Church issued background material in July to confront “this Americanisation of European religious culture.” Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England and spiritual leaders of the world’s Anglicans, said last year that creationism was “a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories” and said it should not be taught in British schools.

In several statements and a book over the past year or so, Pope Benedict has clearly been more sympathetic to critics who say scientists go beyond their limits when they say Darwinism proves God does not exist. But he has also made clear the Roman Catholic Church does not support creationism and does not reject the scientific theory of evolution.

It’s fascinating to see this trans-Atlantic divide between Europe and the United States (where, it should be noted, the courts and many scientists also reject these views). Could this mean that creationism and ID are mostly American views that won’t catch on elsewhere?