“Do Catholic countries have better football players?”

I was surprised to see this headline on the Austrian Catholic website kath.net today… and even more surprised to see they seemed to mean it seriously.

“A look at the participants in the final round of the European football championship in Switzerland and Austria suggests this,” kath.net writes in a report from Vienna. “In seven of the 16 participating countries, Catholics are clearly in the majority: Poland (95 percent of the population), Spain (92 percent), Italy (90 percent), Portugal (90 percent), Croatia (77 percent), Austria (69 percent ) and France (51 percent). Only one Protestant stronghold confronts them, Sweden. Of the 8.8 million inhabitants of the northern European country, 80 percent are Lutherans.”

There’s no hint of analysis of why this should be relevant, or mention of the personal faith — or lack thereof — of the players on these national teams. This purely statistical view (sports fans love stats, don’t they?) goes on to point out which participating countries have large numbers of both Catholics and Protestants (Germany, Switzerland and Netherlands).

The article notes that only 32 percent of all Czechs call themselves Christians, making the Czech Republic the most “de-churched” participating country, i.e. the country where religion has retreated the most. Even there, though, the Catholics make up the largest group among the believers (26.5 percent of the population). So maybe they still have a chance after all.

No religion story in Europe is complete without a mention of Islam, so the Vienna-datelined article ended up with a comment about Turkey. The Turkish team, by the way, beat Austria’s co-hosts Switzerland 2-1 on Wednesday in Basel and face the “de-churched” Czechs on Sunday in Geneva, aka “the Protestant Rome”.

“The only Muslim-dominated country in the European Championship is Turkey, where 98 percent of the 72 million inhabitants are Muslims. The 120,000 Christians there have a hard time because of much discrimination,” it wrote. “In Europe there are 224.5 million Catholics, 57.8 million Protestants, 39 million Orthodox, 15.7 million Muslims and 1.6 million Jews.”

These statistics appear to be completely irrelevant to Euro 2008. In fact, with the large Catholic majority in Europe that kath.net mentions at the end, it’s almost inevitable that many countries with a Catholic majority will end up in the final rounds every time the championships are held. Can any football fan tell me if there’s something this religion editor is missing?

The Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) has just published a booklet for school teachers urging them not to advocate creationism or intelligent design (ID). That’s “evangelical” as in the German evangelisch (meaning Protestant, mostly Lutheran), and not “evangelical” as it’s more commonly used in the United States. Still, it’s interesting to see that the EKD in Germany, where there are few U.S.-style evangelicals and almost no dispute about the theory of evolution, felt it necessary to issue a 22-page booklet about teaching evolution. It’s called “The Origin of the World, the Theory of Evolution and the Belief in Creation in School” (here in German).

EKD Chairman Bishop Wolfgang Huber (pictured below) writes in the introduction that there is “an intense debate” about these issues but that “it is being conducted in Germany in a different way from, for example, the United States of America. Still, a fundamental clarification is of considerable practical importance.” He doesn’t elaborate.

The daily Die Welt gave a bit more background. “This dispute is increasingly spilling over from the USA to us and has already led to political debates. The Hesse state culture minister (and Protestant synod member) Karin Wolff spoke last year of a “surprising agreement” between evolution and the Bible. With that she sparked a dispute within the Church in which the reasonable faction of the EKD found itself confronted with the growing strength of evangelicals loyal to the Bible. This “orientation aid” should now calm the dispute by setting limits towards both sides.”The “orientation aid,” as the booklet is called, criticises Richard Dawkins and other atheists for thinking science can disprove the existence of God. It compares the books of the “new atheists” to the communist textbooks in East Germany: “The new atheism propagated by Dawkins and others today fits seamlessly into this ideological scheme.”

The booklet has several pages on the relationship between science and religion. Sorry, I can’t translate them all but they boil down to saying that biblically literal creationism is unseriös (”unserious” is a serious put-down in German). ID turns God into a god-of-the-gaps, it adds. So how does the EKD want German schools to deal with creation? Unlike in the U.S., even state schools in Germany have religion classes, separated according to religions and denominations. The EKD says it believes the Biblical story of creation explains the overall purpose of life while science explains the physical details. “God the creator is part of this belief, but not creationism,” the booklet writes. “So Protestant religion class can discuss creationism, but not advocate it.”

The booklet talks positively about “cooperation that connects subjects” (fächerverbindende Kooperation) and says “in principle all classes can deal with both the belief in creation and the theory of evolution.” Religion class is special in that it can advocate a religious view such as God as creator. “But teachers, because of their pedological responsibility and the duty to be evenhanded that goes with their occupation, cannot claim a comparable right for themselves, neither about creationism nor other views, for example atheist ones,” it adds.

