Nigerian author Uwem Akpan, who is a Jesuit priest, said he was "humbled" that his debut collection of short stories was chosen by influential U.S. talk show host Oprah Winfrey for her book club.

Oprah picked "Say You're One Of Them" as her 63rd book club selection, the first time she has chosen a book of short stories, saying these stories "left me stunned and profoundly moved."

The collection, published in 2008, includes five separate stories from the perspective of an African child that were described as capturing the resilience of children growing up in the face of unimaginable devastation.

Uwem Akpan, who runs a parish in Lagos, told Entertainment Weekly that he was "very, very humbled" to be chosen by Oprah.

He said he was not currently working on another book as his parish had been so busy but the church supports his writing with no conflict of interest between writing and being a priest.

"I have permission to write, but I do not need an imprimatur from the church -- that is more for people who are writing about theology and philosophy. They see that I am writing fiction and assume it is made up," he said.

"Don't forget that Jesus was a priest and a poet."

Oprah's book club is the biggest in the world with almost two million online members and books chosen for Oprah's book club invariably  skyrocket to the top of the U.S. bestseller lists. Akpan studied philosophy and English at Creighton and Gonzaga universities then studied theology for three years at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa.

He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003 and received his master's degree in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. His story collection was first published last year by Little Brown & Co, which is part of the Hachette Book Group that is owned  by French publishing company Largardere.

Umem Akpan picture: Courtesy of Oprah.com

Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has shown a refreshing frankness in talking about the widespread abuse of children in Catholic-run schools and orphanages documented in the Ryan report last week. In an op-ed page piece for the Irish Times today, he described himself as shocked but not totally surprised and recalled hearing about the abuse from victims up to 40 years ago. He refers to reporting by “a few courageous and isolated journalists like Michael Viney,” whose series on abuse appeared in the Irish Times in 1966.

(Photo: Archbishop Diarmuid Martin/Dublin Archdiocese)

“The stories they told then were not radically different from what the Ryan report presents, albeit in a systemic and objective way which reveals the horror in its integrity,” he wrote. “Anyone who had contact with ex-residents of Irish industrial schools at that time knew that what those schools were offering was, to put it mildly, poor-quality childcare by the standards of the time. The information was there.”

The official Church reaction in Ireland has been shame and apologies all around, starting with Cardinal Sean Brady. It included apologies from the Christian Brothers, a teaching order with a reputation for stern discipline and abuse charges that won a lawsuit to bar the report from naming abusers. These were certainly appropriate. What was missing, though, was the admission that the problem was well known, even if all the details were not. There was even a film made about one of these schools, The Magdelene Sisters, that won the Golden Lion at the 2002 Biennale Venice Film Festival.

(Photo: Papal Cross in Phoenix Park in Dublin, 20 May 2009/Cathal McNaughton)

Irish novelist John Banville tackled this in an op-ed piece for the New York Times on Friday:

Everyone knew. When the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse issued its report this week, after nine years of investigation, the Irish collectively threw up their hands in horror, asking that question we have heard so often, from so many parts of the world, throughout the past century: How could it happen?

Surely the systematic cruelty visited upon hundreds of thousands of children incarcerated in state institutions in this country from 1914 to 2000, the period covered by the inquiry, but particularly from 1930 until 1990, would have been prevented if enough right-thinking people had been aware of what was going on? Well, no. Because everyone knew…

Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled — the word is not too strong — by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.

We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today.

Irish Jesuit blogger Fergus O’Donoghue disputes Banville’s description of Ireland as a “closed state … ruled… by an all-powerful Catholic Church.” That was not factually the case, of course, but the Catholic Church certainly did enjoy great influence for much of that period. And many lay people accepted the Church’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to issues like this.

As O’Donoghue explained in another post:
Part of the background is the middle class mentality which infused Irish society and the Irish Church: the children in institutions had to be taught to know their place.

Why did so many Catholic institutions fail so appallingly? A hundred reasons can be suggested, but three come to mind: undue respect for authority (which was self-justifying and rarely self-critical); religious authoritarianism (government of communities by self-perpetuating cliques, who rarely saw the need for fresh thinking); and a rancid clericalism (product of a religious culture that increasingly turned in on itself).

