The surviving parts of the world’s oldest Christian Bible were reunited online on Monday, generating excitement among biblical scholars still striving to unlock its mysteries. The Codex Sinaiticus was hand written by four scribes in Greek on animal hide, known as vellum, in the mid-fourth century around the time of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great who embraced Christianity.

Not all of it has withstood the ravages of time, but the pages that have include the whole of the New Testament and the earliest surviving copy of the Gospels written at different times after Christ’s death by the Four Evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Bible’s remaining 800 pages and fragments — it was originally some 1400 pages long — also contain half of a copy of the Old Testament. The other half has been lost.

Read our full story here. And consult the Codex here.

(Photo: Part of the Codex Sinaiticus at the British Library in London 3 July 2009/Kieran Doherty)

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Morocco has shifted from mass arrests to tight surveillance in its fight against Islamic militants and hopes a new campaign to reinforce the authority of state-appointed imams will cut off support for jihadism.

As militants reach a growing audience through DVDs and the Internet, the government has tried to seize back the initiative, revising laws governing mosques and adding new theological councils to tighten control of religious life in the regions.

(Photo: Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech at sunset, 7 Jan 2005/Tom Heneghan)

Now it is preparing to send 1,500 supervisors into the north African country’s towns and villages to make sure that imams are preaching the moderate local version of Islam and respect for King Mohammed in his role as leader of Morocco’s Muslims.

“In this era of satellite TV, people no longer accept to see religious officials who are not trained,” said Hakim el Ghissassi, a cabinet member at Morocco’s Ministry for Religious Endowments and Islamic Affairs. “If today we deny religious instruction to the young, where will they look for it? On extremist Internet sites with self-proclaimed radical Imams.”

Read the whole analysis here.

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You won’t get an email saying Pope Benedict added you as a friend and you can’t “poke” him or write on his wall, but the Vatican is still keen to use the networking site Facebook to woo young people back to church.

A new Vatican website, www.pope2you.net, has gone live, offering an application called “The pope meets you on Facebook,” and another allowing the faithful to see the Pope’s speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.

Phil Pullella looks at the Vatican’s latest bid to preach the gospel with new technologies. Read the full story here.

Pope Benedict’s comments about condoms on his flight to Cameroon have made headlines worldwide. They have been quoted extensively on many websites run by news organisations and also by the Vatican. But that hasn’t stopped the same Vatican from editing them after the fact to try to make them sound more acceptable.

(Photo: Pope Benedict answers questions in the plane to Africa, with Rev. Georg Gänswein (L) and Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (C), 17 March 2009//Alessandro Bianchi)

The main change on the Vatican website comes in the most controversial part, where he says: “It (AIDS) cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem.” This was criticised in Europe and the United States as going beyond a doctrinal question and spreading untruths about public health policies. Now the Vatican’s Bollettino (daily bulletin — here in the original Italian) has watered this down to have him say:   “On the contrary, the risk is that they increase the problem.” The Milan daily Corriere della Sera has the original transcript in Italian.

The Vatican editors also softened the pope’s talk about solutions. In the original, he said: “The problem of AIDS cannot be solved only with money …” In the new version, this comes out as: “The problem of AIDS cannot be solved only by advertising slogans …”

The Bollettino flip-flopped when it came to using the everyday word “condom” (preservativi in Italian), as the pope did when he spoke on the plane to journalists. It first replaced that with the more scientific sounding word “prophylactics” (profilattici). The term “prophylactics” has a wider meaning and could include other methods besides condoms. But abstinence, which the Vatican preaches as the most effective method against spreading AIDS, can also be described as a prophylactic measure. This seems to have dawned on the Vatican editors only after they changed Benedict’s comment to say profilattici, as Corriere documents in the screenshot here. So they later had to go back and correct the correction by switching back to preservativi.

Asked in Yaoundé about the editing, chief Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said he knew about the issue with the word preservativi but was not aware of any other changes. He said the Vatican’s Secretariat of State occasionally “finetunes” the pope’s unprepared spoken workds to “make them flow better in Italian” and to “join loose phrases.” The pope’s native language is German, but he is an impressive linguist, has been living in Rome since 1982 and speaks excellent Italian.