Is Martin Luther, the German monk who sparked the Reformation, going to be “rehabilitated” this year by Pope Benedict? Some media say yes, the Vatican says no way. Here is an interesting sequence of events that says a lot about how something can take on a life of its own, regardless of whether it may be totally correct.
0It all appears to have started on March 2, when ApCom, an Italian news agency, ran a three paragraph article, here in Italian , merely saying that the pope and some of his former PhD students (the so-called Ratzinger- Schlerkreis), would discuss Luther during their yearly summer encounter in August at the papal summer villa at Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome.
APcom, said the seminar would discuss whether Luther “wanted a rupture … or intended to reform the Church but without traumas”.
On March 5, two days after the APcom report, the Turin newspaper La Stampa ran a story with the headline “Ratzinger reforms Luther. ‘He had many Catholic ideas. The theologian pope summons his students for a seminar of study on the heretic.”The article, seen here in Italian, quoted Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity, as saying the choice of topics was meant “to favour a climate of encounter with Protestants.”
The day after the article in La Stampa, the Times of London reported that “Pope BenedictXVI is set to rehabilitate Martin Luther, arguing that he did not intend to split Christianity, but only to purge the church of corrupt practices.”
From there, the story took off,was repeatedby some news organisations around the world, was the buzz on the blogs, and even prompted an editorial critical of the pope by the Financial Times, called “Papal Indulgence - Cosmetic changes cannot hide Benedict’s dogmatism”.
The Vatican itself finally weighed in on March 8, when Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s chief spokesman, told the Italian news agency Ansa, that the Financial Times editorial was “totally without foundation because no rehabilitation of Luther is foreseen.” The Ansa story went onto say that the specific theme of this summer’s meeting had not yet been finally decided.
What do you think about how the media covered this and do you think the pope should “rehabilitate” Luther?

Only a few days ago, Samuel Kobia from Kenya was running unopposed for a second five-year term as general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC) at its Central Committee meeting now being held in Geneva. The story seemed pretty ho-hum. Then the German Protestant news agency epd revealed he had a “digital doctorate” from a unaccredited diploma mill in the U.S. Now he’s in danger of losing his job running the WCC, the global Christian grouping of 349 churches (mostly Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox) that represent more than 560 million believers around the world. Our correspondent in Geneva Robert Evans reports he may be on his way out. The rumour making the rounds is that we may hear as early as Tuesday that he will not be there much longer.

All because of a phony Ph.D? No, there’s a lot more where that story came from. The epd also ran a scathing interview with Lutheran Bishop Martin Hein of Kassel, the top German on the WCC Central Committee, in the run-up to the meeting. He made it abundantly clear that the German Protestants, who contribute one-third of the WCC budget, had lost patience with Kobia. Here’s a taste of what he said:

“The WCC takes stands on everything. The World Council of Churches does not have to be a little United Nations.”

Hein noted the WCC played an active role during the Cold War and the apartheid era in South Africa but added: “The real difficulty is that both those political challenges are now gone.”

He criticsed Kobia for taking decisions without much consultation and traveling around too much: “I’m sometimes amazed how often the secretary general is on the road.”

“In the long term, one-third of the costs of the WCC cannot come exclusively from Germany,” Hein said, adding he thought other churches in the Global North, including the Orthodox churches, could give more.

Kobia, 60, told a news conference last week that he saw visiting outlying faith communities around the world as part of his mandate. Responding to another complaint voiced by Hein, he said the WCC had cut back on some of its many programmes.

Kobia would be the first head of the WCC to serve only one term if he steps down. The first general secretary, Willem A. Visser ‘t Hooft of the Netherlands, served from 1948 to 1966. Kobia’s immediate predecessor, Konrad Raiser from Germany, served from 1993 to 2003.

The peaceful revolution that toppled East German communism had roots going back to a prayer. The weekly peace prayer meetings started in 1982 in Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche (Church of St. Nicholas) became a rallying point for dissidents later in the decade. By September 1989, participants leaving the church defied the Stasi and arrest threats to march publicly against the government. On October 9, the protesters feared a “Chinese solution” — i.e. a bloodbath like the one in Beijing the previous summer — but marched anyway out of the Lutheran church and around the city. When the massed security forces did not fire on the marchers, who by then numbered 70,000, the protest movement began to lose its fear. The opening of the Berlin Wall followed only a few weeks later.

Christian Führer has just told the New York Times he will step down in March as pastor of the Nikolaikirche when he reaches 65. Führer was a co-organiser of the peace prayers during the 1980s and the protest marches in 1989. He was also a courageous source for us journalists trying to cover the protests there in September and October of that year. The Stasi had closed Leipzig off to foreign reporters and would turn us away on the autobahn before we could even reach the city. Führer took calls from our East Berlin office on his crackling (and bugged) phone line and kept us informed of the growing numbers of participants at his prayer services, the arrests outside his church and the marchers who succeeded in protesting publicly.

Leipzig opened up after the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, but plainclothes Stasi agents still haunted the meetings and marches. Courage outweighed fear at a prayer service I attended early that December, but Führer still ended it with an appeal to the participants not to let themselves be provoked into violence. They streamed out and marched around the city, calling for reunification with West Germany.

Several of the Protestant pastors active in the protests went on to political careers in reunited Germany. Führer stayed at his church, campaigning for the unemployed, fighting neo-Nazis and opposing the Iraq war. His last battle was to have a German Unity Monument located in Leipzig. The German parliament voted last November to build it in Berlin.

Attenzione! The Vatican will issue an important doctrinal document on Friday “on some aspects of evangelisation.” Pope Benedict has a long track record of making sharp distinctions between Catholicism and other religions in his doctrinal declarations. Some of these have upset other Christians, others have angered Muslims and been challenged by Islamic scholars. This new text has been written by papal aides, not the pope himself, but it is expected to be a close reflection of his views. What Vatican observers are waiting to see is how clearly it states the Catholic view on converting others and how other religions react.

The document from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed for over two decades before becoming pope in 2005, comes at a time of growing Catholic difficulties with Anglicans, Protestants and evangelical and Pentecostal Christians. Its hesitant reaction to an invitation leading Muslim scholars for a theological dialogue has raised questions about its interest in inter-faith relations. And evangelisation is now a sensitive topic for Christian churches. The Vatican is working with the World Council of Churches, the World Evangelical Alliance and Pentecostal leaders on a code of conduct for missionary work .

The declaration is expected to say that conversion remains a goal of Catholic missionary efforts and that Catholic theologians must not water this down by arguing that other faiths can be paths to salvation. This recalls Dominus Iesus, a document issued in 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) that said the Catholic Church was the only true church of Jesus Christ and others were “gravely deficient.” In fact, the document should be a guide on how to put Dominus Iesus into practice. The CDF began this process with a clarification of the 2000 document last June — a clarification that caused dismay among leading Protestant theologians.

Doesn’t the Roman Catholic Church have the right to restate its traditional beliefs? Of course it does. But it also operates in a broader context than the Catholic world alone, a context where Vatican documents are read carefully by other faiths for indications of how the world’s largest church thinks and what it plans to do. In a globalised world, leading religions are involved in inter-faith and ecumenical dialogues to foster better understanding among peoples. These efforts have led to much improved contact and comprehension among religions in the past few decades. Pope John Paul preferred this kind of dialogue, such as the 1986 World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi, Italy, but Cardinal Ratzinger kept his distance.

In recent years, this ecumenical drive seems to have slowed. Many faiths seem to be putting a renewed emphasis on their own identity. Again, that’s their right, but it does sometimes rub other religions the wrong way. Pope Benedict has done that before in the past, for example with Dominus Iesus (which upset Anglicans and Protestants) or with his 2006 Regensburg speech (which upset Muslims). He has shown more interest in working with the Eastern Orthodox churches. Wolfgang Huber, the top Lutheran bishop in Germany, has been especially critical of Benedict’s approach, for example calling the restatement of Dominus Iesus “an affront” to Protestants.

The line-up for Friday’s news conference in Rome about the new document indicates it is meant mostly as an internal text. It will be presented by CDF Prefect Cardinal William Levada, Cardinal Ivan Dias, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, Cardinal Francis Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, and CDF Secretary Archbishop Angelo Amato.

Notably absent will be the two cardinals who head dicasteries — the Vatican equivalent of government ministries — that deal directly with other faiths. They are Jean-Louis Tauran, President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue and Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Kasper was openly critical of the CDF in a speech to cardinals in Rome last month, saying the powerful dicastery “aroused perplexity and created discontent” by issuing its document restating Dominus Iesus last summer.

A statement by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) last week stressed issues expected to be part of the CDF document as well. In that statement, the bishops criticised Father Peter Phan, a leading theologian teaching at Georgetown University in Washington, for creating “considerable confusion” about Christ, the Church and other faiths. They restated Church teaching that Jesus Christ Catholicism was the only true church, Jesus Christ was mankind’s only saviour and other religions were “a preparation for the Gospel.” (Read John Allen’s full analysis here)

How do readers who follow developments in ecumenical and inter-faith dialogue see the way relations between faiths are going under Pope Benedict? Is his emphasis on traditional Catholic positions making it easier or more difficult to promote understanding among religions?

October 31 was Reformation Day, the anniversary of the day that Martin Luther issued his famous 95 Theses, and as such a fitting occasion for Lutherans around the world to reflect on the reforms he brought to Christianity. It was probably inevitable that a Lutheran cleric somewhere would comment on the relevance of the Reformation to a major issue in today’s religious world — the future of Islam. Margot Kässmann, the Lutheran bishop of Hannover in Germany, told the local newspaper: “Something like a Reformation would also be good for Islam.”

Bishop Kässmann is one of the most prominent religious leaders in Germany, an effective preacher and a popular talk show guest. It’s clear that she means Muslims should question their traditions and shed abuses, much like Luther did in Christianity. That’s a view that Muslim reformers can also support in principle. It leads to the question, though, of how far the paradigm of the Reformation is applicable to Islam. Has the term “Islamic Reformation” become a soundbite that brings more confusion than clarity?

The Reformation in 16th-century Europe ended the Catholic Church’s monopoly of religious authority and led to a multitude of Protestant denominations. One of the driving forces was the liberating effect of questioning traditions, Kässmann said in her interview. The result was the de-centralisation of Western Christianity. By contrast, Islam already has a multitude of different schools and interpretations. Islamist radicals such as Osama bin Laden are not religious scholars, but they issue fatwas on their own that reinterpret traditional views of Islam. So part of the religion’s problem today, some Islam experts argue, is that there is no central authority that can settle disputed issues. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest — and only partly in jest — that Islam actually needs a Luther or a pope to bring about the reforms Kässmann refers to.

The idea of an “Islamic Reformation” has been discussed at least since 9/11. For example, British author Salman Rushdie made just such a proposal after the London bombings in 2005. “The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance of the concept that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities,” he wrote.

Another term that sometimes pops up in the media is “Muslim Martin Luther” to describe the person who could inspire such a Reformation. One man who sometimes gets that label is Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born intellectual popular among young Muslims in Europe. He preaches an Islam that stays loyal to its traditions while adapting to life as a minority religion in Europe. When the online magazine Salon asked him what list of demands he would nail to a church door, he first said he didn’t have a list. He then argued for more rather than less agreement in reading Scriptures. “This is the problem we have today in the Muslim world,” he said. “We repeat slogans, but we don’t know exactly what they mean.”

Another discussion, on the website of the Brookings Institution, asked “Is Osama bin Laden the Martin Luther of Islam?” The link made here is that both Luther and the founder of al Qaeda preached that every believer could understand Scripture without needing clerics to interpret it.

In a recent seven-part series on the reform of Islam, a young U.S. Muslim blogger named Ali Eteraz says “The Islamic reformation has already happened.” The “Muslim Martin Luther” in this interpretation was Abdul Wahhab, the founder of the Wahhabi school of Islam in the 18th century. By contrast, the conservative U.S. author Dinesh D’Souza places the “Islamic Reformation” in the present time: “Islam is in the middle of a reformation. What is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism if not a sign of the Islamic Reformation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

Eteraz argues that we should actually speak of an “Islamic Counter-Reformation.” A few years ago, Paul Marshall from Freedom House in Washington used the same phrase and described it as “something akin to a ‘Catholicisation‘ of Islam.”

Is it confusing enough now, or should we go on? The Iranian historian Hashem Aghajari has called for an “Islamic Protestantism” — an appeal that earned him a death sentence, which was later commuted. Others call for an Islamic Enlightenment. Eteraz looks forward to Post-Islamism (at least that’s getting away from the Reformation paradigm).

This is not to say that anyone using Christian terms to advocate change in Islam has nothing useful to say. Kässmann followed up her Reformation comment with the warning that change in Islam “cannot be imposed from outside” — something not all non-Muslim observers recognise. But as well-intentioned as these comparisons are, they seem to ask more questions than they answer and confuse the argument the authors are trying to make.

What do you think? Does it help non-Muslims to have issues explained with Christian terms? Do Muslims think these Christian precedents are helpful?