Religious life in Ireland has wonderful aspects, but this one is shameful.

(Photo: 1937 Irish stamp showing Saint Patrick/Wikimedia Commons)

Martin’s frank approach seems to be the background to the unusual exchange between himself and the new London Archbishop Vincent Nichols, whose comments about the “courage” of Irish religious orders to confront their past he dismissed as “not … helpful.” Instead of praising them for confronting abuse he says was already known, Martin wants them to do more for their victims. And that means money.

This is not going to go away anytime soon. The Irish cabinet is due to discuss the Ryan report this week, and the Dail (parliament) will debate it in early June. Another damning report, this time just on abuse in the Dublin archdiocese, is due out this summer.

The uproar over traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson and his denial of the Holocaust highlights an open secret here in Rome: Vatican departments don’t talk to each much, or at least as much as they should. The pope appears to have decided to lift the 1988 excommunication of four schismatic bishops of the SSPX (including Williamson) without the wide consultation that it may have merited. The Christian Unity department, which also oversees relations with Jews, was apparently kept out of the loop. The head of the office, Cardinal Walter Kasper, told The New York Times it was the pope’s decision. Kasper’s office and the Vatican press office, headed by Father Federico Lombardi, were clearly not prepared for the media onslaught that followed the discovery of Williamson’s views denying the Holocaust.

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

Pope Benedict’s lifting of the ban and Williamson’s comments about the Holocaust are unrelated as far as Church law is concerned. The excommunications lifted last Saturday were imposed because the four were ordained without Vatican permission. As Father Thomas Resse, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, told me: “The Holocaust is a matter of history, not faith. Being a Holocaust denier is stupid but not against the faith. Being anti-Semitic, however, is a sin.” This is an important distinction, but not one the Vatican seems to be able to get across.

It was all very reminiscent of the pope’s Regensburg speech in 2006. Few in the Vatican knew it was coming. The Vatican was overwhelmed by the Muslim reaction and the media interest. This time, it is also not clear how many people in the Vatican even knew about Williamson’s history. Surely, those negotiating with the traditionalists for the lifting of the excommunications should  have known. If they didn’t, why didn’t they? If they did, why did they not tell Kasper’s department? The Holocaust is such a sensitive issue for Jews that this response could have been seen from miles away.

(Photo: Pope Benedict speaks at Regensburg University, 21 Sept 2006/KNA)

Even if the Vatican felt the rapprochement with the traditionalists was necessary, a clear and severe distancing from Williamson’s views issued simultaneously to the announcement of the lifting of the excommunications certainly would not have hurt.

It is still too early to gauge the public relations fallout within the Jewish community and in the Church itself. In all the years I have been covering Catholic-Jewish relations, this is the biggest blow-up I can recall — bigger than the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, the Good Friday prayer,  the controversy over Pius XII or the late Pope John Paul receiving Arafat.  It will take a long time for this one to heal. Those involved in Catholic-Jewish dialogue say it will go on. It will.

In 2003, several Reuters correspondents — including myself — published a book entitled “Pope John Paul, Reaching Out Across Borders.” One contributor, Alan Elsner, is Jewish and lost relatives in the Belzec death camp in Poland in 1942. He concluded his chapter on Catholic relations with Jews with this paragraph:

“For the Jews, the central question to be put to Christians remains, in the words of Rabbi Michael Signer ‘Can we trust you, can we trust you now?’ For Pope John Paul, the answer was a resounding ‘yes’. It will be for his successor to provide an answer for the future.”

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.)

The dispute over Pope Pius XII’s public silence about the Holocaust (background here) widened over the weekend. At the same time, Pope Benedict came in for criticism for his own silence, this time about organised crime in the Naples area during a visit to nearby Pompei . A local newspaper had (wrongly) reported he would publicly condemn the Camorra, as the local mafia is known. His spokesman insisted the visit to a Marian shrine (the purpose of the trip) was purely spiritual.