This is not the first time this has happened. Two years ago, Benedict’s comments in the plane flying to Brazil about excommunicating Catholic politicians who support abortion were changed in the final Vatican version.  In his famous Regensburg speech, he said a Byzantine emperor he quoted criticising Islam had spoken “somewhat brusquely.” The final version spun this to say he spoke “with a startling brusqueness we find unacceptable.”

Unacceptable. Interesting that he should choose that word. Is this editing of his comments unacceptable?

One passage in Pope Benedict’s letter today about the Williamson affair particularly stood out — the part where he confessed to almost complete ignorance of the Internet. There can’t be many other world leaders who could write  the following lines without blushing: “I have been told that consulting the information available on the internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on. I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news.” This made it look as if the world’s largest church was ignorant of the world’s liveliest communications network.

That’s not the case, of course. The Vatican runs a very full website of its own, www.vatican.va, as do Vatican Radio (in 38 languages), Catholic bishops conferences, dioceses and parishes as well as Catholic publications all around the world.

In fact, somebody in the Vatican seems to be following the Internet far more closely that the mainstream media (including ourselves), which missed an interesting little nugget now popping up on tech blogs and some Catholic sites mostly in Europe. The Holy See’s representative to the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently warned against the tensions that could be caused if ICANN created new top-level domain names (so-called gTLDs) for religions.

In a letter to the president of ICANN dated February 20, its representative Monsignor Carlo Maria Polvani spoke of “the possible perils connected with the assignment of new gTLDs with reference to religious traditions (e.g., .catholic, .anglican, .orthodox, .hindu, .islam; .muslim, .buddhist, etc…). These gTLDs could provoke  competing claims among theological and religious traditions and could possibly result in bitter disputes that would force ICANN, implicitly and/or explicitly, to abandon its wise policy of neutrality by recognizing to a particular group or to a specific organization the legitimacy to represent a given religious tradition.”

ICANN President Paul Twomey responded on February 24 that ICANN was indeed considering new faith-based gTLDs but “an objection may be filed if there is substantial oppostion to the gTLD application from a significant portion of the community to which the gTLD string may be explicitly or implicitly targeted.”

Imagine a group of technicians and managers having to decide who gets to use the domain name “.islam”? What could they tell the Vatican if they ignore Polvani’s plea and let “.catholic” domain names proliferate out of control? What about that “.orthodox” domain name — orthodox what?

Is this a good idea?

The Vatican’s official spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi S.J., has issued the following statement on the letter Pope Benedict has sent to Roman Catholic bishops around the world about the controversy over the readmission of four excommunicated ultre-traditionalist bishops to the Church. In view of the controversy surrounding that step and the Vatican’s admittedly clumsy handling of its announcement, we wanted to run the statement in full below. Again, any comments on how you see this controversy are welcome.

(Photo: rev. Federico Lombardi, 13 June 2007/Herbert Neubauer)

The difficult commitment to reconciliation

The “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church concerning the remission of the excommunication of the four Bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre” is definitely an unusual document and deserves all our attention. Never before in his Pontificate has Benedict XVI expressed himself in such a personal manner and intensity on a controversial subject. There isn’t the slightest doubt: this Letter bears his mark, from beginning to end.

The Pope has lived this event, the remission of the excommunication, and the following reactions with an involvement and suffering that are manifest. He speaks of a “discussion more heated than any we have seen for a long time”, and has felt the need to intervene to “contribute to peace in the Church”, a peace that has been disturbed.

With his usual lucidity and humility, he recognises the shortcomings and the mistakes which have had a negative influence on the course of events; and with great nobility, he doesn’t make others shoulder the responsibility, thus showing his solidarity with his collaborators. He speaks of insufficient information pertaining to the Williamson case, and lack of clarity in presenting the measure of remission of excommunication and about its meaning. However, this is not the most significant aspect of his reflexions.

Whereas the “Williamson case”, misconstrued as a denial of the path of reconciliation between Christians and Jews, is fortunately behind us, the Pope reminds us, with legitimate pride, that the sharing and promotion of all the steps accomplished for the reconciliation since the Council, have been “since the beginning the objective of his own theological work”; and he thanks the “Jewish friends” for their contribution in re-establishing quickly an atmosphere of trust, although a certain sadness still lingers because of the attacks coming from certain Catholics on this subject.

