Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, a member of Japan’s tiny Roman Catholic minority, had a chance toenjoy some time away from political trouble at home when he met with Pope Benedict on Tuesday.

As his first stop during a trip to attend July 8-10 summit of G8 leaders in Italy, Aso went to the Vatican, gave the pope a Sony digital video camera and discussed the global economic crisis with him.

(Photo: Prime Minister Aso presents video camera to Pope Benedict, 7 July 2009/Danilo Schiavella)

His visit was timely in that respect — Benedict published an encyclical on economic and social issues today, calling for a bold reform of the world economic order to overcome the financial crisis and redirect the focus of business to the welfare of all people.

Aso, the first Japanese prime minister to meet a pope in 10 years, told Benedict that Japan wanted to cooperate with the Vatican, according to his aides. According to the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano, the two men had a cordial discussion that “touched on current international issues such as the economic crisis and the commitment of Japan and the Holy See to Africa. On the bilateral level, the good relations between Japan and the Holy See were noted.”

(Photo: Aso and Benedict in the papal private library, 7 July 2009/Osservatore Romano)

For the unpopular prime minister, who looks set to lose a general election due by October, meeting Pope Benedict was probably a personal highlight of his trip, even though voters would not care much.

Aso is having a tough time at home with his support falling on doubts about his leadership abilities and the main opposition party has a good shot at ending more than a half-century of almost unbroken rule by Aso’s business-friendly Liberal Democratic Party.

Pope Benedict told Aso that he was happy to meet a Japanese prime minister who is Catholic and to know that Japan’s society is open to various religions.

Aso himself has little difficulty with mixing and matching various faiths. As we’ve mentioned here in an earlier post, he regularly pays respect and offers gifts to Shinto shrines, such as Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine dedicated to Japan’s war dead. Japan’s indigenous religion of Shinto is polytheistic and combining that with Christian monotherism may sound like a contradiction, but it is something many Japanese Catholics take in their stride.

Whether visits to Yasukuni shrine overstep the boundaries of Catholic doctrine is a difficult question, but Aso and the pope did not touch the issue at the 25-minute meeting, according to a statements released after the talk.

(Image: Aso meeting at bottom of front page of L’Osservatore Romano edition of 8 July 2009)

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Pope Benedict issued an ambitious call to reform the way the world works on Tuesday shortly before its most powerful leaders meet at the G8 summit in Italy. His latest encyclical, entitled “Charity in Truth,” presents a long list of steps he thinks are needed to overcome the financial crisis and shift economic activity from the profit motive to a goal of solidarity of all people.

Following are some of his proposals. The italics are from the original text. Do you think they are realistic food for thought or idealistic notions with no hope of being put into practice?

• “There is urgent need of a true world political authority. .. to manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration… such an authority would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights.”
• The economy needs ethics in order to function correctly - not any ethics whatsoever, but an ethics which is people-centred…”
• “Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers. Right intention, transparency, and the search for positive results are mutually compatible and must never be detached from one another.”
• “Without doubt, one of the greatest risks for businesses is that they are almost exclusively answerable to their investors, thereby limiting their social value… there is nevertheless a growing conviction that business management cannot concern itself only with the interests of the proprietors, but must also assume responsibility for all the other stakeholders who contribute to the life of the business: the workers, the clients, the suppliers of various elements of production, the community of reference… What should be avoided is a speculative use of financial resources that yields to the temptation of seeking only short-term profit, without regard for the long-term sustainability of the enterprise, its benefit to the real economy and attention to the advancement, in suitable and appropriate ways, of further economic initiatives in countries in need of development.”
• “One possible approach to development aid would be to apply effectively what is known as fiscal subsidiarity, allowing citizens to decide how to allocate a portion of the taxes they pay to the State.”

(Photo: Pope Bendict, 1 July 2009/Tony Gentile)

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(Photo: L’Aquila’s Santa Maria of Collemaggio Basilica, 13 April 2009/Daniele La Monaca)

They came, they prayed, they appealed.

Religious leaders from around the world held their own not-so-mini “G8 summit” in Italy on June 16-17. The “Fourth Summit of Religious Leaders on the occasion of the G8,” as the meeting was officially called,   started with a visit to L’Aquila, the central Italian city severely damaged by an earthquake on April 6. That will be the venue in July of the actual summit of the G8 club of industrial nations.

Nearly 130 religious leaders and diplomats then moved to Rome where they held two days of talks under the auspices of the Italian foreign ministry. This was the religious leaders’ fourth annual meeting, following those held in conjunction with earlier G8 summits in Moscow, Cologne and Sapporo.

They were hosted by Bishop Vincenzo Paglia, the bishop of Terni who is one of the founders of the Sant’ Egidio community and a member of the Italian bishops conference commission for ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue.