The Pius dispute heated up when Rev. Peter Gumpel, the German Jesuit who is the postulator for the late pope’s cause for sainthood, told the Italian news agency ANSA on Saturday that Benedict was delaying the beatification of Pius because it would harm relations with Jews. He also said Benedict could not visit Israel until a caption under a photograph of Pius at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial was changed. The caption said Pius “abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews”. The Vatican denies that charge and says Pius did all he could to save Jews.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi denied the caption was holding up any papal visit to Israel. Without naming them, he also told both Gumpel and Pius’s critics to lay off Benedict. “In this situation, it is not opportune to exercise pressure on him from one side or the other,” he said.

The latest twist to this came on Monday when a photograph of Benedict emblazoned with a superimposed Nazi swastika appeared on an Israeli website run by self-proclaimed supporters of the governing Kadima party. It was later removed after a request from Kadima’s leader, Israel’s foreign minister and possibly soon its prime minister, Tzipi Livni. Before it was swapped for a picture of a smiling Benedict overlooking a crowd-filled St. Peter’s Square, a Kadima spokesman said: “Tzipi Livni strongly condemns this and we are working to remove this shameful picture.”

There is no link between the Pius story and Benedict’s non-condemnation of the Camorra, but several Italian papers like La Stampa, La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera played the issue prominently. This prompted Il Giornale’s Vatican correspondent Andrea Tornielli, a prominent Pius defender, to complain the press was now talking about “the ’silence’ of Papa Ratzinger.” “I think that Benedict should be free to make a Marian pilgrimage without being obliged to speak publicly about all the social scourges of the area that hosts him,” he wrote.

We’ve said here that the polemics were sure to continue because of two meetings at the Vatican in coming weeks. The New York Jewish weekly Forward has now added two more occasions for further sparks to fly:

The Jewish umbrella group in charge of official relations with the Holy See is planning to raise the issue during a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI later this month. The issue also is likely to be broached at a high-level biennial Jewish-Vatican meeting in mid-November in Budapest.

Abraham Foxman, the national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League, called on the body, the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC), to “take a strong stand” in insisting that the Vatican fulfil its promise to open its wartime archives to independent scholars.

The financial crisis so dominates the news these days that reports on a meeting of the Christian and Muslim religious leaders and scholars pictured here zero in first on what they said about the economy. These men and women of faith would readily admit they look like anything but a group of portfolio managers, but comments on the crisis now get top billing no matter where they come from. We grabbed the crisis angle too, breaking out the economic statement from the final communique yesterday as our first item on this meeting. With that done, let me go back to look at the rest of the news from the latest Common Word dialogue meeting in Cambridge and London on October 12-15.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this meeting was how both sides — 17 Muslims and 19 Christians — worked to understand the other’s faith and find ways to spread that understanding within their communities. For example, in his opening address, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tackled the problem of how to deal with the the two faiths speak differently about God. “While what we say about God is markedly different,  irreducibly different in many respects,” he said, “we recognize in each other’s language and practice a similarity in the way we understand the impact of God on human lives, and thus a certain similarity in what we take for granted about the nature or character of God.” 

Meeting in Cambridge, they held sessions in the “scriptural reasoning” practiced at the university’s Inter-Faith Programme. In these sessions, Christians, Muslims and Jews read passages from their scriptures together and then explain them to each other. David Ford, an Anglican theologian from Northern Ireland who is director of the Inter-Faith Programme, told me he attended one such session with a British Anglican bishop, a German Jesuit priest, a Muslim sheikh from the Emirates, a Libyan Islamic theologian, a British Methodist theologian and an Iranian ayatollah.  “We were all studying together and dealing with important issues,” he said. “Some of the Muslim scholars were doing this for the first time with Christians,” said Aref Ali Nayed, a senior advisor to the Inter-Faith Programme.

Nayed told me the theological issues they discussed included the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the way canons of scripture are established, the question of prophesy, the notion of a convenant with God and various aspects of hermeneutics, or how to analyse scripture. At their last meeting at Yale University in July, both sides explained how they understood concepts like love, compassion and mercy. The question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God was also discussed and that dialogue continues, he said.

If those terms seem overly academic, consider what an agreement could mean down at the level of the average church or mosque. If Muslims understand how Christians understand the Trinity, for example, then imams might not stoke tensions by preaching that Christians are polytheists.  By the same token, priests and pastors might not condemn Islam as a false religion if they believed Christians and Muslims worshipped the same God and valued love, compassion and mercy in similar ways.