The Pope then sets out to clarify the nature, the meaning and the intentions of the remission of excommunication; he explains that, since excommunication was a punishment for persons who had accomplished an act that endangered Church unity by not recognising the Pope’s authority, therefore, now that the persons who were thus sanctioned have shown their acknowledgment of the Pope’s authority, the remission of the excommunication was a warm invitation to their returning within the unity of the Church.

The Pope makes a distinction as far as the problem of the juridical recognition of the Saint Pius X Fraternity is concerned, linking it clearly to doctrinal questions about the acceptance of Vatican II Council and the magisterium of the Popes since that Council. Until that happens, their representatives will not be able to fulfil any recognised ministry in a legitimate way in the Church.

A central point of the Letter concerning the Pope’s decision - in the light of the mainly doctrinal nature of the needed clarification - is the join the Commission “Ecclesia Dei”, for the relations with the traditionalist communities, with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, thus ensuring a better practice of collegiality in the procedure and decision making. With this perspective of a renewal in the Curia’s organisation, the Pope gives an answer to most of the objections concerning the making of the recent measure, especially to the episcopates more directly implicated.

However, there still remains the question of many people, in the light of the recent tensions: Was this measure of remission of excommunication really necessary ? Weren’t there in the Church questions of greater importance and urgency ?

The answer to this question makes up more than half of the Letter. The Pope’s writing becomes more and more intense. Benedict XVI feels deeply challenged in his responsibility as Pastor of the universal Church, and compelled to clarify, without hesitation, his brothers in the Episcopate, co-responsible of the well-being of the Church, about the priorities and the spirit in which he carries out his service.

In a nutshell, he recalls the great priorities of his Pontificate, which were anyway clearly said from the very first day: lead men to God, the God who revealed himself in the Bible and in Christ; Christian unity; dialogue between those who believe in God, at the service of peace; testimony of love according to the social dimension of Christian life.

However, the Pope then goes on to invite his interlocutors to a personal and ecclesial reflexion in a committed and urgent manner. That a gesture, intended to be merciful in view of reconciliation, should give rise to a situation of acute tension, is a paradox that should compel us to questioning so as to discern about the spiritual attitudes that have been manifest and at work in this event.

The first criterion that the Pope asks to reflect upon is the commandment of reconciliation with the “brother who has something against you”, according to what the Lord said on his ‘Sermon on the Mount’.

The Pope’s questions become pressing, animated by a vivid preoccupation for unity. Without losing any sense of realism, for he recalls the grave defects of the traditionalists, but equally critical in a realistic way, the Pope feels obliged to ….. in the conflict between members of the Church and of society who seem to oppose, with unyielding intransigence, every effort of reconciliation, or simply any recognition of positive elements in others. The spiritual realism reaches its zenith when he evokes saint Paul’s injunction to the Galatians “not to bite and devour each other”.

The reflexion concludes with yet another passionate invitation to love as an absolute priority for the Christian, and a profound aspiration for peace in the Church community.

Beyond the errors or mishaps, which are recognised in a fair manner and overcome when possible, beyond any human prudence that calls to avoid touching sensitive points, the Pope brings us back, with firmness and courage to the Gospel as fundamental and ultimate criterion, not only of Christian and Church life, but of the government of the Church as well.

For it is only through mutual conversion to this Gospel that we can hope to overcome the divisions, and to be able to understand the profound convergence between Tradition and Council.

Finally, we are led to understand that our Pope, by his personal commitment in these situations of crisis, brings us to rediscover the essential point, more profound and radical, which will enable us to resume our journey.

F.L.

(Photo: Pope Benedict at his Wednesday audience, 28 Jan 2009/Tony Gentile)

The Vatican published today the official text of an unprecedented letter Pope Benedict has sent to Roman Catholic bishops around the world explaining his reasons for readmitting four ultra-traditionalist bishops to the Church and his dismay at the uproar caused by the Holocaust denial of one of them, British-born Bishop Richard Williamson. Papal protocol usually keeps a safe buffer around the pope, shielding him from the rough and tumble of daily disputes, but Benedict broke with that tradition to write about his dismay at the Williamson controversy, admit it was mishandled and reveal how isolated he was from information anyone could easily find on the Internet. Given its unusually personal nature, we reprint it here. The text and translations into other languages are available in the Vatican’s daily bulletin.

Do you find this convincing? Should he have said more? Or should this now close the Williamson controversy?

LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI

TO THE BISHOPS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

concerning the remission of the excommunication

of the four Bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre

Dear Brothers in the Episcopal Ministry!