Apart from the Catholic hosts, the participants including high-level Muslims, Protestants, Orthodox, Hindus, Anglicans, Zoroastrians, Jews, Shintoists and Buddhists.

Their final appeal, which will be published soon on the Italian Catholic Church’s website, was sent to reporters in advance. It is posted on the next page.

(more…)

UPDATE: Eluana Englaro died on Monday Feb. 9.

What’s been called “Italy’s Terry Schiavo case” is starting to resemble its U.S. precedent in more ways than one. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered doctors on Friday not to disconnect the feeding tubes that the country’s top appeals court had ruled could be removed. Doctors had began withdrawing them on Friday before the order came from Rome.

Eluana Englaro, 38, has been in a vegetative state since a car crash in 1992. Her  case has looked much like that of Schiavo, the American who spent 15 years in a vegetative state and was allowed to die in 2005 after a long court battle.

(Photo:Eluana Englaro in an undated family photo)

“Until we have a law about end-of-life issues, nutrition and hydration, because they are a form of vital life sustenance, cannot be suspended under any circumstances by those who are care-givers of people who are not self-sufficient,” Berlusconi said after making the case resemble the Schiavo drama even more by intervening to stop Englaro’s tubes from being removed. In the Schiavo case, President George Bush also stepped in at a late stage to try to block a court decision to disconnect her.

The cabinet acted in defiance of Italy’s President Giorgio Napolitano, who was opposed to dealing with the issue through a decree and has the power to block it. But Berlusconi said that if that happened he would call an emergency session of parliament, where he has a comfortable majority, to enact a law.

Catholic politicians, mostly in the centre right, have said that not feeding Englaro amounts to euthanasia, which is illegal in Italy, and had urged the government to intervene.

As in the Schiavo case, the Milan court that ruled on Englaro back in November said it was convinced that her condition was irreversible and that she would prefer to die rather than be kept alive artificially. Do you think those criteria are enough to allow doctors to remove the nutrition and hydration tubes?

(Photo: Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, 20 Dec 2008/Remo Casilli)

Last week I wrote about Italy’s atheist association planning to get on the “no God” ad bandwagon by running their own ads on public buses in the northern city of Genoa. Not so fast. Put on the brakes. Someone decided that it ain’t gonna be that way.

The group, the Italian Union of Atheists and Rationalist Agnostics (UAAR), now says the publicity agency has informed it that the ads can’t run. The agency said the ads violated the advertising code.

(Photo: Planned Italian bus ad saying“The bad news is that God doesn’t exist. The good news is that you don’t need him.”/UAAR)

The UAAR is wondering why the ad was not considered unethical when they sent the contract to the agency for signing.

The UAAR said it suspects that pressure by local conservative politicians and the local Roman Catholic Church undermined the whole project.  They group says they may try placing the ads on public transport in other cities.

Many Italians were shocked to find pictures in their daily newspapers recently of Muslims kneeling in prayer on the piazzas in front of the cathedrals in Milan and Bologna during demonstrations in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
Predictably, politicians in the centre-right government criticised the protests with some, including the ministers for defence and European affairs, calling them a blasphemous provocation.

(Photo: Il Giornale says Milan square “transformed into a mosque”)

The government ministers noted that it would be impossible for Christians to pray in Mecca and one called on the Roman Catholic Church to take a harder stand and be less tolerant.

Critics of the demonstrations have found an unlikely ally in Yahya Pallavicini, the vice-president of CO.RE.IS, Italy’s Islamic Religiuos Community. The demonstrations were organised by another Islamic group, the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy (UCOII) and Pallavicini thinks they went over the top.

“We pray in our mosques and in our in mosques and our homes but using prayer during demonstrations in such a theatrical way after burning U.S. and Israeli flags creates disorder and leads to the stereotyping of Islam in Italy,” he told me in a phone conversation. “This is a manouevre to try to help fundamentalist positions.”

“This is a very misleading use of religion, this is the strategy of Hamas,” he said.

After some Catholics expressed outrage over the prayers in front of Milan’s cathedral, some Muslims apologised to the city’s archbishop, Cardinal Dionisio Tettamanzi. But Pallavicini urged the prelate not to accept their apology and to take a hard line instead against Muslims who abuse religion for political purposes.

Do you think Muslims crossed a red line by praying in front of these cathedrals or do you think they have a right to do so?

(Photo: Milan cathedral, 13 Jan 2001/Stefano Rellandini)

Here is an Italian video discussing the Muslim prayer protest in Milan. Footage of the protest runs from 0:54 to 1:26:

The members of Italy’s atheist association probably would not fill one of the side chapels of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. But that’s not stopping the group from launching an unprecedented ad campaign on buses in Italian cities, much like the one recently started in Britain.