As Egypt’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Ali Gomaa put it: “We want to listen in order to correct misconceptions, to dissolve the ice, to find what is common, and to cooperate for the sake of worshipping God, engaging in positive development and purifying the human soul … we reject this constant provocation that generates hatred and accordingly instability and division.” 

But how do you get from here to there? The meeting addressed that in its communique:

“Looking towards the future, mindful of the crucial importance of education and inspired by our presence in a great seat of learning, we have also been keen to identify specific ways in which our encounter might be broadened and deepened.  We have, therefore, committed ourselves to the following over the coming year:

· To identify and promote the use of educational materials, for all age-groups and in the widest possible range of languages, that we accept as providing a fair reflection of our faiths

· To build a network of academic institutions, linking scholars, students and academic resources, with various committees and teams which can work on shared values

· To identify funds to facilitate exchanges between those training for roles of leadership within our religious communities.”

“I sense in this meeting a feeling of urgency, especially on the Muslim side, that we need to show our communities that dialogue does bear fruit and improve their lives to some extent,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America. The way to do this is to have leaders of each faith speak out when the other is under attack. The communique denounced the persecution of Iraqi Christians in Mosul: “These threats undermine the centuries-old tradition of local Muslims protecting and nourishing the Christian community, and must stop …  We find no justification in Islam or Christianity for those promoting the insecurity or perpetrating the violence evident in parts of Iraq.”

Mattson, a professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary in the United States, told me U.S. Muslims want to hear similar statement from Christian leaders condemning “the dehumanisation of Muslims, like these public attacks on Islam that you see with the distribution of the DVD ‘Obsession’.”

The communique also mentioned another aspect of inter-faith dialogue that the Common Word declaration originally did not address but participants feel they must include. It said the scriptural reading sessions had “given us each a greater appreciation for the richness of the other’s heritage as well as an awareness of the potential value in being joined by Jewish believers in a journey of mutual discovery and attentiveness to the texts we hold sacred.” In contrast to the Yale meeting, there were no Jewish participants in Cambridge, but Nayed said one session held a conference call with a Jewish scholar to discuss ways of involving them more in future.

To return to the financial theme this post started with — the “trickle-down effect” is under fire these days for not being an efficient way to spread wealth in an economy. In the context of inter-faith dialogue, however, it seems like the best way to proceed. Ford, Mattson and Nayed all stressed to me the importance of having Christian and Muslim scholars get to know each other and discuss issues in person. Nayed said agreement reached at such meetings could trickle down through the communities: “To have top Muslim theologians become personal friends of top Christian theologians has a monumental effect because they all have graduate students who will teach other students who will become preachers in mosques and churches. This is really important.”

Father Adolfo Nicolas, the new superior general of the Jesuit order of Catholic priests, possesses, besides decades of experience, a good sense of humour. At his first meeting with reporters since his election on Jan 19, the 71-year-old Spaniard spoke about his life, his formation in Asia and what he had been reading about himself in the media.

“I’ve read that I am 50 percent Kolvenbach and 50 percent Arrupe,” he said, referring to his two immediate predecessors, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach and Pedro Arrupe. “However, no one has yet said I’m 10 percent Elvis Presley, although one could say this and it wouldn’t surprise me. But I think this is all false.”

After the laughter died down, the soft-spoken Spaniard became a bit serious: “I am not Kolvenbach and I am not Arrupe. I am made for the reality in which I find myself.”

Even religious media have had a hard time defining him after his election to lead the Roman Catholic Church’s largest clerical order. “I am an unknown,” said Nicolas, who has spent much of his life in Asia. “So this has been like a treasure hunt (for the media). ”

Jesuit superiors general are known as “black popes” because, like the pontiff, they wield worldwide influence and usually keep their position for life — and their simple cassock is black, in contrast to the pope’s white.

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He dismissed media reports that there was a “theological gap” between himself and the Pope. “That is not true,” he said, calling him “a great professor” whose work he had studied while in Japan. “Theology is a dialogue …sometimes there are differences.”

Nicolas spoke much about how Asia had taught him tolerance. “The way of seeing faith in Asia is totally different from the way we see it here. Asia changed me, I hope for the best … Asia can do much to enrich the universal Church.”