The remission of the excommunication of the four Bishops consecrated in 1988 by Archbishop Lefebvre without a mandate of the Holy See has for many reasons caused, both within and beyond the Catholic Church, a discussion more heated than any we have seen for a long time. Many Bishops felt perplexed by an event which came about unexpectedly and was difficult to view positively in the light of the issues and tasks facing the Church today. Even though many Bishops and members of the faithful were disposed in principle to take a positive view of the Pope’s concern for reconciliation, the question remained whether such a gesture was fitting in view of the genuinely urgent demands of the life of faith in our time. Some groups, on the other hand, openly accused the Pope of wanting to turn back the clock to before the Council: as a result, an avalanche of protests was unleashed, whose bitterness laid bare wounds deeper than those of the present moment. I therefore feel obliged to offer you, dear Brothers, a word of clarification, which ought to help you understand the concerns which led me and the competent offices of the Holy See to take this step. In this way I hope to contribute to peace in the Church.

An unforeseen mishap for me was the fact that the Williamson case came on top of the remission of the excommunication. The discreet gesture of mercy towards four Bishops ordained validly but not legitimately suddenly appeared as something completely different: as the repudiation of reconciliation between Christians and Jews, and thus as the reversal of what the Council had laid down in this regard to guide the Church’s path. A gesture of reconciliation with an ecclesial group engaged in a process of separation thus turned into its very antithesis: an apparent step backwards with regard to all the steps of reconciliation between Christians and Jews taken since the Council – steps which my own work as a theologian had sought from the beginning to take part in and support. That this overlapping of two opposed processes took place and momentarily upset peace between Christians and Jews, as well as peace within the Church, is something which I can only deeply deplore. I have been told that consulting the information available on the internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on. I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news. I was saddened by the fact that even Catholics who, after all, might have had a better knowledge of the situation, thought they had to attack me with open hostility. Precisely for this reason I thank all the more our Jewish friends, who quickly helped to clear up the misunderstanding and to restore the atmosphere of friendship and trust which – as in the days of Pope John Paul II – has also existed throughout my pontificate and, thank God, continues to exist.

Another mistake, which I deeply regret, is the fact that the extent and limits of the provision of 21 January 2009 were not clearly and adequately explained at the moment of its publication. The excommunication affects individuals, not institutions. An episcopal ordination lacking a pontifical mandate raises the danger of a schism, since it jeopardizes the unity of the College of Bishops with the Pope. Consequently the Church must react by employing her most severe punishment – excommunication – with the aim of calling those thus punished to repent and to return to unity. Twenty years after the ordinations, this goal has sadly not yet been attained. The remission of the excommunication has the same aim as that of the punishment: namely, to invite the four Bishops once more to return. This gesture was possible once the interested parties had expressed their recognition in principle of the Pope and his authority as Pastor, albeit with some reservations in the area of obedience to his doctrinal authority and to the authority of the Council. Here I return to the distinction between individuals and institutions. The remission of the excommunication was a measure taken in the field of ecclesiastical discipline: the individuals were freed from the burden of conscience constituted by the most serious of ecclesiastical penalties. This disciplinary level needs to be distinguished from the doctrinal level. The fact that the Society of Saint Pius X does not possess a canonical status in the Church is not, in the end, based on disciplinary but on doctrinal reasons. As long as the Society does not have a canonical status in the Church, its ministers do not exercise legitimate ministries in the Church. There needs to be a distinction, then, between the disciplinary level, which deals with individuals as such, and the doctrinal level, at which ministry and institution are involved. In order to make this clear once again: until the doctrinal questions are clarified, the Society has no canonical status in the Church, and its ministers – even though they have been freed of the ecclesiastical penalty – do not legitimately exercise any ministry in the Church.

In light of this situation, it is my intention henceforth to join the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei” – the body which has been competent since 1988 for those communities and persons who, coming from the Society of Saint Pius X or from similar groups, wish to return to full communion with the Pope – to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This will make it clear that the problems now to be addressed are essentially doctrinal in nature and concern primarily the acceptance of the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar magisterium of the Popes. The collegial bodies with which the Congregation studies questions which arise (especially the ordinary Wednesday meeting of Cardinals and the annual or biennial Plenary Session) ensure the involvement of the Prefects of the different Roman Congregations and representatives from the world’s Bishops in the process of decision-making. The Church’s teaching authority cannot be frozen in the year 1962 – this must be quite clear to the Society. But some of those who put themselves forward as great defenders of the Council also need to be reminded that Vatican II embraces the entire doctrinal history of the Church. Anyone who wishes to be obedient to the Council has to accept the faith professed over the centuries, and cannot sever the roots from which the tree draws its life.