(Photo: Planned Italian bus ads/UAAR)

The Italian Union of Atheists and Rationalist Agnostics (UAAR) will run the ads on four buses in the northern city of Genoa next month. The ads, which will cover the entire bus painted a soothing sky blue, read: “The bad news is that God doesn’t exist. The good news is that you don’t need him.”

The Padua-based group is launching the campaign in Genoa because advertising is much more expensive in other large cities such as Milan and Rome. But Genoa is also home to Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, the president of  the Italian Bishops Conference. According to some Italian reports, one of the buses will pass near his residence.

The group claims to have some 3,000 members and says it has received many more contributions since news of the bus campaign.  UAAR, which has chapters in 40 Italian cities, says if more funds come in,  it will take the campaign to Pope Benedict’s backyard in Rome. It says it decided to run the ads because the Italian media pays no attention to atheists. It added that Italian politicians “don’t always have to say ‘yes’ to the Church.”

The UAAR says it got the ad idea from the British Humanist Association, but it didn’t follow the London example completely. The British ads say “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” One would have thought the British atheists would be more decisive than Italian ones in denying the deity.

(Photo: British atheist Richard Dawkins in a London bus, 6 Jan 2009/Andrew Winning)

Atheists in Barcelona, London and Washington have already run ads like this and more are bound to come elsewhere. Do you find these offensive? Humourous?  A waste of valuable ad space? Do you think atheists get ignored by the mainstream media?

The Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano published an article over the weekend claiming that the contraceptive pill pollutes the environment massively, contributes to male infertility and causes abortions. Those claims, if true, hit lots of hot buttons about science, ethics, faith and government policy. They should make headlines around the world. But apart from the Italian press, for which this is a home game, they haven’t. Why not?

(Photo: Japanese contraceptive pills, 26 Aug 1999/Kimimasa Mayama)

It’s probably because the article also sets off lots of red lights for anyone trying to assess the validity of its claims. Its author Pedro José Maria Simón Castellví, head of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, makes several scientific-sounding claims but basically asks the reader to accept them on faith. Castellví says his article is based on a 100-page report by a Swiss doctor, Rudolf Ehmann, but doesn’t quote directly from it or say where it can be found.  This can’t be for lack of space, because he fills several lines with florid praise for the report with comments such as: “The original German text is beautifully written … it is written with all the scientific requirements, without any inferiority complex toward any discussion of obstetrics and gynaecology…”

The article’s headline — “Humanae Vitae - A Scientific Prophesy” — also hints its purpose is probably more religious than scientific. Humanae Vitae is the 1968 encyclical that reaffirmed the Church ban on artificial birth control. Its 40th anniversary last July prompted a series of Catholic statements, articles and conferences defending what was probably the most controversial encyclical of the 20th century. The major bioethics paper put out by the Vatican last month made several references to Humanae Vitae to bolster its argument.

Castellví’s article is still only available in the original Italian.  Silvia Aloisi in our Rome bureau provided FaithWorld with this quick summary of the article and comment in the Italian press:

The contraceptive pill is abortive, pollutes the environment and contributes to male infertility, according to an article published in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.  The head of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations (FIAMC), Pedro José Maria Simón Castellví, wrote in the article that the pill had “devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature.”

“We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution provoked by by-products of the pill,” he said.  This was a “clear anti-environmental effect demanding further explanation by manufacturers.”

Castellví gave no further details but said the findings were documented in a 100-page report recently published by his federation. He also said that the contraceptive pill, even when it had low hormone levels, was in many cases abortive because it prevented the embryo’s implantation into the woman’s womb.

The deputy chairman of the Italian Society of Contraception dismissed the article as “science fiction. “Gianbenedetto Melis told Italy’s Ansa news agency: “The pill cannot provoke an abortion because it blocks ovulation, and if there is no egg to be fertilised there can be no pregnancy.” Flavia Fronconi, a pharmacologist, said “the world is full of substances with oestrogen effects … Even a plastic bottle left in the sun releases oestrogen ‘polluting’ the liquid that we drink.”

Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, former president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, was cautious about the link made in the article between the pill and male infertility. “It’s true that the spreading of hormones in the environment increases the chances of multiple births and in turn provokes male infertility,” Sgreccia told the daily Corriere della Sera. “But there are several causes for this. And more than anything else, it stems from the fact that they are used in agriculture fertilisers, so they end up in vegetables and meat,” he said.

After some research on the Internet, I found Ehmann’s full report on the FIAMC website in the original German and a Spanish translation. There was only a four-page summary in English. In his report, Ehmann makes the claims mentioned in L’Osservatore Romano, sometimes with footnotes quoting scientific publications and sometimes not. It’s hard for a non-scientist to assess his scientific claims, but Castellví’s article gives the impression that it aims more to support doctrines than prove facts.  One sceptical blogger who got the same impression asks whether “the people responsible for the conclusion reported by Castellví are the same who were involved in the ‘research’ supporting Intelligent Design.”