“In Japan, I discovered that true religiosity is much deeper, that you must go to the heart of the person, the heart of the question when we speak of God, just as when we speak of ourselves or of human life. This taught me to smile in the face of things that in Spain would have upset me. But human life is like this, people are like this. Imperfection is so natural that one must accept it and not look for people who are perfect … It scandalises the Japanese that we are so strict, intolerant, so unaccepting of diversity.”

Then, at the end of the meeting, his sense of humour returned. He said one of the most interesting places in Asia is the Philippines and noted some similarities between the Filipino and Italian characters. “Like Italians, the Filipinos see traffic laws not as laws but as suggestions.”

Returning to news reporting after two weeks off feels like you’ve been away for two weeks. Returning to blogging after a holiday break feels like you’ve been away for an eternity. So much going on! My colleague Ed Stoddard in Dallas was minding the shop, but he was unexpectedly sent off to report the news from the campaign trail. That gave FaithWorld a very American accent, which was a timely twist given the role of religion in the Iowa vote. It’s back to the view from Paris now — here are some inital comments on recent events concerning religion around the world:

Benazir Bhutto — The assassinated Pakistani leader will speak from beyond the grave next month when her book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West is published. HarperCollins has announced it has brought forward to Feb. 12 the release of the book that Bhutto worked on before returning to Pakistan in October. In a statement, it called the book “a bold, uncompromising vision of hope for the future of not only Pakistan but the Islamic world. Bhutto presents a powerful argument for a reconciliation of Islam with democratic principles, in the face of opposition from Islamic extremists and Western skeptics.”

It will be interesting to see what she has to say about the role of Islam in Pakistani politics, especially after all the praise for her as a modern, secularist Muslim leader in comments after her assassination. Bhutto’s party is politically secularist and she pledged to fight against Islamist militants now challenging the Islamabad government. But let’s not forget that the Taliban emerged during her second stint as prime minister in 1993-1996 and were a key element in Pakistani policy towards Afghanistan at the time. She worked with an Islamist politician close to the Taliban then and now. It was also on her watch that, as historian William Dalrymple put it, Kashmir was turned into “a jihadist playground.” Whether she supported all this, couldn’t oppose the military people behind it or both (that’s my hunch) is something historians will debate long into the future. But it is clear that her record is more complex than some of the eulogies would have it.

Saying this is not meant to tarnish the reputation of this courageous woman. The Pakistanis who were ready to vote for her know all this already. Her father and political mentor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a left-wing populist who sported Mao caps and campaigned on the faith-free slogan roti, kapra, makan (bread, clothes, housing), played the Islamic card with concessions to religious pressure groups when necessary. It’s more a comment on how complex Pakistani politics are and how hard it is to fit its main actors into categories that readers readily understand.

BTW it’s disappointing to see Dalrymple, a fine historian of the Subcontinent, fall into the same trap as readers who want us to write about “Muslim riots ” in France. In his New York Times op-ed piece cited above, he said that former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by “Sri Lankan Hindu extremists.” The Tamil Tigers are Sri Lankan and presumably mostly Hindu, as most Tamils are, but their separatist struggle is nationalist and not religious at all. They were some of the first modern suicide bombers, but that’s as close to religiously inspired militants as they get.

Anglican Agonies — Will 2008 be the year of decision for the Anglican Communion? Yes, no, maybe… or maybe none of the above? It’s getting more complicated as July’s Lambeth Conference nears. The Global South primates have announced a rival meeting for June called the Global Anglican Future Conference (with the unfortunate acronym GAFCON). The news was hardly out before the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, Bishop Suheil Dawani, complained he had not been consulted and expressed concern it could boost tensions in the region. “I believe our Primate, Dr Mouneer Hanna Anis, is also concerned about this event,” he wrote. “His advice to the organizers that this was not the right time or place for such a meeting was ignored. I urge the organizers to reconsider this conference urgently.”

The organisers say primates can attend both Jerusalem and Lambeth, but it looks like this is the alternative Lambeth conference that Nigeria’s Archbishop Peter Akinola has suggested. It’s hard to see what Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams can do. “The Archbishop of Canterbury was never one for diktats,” Andrew Brown blogged at The Guardian. “Now his inaction has let those who would split the church get into a fine mess.”

The next Black Pope — The Society of Jesus, aka the Jesuits, open their General Congregation on Monday to elect a new Superior General, aka the “black pope.” The Jesuits are the largest order in the Roman Catholic Church, with a long intellectual heritage, checkered history and record of theological tussles with the Vatican. We’re covering this for news, so I won’t go into it much now, except to spotlight the Jesuit info page on the pow-wow and two previews from America, Commonweal , The Tablet and the National Catholic Reporter and interviews with the outgoing chief Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach in Vatican Radio, Catholic News Service, Die Tagespost, La Croix, adnkronos and Katholiek Nederland (he’s Dutch). My favourite nugget from all this is that the four days they put aside for considering the new superior general is known as the murmuratio. There’s not supposed to be any campaigning, but they can murmur about the candidates.

Malaysia’s Allah Muddle — Another story on increasingly exclusive Muslim views from Malaysia, where a Catholic weekly has been told it cannot use the word Allah for God in its Malay-language articles, even though it is the usual Malay word for the deity. There seemed to be some flip-flopping over this, and the weekly eventually got its publishing permit renewed. But government officials later insisted the word Allah is from now on reserved for Muslims.

This is not just semantics. The Malaysian government has a policy of moderate Islam that it calls Islam hadhari, or civilisational Islam. It has been talking this up for a while now, just at a time when Washington has been looking for “moderate Muslims” to promote as a counterweight to Islamic radicals. But the trend in Malaysian Islam seems to be going the other way, as increasing complaints from minority Christians, Hindus and Buddhists indicate. As Malaysian political scientist Farish Noor notes: “The administration of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi came to power on the promise that it would promote its own brand of moderate Islam that was pluralist and respectful of other cultures and religions. But time and again the Malaysian public — first Hindus and now Christians — have felt necessary to protest over what they regard as unfair, biased treatment and the furthering of an exclusive brand of Islam that is communitarian and divisive. The latest fiasco over the non-issue that is the name of God would suggest that Prime Minister’s Badawi’s grand vision of a moderate Islam has hit the rocks, and is now floundering.”

Ali Eteraz, a lively Muslim blogger in the U.S., says “Leaders in Malaysia promote supremacist, dominionist versions of Islam, because it makes political sense for them to do so. Sixty per cent of the country is Malay-Muslim; the rest are Chinese Buddhists, Tamil Hindus and animists. So, if you can control the Muslims, you will control the government.”

A few other stories from Malaysia chipped away further at its reputation for tolerance — Taoist statue deemed “offensive” to Islam and Malaysian Hindu loses case to ban conversion to Islam. Next door in Indonesia, there are reports of increased attacks on the Ahmadi sect, which many Muslims consider to be heretics, and an Islamic Defenders’ Front wants to ban it. Also, an Anti-Apostasy Alliance says conversion to Christianity “is a bigger evil than terrorism.”

(more comments to follow)

We noted here on Monday that the unprecedented appeal by 138 Muslim scholars for a real Christian-Muslim dialogue put the focus on how the Vatican would react. The only comment from Rome so far has been cautiously positive, saying it was “very interesting” and “encouraging” but going no further. Now one of the Catholic Church’s top experts on Islam has given his analysis — and he’s impressed by what he sees.

Father Samir Khalil Samir, S.J. is an Egyptian who heads the Research and Documentation Centre for Arab Christianity (CEDRAC ) at Saint Joseph’s University in Beirut. A genial polyglot whose native language is Arabic, he is as familiar with the Koran as the Bible and has written extensively about both religions. He was one of two Jesuit professors who lectured about Islam to Pope Benedict and the pope’s former PhD students (the so-called Ratzinger- Schülerkreis) at a private meeting in 2005. He can be both critical and sympathetic in his analyses, so a positive assessment from him carries weight.

“There is a lot of good in the document sent to Benedict XVI and Christian leaders,” reads the start of his analysis just published by the Rome-based Catholic news service AsiaNews.it. He also points out what he calls “gaps and elements which provoke the need for deeper reflections.” Read the whole analysis here .