I hope, dear Brothers, that this serves to clarify the positive significance and also the limits of the provision of 21 January 2009. But the question still remains: Was this measure needed? Was it really a priority? Aren’t other things perhaps more important? Of course there are more important and urgent matters. I believe that I set forth clearly the priorities of my pontificate in the addresses which I gave at its beginning. Everything that I said then continues unchanged as my plan of action. The first priority for the Successor of Peter was laid down by the Lord in the Upper Room in the clearest of terms: “You… strengthen your brothers” (Lk 22:32). Peter himself formulated this priority anew in his first Letter: “Always be prepared to make a defence to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15). In our days, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel, the overriding priority is to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God. Not just any god, but the God who spoke on Sinai; to that God whose face we recognize in a love which presses “to the end” (cf. Jn 13:1) – in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. The real problem at this moment of our history is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with increasingly evident destructive effects.

Leading men and women to God, to the God who speaks in the Bible: this is the supreme and fundamental priority of the Church and of the Successor of Peter at the present time. A logical consequence of this is that we must have at heart the unity of all believers. Their disunity, their disagreement among themselves, calls into question the credibility of their talk of God. Hence the effort to promote a common witness by Christians to their faith – ecumenism – is part of the supreme priority. Added to this is the need for all those who believe in God to join in seeking peace, to attempt to draw closer to one another, and to journey together, even with their differing images of God, towards the source of Light – this is interreligious dialogue. Whoever proclaims that God is Love “to the end” has to bear witness to love: in loving devotion to the suffering, in the rejection of hatred and enmity – this is the social dimension of the Christian faith, of which I spoke in the Encyclical Deus Caritas Est.

So if the arduous task of working for faith, hope and love in the world is presently (and, in various ways, always) the Church’s real priority, then part of this is also made up of acts of reconciliation, small and not so small. That the quiet gesture of extending a hand gave rise to a huge uproar, and thus became exactly the opposite of a gesture of reconciliation, is a fact which we must accept. But I ask now: Was it, and is it, truly wrong in this case to meet half-way the brother who “has something against you” (cf. Mt 5:23ff.) and to seek reconciliation? Should not civil society also try to forestall forms of extremism and to incorporate their eventual adherents – to the extent possible – in the great currents shaping social life, and thus avoid their being segregated, with all its consequences? Can it be completely mistaken to work to break down obstinacy and narrowness, and to make space for what is positive and retrievable for the whole? I myself saw, in the years after 1988, how the return of communities which had been separated from Rome changed their interior attitudes; I saw how returning to the bigger and broader Church enabled them to move beyond one-sided positions and broke down rigidity so that positive energies could emerge for the whole. Can we be totally indifferent about a community which has 491 priests, 215 seminarians, 6 seminaries, 88 schools, 2 university-level institutes, 117 religious brothers, 164 religious sisters and thousands of lay faithful? Should we casually let them drift farther from the Church? I think for example of the 491 priests. We cannot know how mixed their motives may be. All the same, I do not think that they would have chosen the priesthood if, alongside various distorted and unhealthy elements, they did not have a love for Christ and a desire to proclaim him and, with him, the living God. Can we simply exclude them, as representatives of a radical fringe, from our pursuit of reconciliation and unity? What would then become of them?

Certainly, for some time now, and once again on this specific occasion, we have heard from some representatives of that community many unpleasant things – arrogance and presumptuousness, an obsession with one-sided positions, etc. Yet to tell the truth, I must add that I have also received a number of touching testimonials of gratitude which clearly showed an openness of heart. But should not the great Church also allow herself to be generous in the knowledge of her great breadth, in the knowledge of the promise made to her? Should not we, as good educators, also be capable of overlooking various faults and making every effort to open up broader vistas? And should we not admit that some unpleasant things have also emerged in Church circles? At times one gets the impression that our society needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may be shown; which one can easily attack and hate. And should someone dare to approach them – in this case the Pope – he too loses any right to tolerance; he too can be treated hatefully, without misgiving or restraint.

Dear Brothers, during the days when I first had the idea of writing this letter, by chance, during a visit to the Roman Seminary, I had to interpret and comment on Galatians 5:13-15. I was surprised at the directness with which that passage speaks to us about the present moment: “Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. But if you bite and devour one another, take heed that you are not consumed by one another.” I am always tempted to see these words as another of the rhetorical excesses which we occasionally find in Saint Paul. To some extent that may also be the case. But sad to say, this “biting and devouring” also exists in the Church today, as expression of a poorly understood freedom. Should we be surprised that we too are no better than the Galatians? That at the very least we are threatened by the same temptations? That we must always learn anew the proper use of freedom? And that we must always learn anew the supreme priority, which is love? The day I spoke about this at the Major Seminary, the feast of Our Lady of Trust was being celebrated in Rome. And so it is: Mary teaches us trust. She leads us to her Son, in whom all of us can put our trust. He will be our guide – even in turbulent times. And so I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to all the many Bishops who have lately offered me touching tokens of trust and affection, and above all assured me of their prayers. My thanks also go to all the faithful who in these days have given me testimony of their constant fidelity to the Successor of Saint Peter. May the Lord protect all of us and guide our steps along the way of peace. This is the prayer that rises up instinctively from my heart at the beginning of this Lent, a liturgical season particularly suited to interior purification, one which invites all of us to look with renewed hope to the light which awaits us at Easter.

With a special Apostolic Blessing, I remain

Yours in the Lord,

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

From the Vatican, 10 March 2009

(Photo: Clouds over the Vatican, 12 Dec 2008/Chris Helgren)

The World Jewish Congress has already reacted to the pope’s letter in the following statement:

Ronald S. Lauder: “Continue to work with Vatican to strengthen understanding”

NEW YORK / BRUSSELS - The president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), Ronald S. Lauder, has praised Pope Benedict XVI for issuing a personal letter to Catholic bishops explaining the circumstances of the Williamson affair. “The Pope has found clear and unequivocal words regarding Bishop Williamson’s Holocaust denial, and he deserves praise for admitting that mistakes were made within the Vatican in the handling of this affair,” Lauder said.

“The Pope’s letter conveys the essential requirements for inter-religious dialogue: candor and the willingness to tackle difficult issues squarely. His expressed anguish at the events following the Holocaust-denying statements by Williamson reflects the similar emotional pain felt by Jews worldwide during this affair. We reciprocate his words of appreciation for Jewish efforts to restore inter-religious dialogue and will continue to work with the Catholic Church to further strengthen mutual understanding and respect,” the WJC president stated.

Those of us who thought the pope had said the final word on the Williamson saga will have to think again. It seems to be never-ending.

On Thursday the Vatican officially releases a letter to the world’s bishops in which the pope essentially acknowledges that the Vatican handled the lifting of the excommunications of four ultra-traditionalist bishops very badly and that it hurt him personally that things went awry.

(Photo: Pope Benedict at his weekly audience, 11 March 2009/Alessia Pierdomenico)

The story started leaking out on Tuesday night in the blog of Andrea Tornielli of Il Giornale and a story with partial excerpts was published in the Italian newspaper Il Foglio on Wednesday.  The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung printed what it said was the full text in German of the pope’s letter. Our story is based on a face-to-face conversation I had with an Italian archbishop who received the letter. We discussed it over a light meal near St Peter’s Square.

If the leaks and the archbishop’s comment are any indication, the letter may be a sort of first — a pope explaining to his bishops why he did something that some of them contested, at times openly. He talks about his pain and also speaks of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), how he felt that he had to bring them back into the fold because there are good people among them. But the pope also acknowledges how some of them are arrogant and think they know better than everyone else.  He says some speak in ways that are discordant with the Church and its teachings. Why do you think the pope felt he had to do this? Was it necessary to write the letter? Will it be interpreted as a sign of weakness or strength?  The entire letter will be  be on the Vatican’s website tomorrow after 1100 gmt.

(Photo: Bishop Richard Williamson, 28 Feb 2007/Jens Falk)

For those of you who read Italian, here is a link to Andrea Tornielli’s blog. For German speakers, here’s today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung text. Following are some excerpts from the German text translated by Reuters:

“The lifting of the excommunications of the four bishops ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988 without a mandate from the Holy See has led, for several reasons, to a dispute inside and outside the Catholic Church more vehement than we have seen in a long time. Many bishops felt helpless in the face of an event that came unempectedly and hardly corresponded to the questions and tasks of today’s Church . While many bishops and believers were ready to view the pope’s will to reconciliation positively, there was on the other hand the question of the appropriateness of such a gesture in view of the really urgent issues for believers in our time. Some groups openly accused the pope of wanting to go back to before the Second Vatican Council. An avalanche of protests began whose bitterness showed hurt that went beyond the present moment. So I felt obliged to write to you, my brothers, to clear some things up and help understand the intentions that I and the responsible organs of the Holy See had in making this step. I hope in this way to contribute to bringing peace into the Church…

“A mishap that was unforseeable for me occured because the Williamson case overshadowed the lifting of the excommunications. The calm gesture of mercy towards four validly but illicitly ordained bishops suddenly seemed to be something completely different: a rejection of Christian-Jewish reconciliation, a withdrawal of what the Council had declared in this matter as the path of the Church. In this way, an invitation to reconciliation with a breakaway Church group turned into its opposite: an apparent retreat behind all steps of reconciliation between Christians and Jews taken since the Council. From the start, taking these steps and developing them has been a goal of my theological work. I can only deeply regret that this overlapping of two contrary events has occurred and upset the peace between Christians and Jews and the peace in the Church…

“I hear that attentive tracking of the news available on the Internet could have made it possible to learn about this problem in time. I learn from this that we at the Holy See must pay more attention to this source of news in the future. I was also saddened to see that also Catholics, who actually could have known better, thought they had to lash out at me with ready-to-pounce hostility. I’m all the more thankful to the Jewish friends who helped clear up the misunderstanding quickly and restore the atmosphere of friendship and trust that — as during the time of Pope John Paul — has reigned during the whole time of my pontificate and, thank God, still exists…

“Another mishap that I honestly regret is that the limits and extend of the measure of 21 January 2009 were not clearly presented when the act was announced. Excommunication applies to people, not institutions. Ordaining a bishop without a papal mandate means the danger of a schism, because it challenges the unity of the college of bishops with the pope. The Church must therefore react with the harshest punishment, excommunication, in order to bring the punished ones to regret their act and return to unity. Twenty years after the ordinations, this goal has still not yet been reached … The lifting of the excommunications was a measure in the area of Church discipline: the people involved were freed of the burden on their conscience of having the harshest Church punishment. One must differentiate the doctrinal area from this disciplinary area. That the Society of Saint Pius X has no canonical standing in the Church is actually not based on disciplinary reasons, but on doctrinal reasons … As long as the doctrinal questions have not been cleared up, the Society has no canonical statue in the Church and its leaders, while free of the Church punishment, do not exercise any office legally in the Church…

“Can we be indvifferent to a community that has 491 priests, 215 seminarists, six seminaries, 88 schools, two university institutes, 117 brothers and 164 nuns? Should we simply let them drift away from the Church? I think for example of the 491 priests. We cannot know the web of their motivations. But I think they would not have decided to become priests if, along with some lopsided or sick (aspects), there had not been a love for Christ and the will to preach about him and with him the living God.  Should we simply shut them out of the search for reconciliation and unity as representatives of a radical fringe group? What would happen then?

“Of course, for a long time, we have heard occasional dissonant tones from representatives of this community — arrogance and a know-it-all attitude, a fixation on one-sidedness, etc. To be honest, I have to add that I have also received several moving testimonies of thankfulness that showed an opening of the hearts. But shouldn’t the great Church also be able to be magnanimous, knowing the long-term perspective it has and the promise given it?   Shouldn’t we, like good teachers, be able to ignore some bad things and try to move out of this squeeze? And shouldn’t we admit that dissonent tones have also come from Church circles? One sometimes has the impression that our society needs at least one group that it need not show any tolerance to and can lash out at with hatred? And whoever dares touch it — in this case, the pope — loses the right to tolerance and can also be met with hatred without anyone being shy or reserved about it?”

The start of a high-powered Vatican-sponsored acadmeic conference on evolution was anything but fossilized.

The third STOQ International Conference, called Biological Evolution, Facts and Theories, began on Tuesday at the Pontifical Gregorian University (picture right) under the patronage of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture.

The conference, which has been organised together with the University of Notre Dame to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, had barely gotten underway when charges of censorship and undemocratic and unacademic behaviour began flying.

At the end of the first session Oktar Babuna, a Turkish doctor and collaborator of prominent Turkish anti-Darwin campaigner Harun Yahya,asked for the floor to put forward a question. Babuna, a proponent of the Islamic creationist campaign against evolution, spoke about his view that there were insufficient transitional forms from species to species to support the theory of evolution.

After he began speaking two professors on the dias, Francisco J. Ayala of the University of California at Irvine and Douglas Futuyma of the State University of New York were visibly irritated. Someone in the hall can be heard saying “turn the microphone off” and seconds later two organisers approached Babuna. One of them abruptly took the microphone away from Babuna and another ordered him to go back to his seat. Watch it all here

“After I walked back to my seat someone said “only evolutionists can ask questions,” Babuna told Reuters afterwards. “This is very anti-democratic and very unacademic. If this is a scientific meeting … if you have scientific questions to ask, they should be responded to scientifically, everybody accepts that … if you force people to shut up and don’t let them ask any question … then it is not a scientific theory but an ideology.” The spat was filmed by Babuna’s associate Dr Cihat Gundogdu, who put an edited version on the Harun Yahya website.

Both men attended the conference with English and Italian versions of Harun Yahya’s super-slick mega-book Atlas of Creation (picture left) in hand. We have done numerous blogs on Islamic creationism, its proponents and its opponents. Some of the links are listed below. But what do you think about the debate and, more importantly, do you think officials at the Gregorian University were right or wrong to yank the microphone from Babuna at a scientific conference?

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2009/02/05/just-before-darwin-day-pew-reviews-faith-and-evolution-in-us/

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/12/24/a-one-stop-shop-for-the-latest-on-islamic-creationism/

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/11/25/harun-yahya-dangles-big-prizes-for-creationism-essays/

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/10/27/richard-dawkins-rips-into-harun-yahya-and-muslim-creationism/

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/06/19/harun-yahya-preaches-islam-slams-darwin-and-awaits-jesus/

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/04/07/harun-yahyas-islamic-creationist-book-pops-up-in-scotland/

It had to happen sooner or later.

Someone pretending to be Pope Benedict’s personal secretary Monsignor Georg Gänswein, a German priest whose good looks have made him a celebrity in his own right, has set up a false Facebook account in his name. Several journalists in Rome have received an invitation from someone claiming to be him and asking them to be his Facebook friend.

But the journalists noted something strange in the dialogue with the purported monsignor. He sprinkles his Italian with German words like gut (good)  — something the real one doesn’t  do since he speaks perfect Italian. The bogus monsignor also posted a video clip of the real Gänswein walking with the pope during the Benedict’s summer holidays last year in the northern Italian mountains. The video — shot by Vatican television — is readily available.

(Photo: Monsignor Georg Gänswein and Pope Benedict at the Vatican, 7 June 2006/Max Rossi)

But the real Gänswein, dubbed “gorgeous George,” doesn’t really need Facebook to make friends. There already are at least four Facebook fan clubs started by swooning admirers. One of the fan clubs uses an Italian play on words that can mean both that he should leave the priesthood or take off his priestly clothes.

Another fan club, writing in English, says “The papal secretary is a very attractive older man.” Gänswein may have some problems with that. He is only 52 and looks much younger.

Gänswein has played a much more marginal role in Benedict’s pontificate compared to his predecessor Stanislaw Dziwisz, who was Pope John Paul’s private secretary for all 27 years of his papacy and had served him when Karol Wojtyla was archbishop of Krakow (where Dziwisz is now cardinal). Dziwisz was a mover and shaker who enjoyed being the gatekeeper. He kept up contacts between the pope and journalists, politicians, commentators, authors and artists.

Gänswein keeps a much lower profile, perhaps because he worked with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger only for a few years before his boss became pontiff in 2005. But his good looks have often thrust him in the limelight he tries to avoid.

The pope’s secretary may not like being part of the new media, but the Vatican does. On Friday, the Vatican and Google will announce that the Holy See will have its own channel on the video sharing site YouTube.

Is a hoax like this disrespectful? Or just the price to pay for being a public personality?

(Photo: Georg Gänswein, 17 May 2006/Max Rossi)