Does this article reflect actual Vatican thinking or is it just a trial balloon? That’s hard to say. The fact that these charges are published in the Vatican newspaper doesn’t mean they’re official, but it does hint that someone there takes them seriously. If they want to convince others, they’ll have to provide more proof.

The role of Pope Pius XII during World War Two is a subject of endless dispute, part of which we’ve tracked on FaithWorld over the past year. This has gained in interest because of Vatican plans to put him on the path to sainthood, which may be held up now because of protests from Jewish groups. We’re all waiting for the secret archives of his papacy (1939-1958) to be opened to finally see what the documents say about his relations with Nazi Germany. While we’re waiting, one of the key questions that could be assessed on the basis of files already available is what Pius thought about dealing with the Nazis before he became pope. There is a long paper trail there, because Pius was the Vatican Secretary of State — effectively, the prime minister of the Vatican — from 1930 until his election as pope. But a lot of people argue for or against Pius without having read this material.

(Photo: Pope Pius XII/Vatican photo)

Gerard Fogarty S.J., a University of Virginia historian and Jesuit priest, has worked through much of this material and come up with a fascinating article in the U.S. Jesuit magazine America. He’s examined much of the paper trail the future pope left in the 1930s but many of the documents are in a language that the leading commentators on Pius don’t speak. We’re not talking about that dead language Latin, but Italian — a lively regional tongue in Europe that happens to be an international language within the world’s largest church, Roman Catholicism.

“This is one of the problems even now,” Fogarty recounted in an informative podcast for America. “Scholars come to me and ask, do you use a translator? No scholar is going to do that. You’ve got to learn the language yourself. So people have not looked at what was published.”

(Photo: Cover of America magazine, 15 Dec 2008 edition)

Fogarty has scoured archives in the United States, Britain, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Vatican City for all the information he can find about Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli — the future Pius XII — and the Nazis in the 1930s. He has also pushed the Vatican to publish documents from the Pius XII papacy in stages, so we can get the files from the war years soon, but come up against the reflexes of a bureaucracy that goes back two millennia. “Some people in the archives opening up just a segment because they want to open it pontificate by pontificate,” he said. Publishing the war documents once the archivists have sorted material until 1945 could give us this information earlier, “but they want to go up to 1958.”

After reading what’s available now, Fogarty thinks Pius XII did the best he could given his understanding — from long diplomatic experience with Germany and advice given by, among others, members of the German resistance — that open protest against the Nazis was counterproductive.

“In retrospect, I wish he hadn’t been so diplomatic,” he said. “If you made me pope, which is not going to happen, i would think as an historian. He was a trained diplomat.”

Asked what he thought about Vatican efforts to beatify or canonise Pius XII, the historian said: “I don’t see evidence one way or another.”

Some of the most frequent accusations against Pius XII are that he was either pro-German or anti-Semitic? Can you say that after reading Fr. Fogarty’s article?

(Photo: Gerard Fogarty, S.J.)

Italy’s “Terry Schiavo case” has ended with the country’s top appeals court allowing a father to disconnect the feeding tube that has kept his comatose daughter alive for 16 years. Eluana Englaro, now 37, has been in a vegetative state at a hospital in northern Italy since a 1992 car crash. The Englaro case has been compared to that of American Terri Schiavo, who spent 15 years in a vegetative state before a long and very public dispute ended in 2005 with a court decision allowing her husband to have her feeding tube disconnected.

As in the Schiavo case, the Milan court that ruled on the case said it was convinced Englaro would prefer to die rather than be kept alive artificially. State prosecutors appealed that decision to the Cassation Court, the highest appeals court in Italy, and it was the Cassation Court’s decision on Nov. 13 that definitively settled the case.

(Photo:Eluana Englaro in an undated family photo)

This was the first time such a ruling has been made and upheld in Italy, where the influential Roman Catholic Church is implacably opposed to ending feeding and hydrating of patients in a vegetative state. Vatican Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan called the decision a “monstrous and inhuman murder” .

When the Schiavo and Englaro cases began, the lines in this ethical dilemma were fairly clearly drawn. On one side were those who said a persistent vegetative state (PVS) was enough to declare a patient effectively dead and disconnect feeding tubes. On the other were those, like the cardinal above, who said that patient was still alive. In 2006, brain scans revealed that a woman in PVS after suffering devastating brain damage in a car crash could imagine playing tennis or walking around her home when doctors asked her to do this.

Do those brain scans prove that PVS patients are still effectively alive? Should courts take that into account?

P.S. According to David Waters at the Washington Post’s On Faith blog, a similar case is going on now in Washington where a hospital wants to stop treatment for a PVS boy but his Orthodox Jewish parents reject their standard of brain death as proof of death and want to wait until his heart stops.

Here’s a video from July when the Milan court ruled tht Englaro’s feeding tubes could be removed: