U.S. Jesuits honour ABC Williams with prize named after English martyr
Poor Rowan Williams. Only a few weeks ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the worldwide Anglican Communion was caught offguard by a Vatican offer of a new Roman home for Anglicans who cannot accept the idea of women bishops. At a joint news conference with London’s Catholic Archbishop Vincent Nichols, he did his ecumenical best to present this as a quite normal gesture among friendly Christian churches and not — as some media presented it — a Roman strategy to poach wandering sheep from the divided Anglican flock. It was proof of his sharp intellect and deep commitment to the ecumenical cause that Williams found a way to finesse this very trying situation.
Now another challenge has come not from across the Tiber, but across the Atlantic. The New York-based Jesuit weekly magazine America has just said it is “ proud to announce that The Most Reverend Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, is the 2009 recipient of the Campion Award. The award is given on a regular basis to a noted Christian person of letters. It is named after St. Edmund Campion, S.J., who is patron of America’s communications ministry.”
What an award to give to the world’s top Anglican! As the press release explains about the man to whom the prize is dedicated, “a martyr of the English Reformation, Edmund Campion stirred Elizabethan England with his daring missionary efforts and the great power of his pen.” What it politely skates over is the fact that Campion was drawn and quartered for refusing to renounce his Catholic faith (see image below). For more about the Catholic view of Campion’s life, just click over to the Catholic Encyclopedia. The quick takeaway from all this is that the archbishop of the Church of England will be honoured with an award named after an English Jesuit martyred for his heroic struggle against — the Church of England!
Anyone who knows the magazine America and the American Jesuits who produce it know they mean this as a sincere appreciation of the archbishop and his tireless work for ecumenical and interfaith understanding. Williams will surely accept it with grace and wit, in the spirit in which it was offered. But while times have changed and relations between Catholics and Anglicans are vastly improved, it still seems a bit strange to present an Archbishop of Canterbury with an award named after Edmund Campion. But that’s the name of America magazine’s highest award, and we have to assume its award is sincerely meant. Maybe the ability to look beyond these limitations is at the heart of ecumenical understanding.
The America announcement notes helpfully that “the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England remember Campion in their calendars of saints.” All the better. Still, this will require quite some finessing. It will be interesting to see how Williams handles this in his acceptance speech. The award will be presented in New York on January 25, at the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
Paris cardinal and others comment on SSPX ban lifting
Paris Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, chairman of the French Bishops Conference, held a press briefing on Saturday evening on the lifting of excommunications of four bishops of the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). France is home to the largest of the provinces of the dissident group, with around 100,000 faithful of a worldwide total of 600,000. Sitting in a medieval meeting room in Notre Dame cathedral, he defended Pope Benedict’s decision to take the four bishops back into the Roman Catholic Church and indicated the SSPX would have to bend to Church discipline.
He called the decision “a measure of clemency and mercy” that would allow the Church to repair a damaging split. He declined to question the bishops’ motives, saying that “when people express their desire to respect the teachings of the church and the primacy of the pope, my ministry of mercy does not allow me suspect them a priori and to suspect them to be the worst people on earth … what they have in their hearts, only God can judge. Not me.”
The handful of journalists present repeatedly asked about one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, whose denial of the Holocaust this week outraged Jewish leaders. “The Jewish community was not shocked by this decision, it was shocked by the comments of Bishop Williamson,” he said. “He may have some twisted thoughts, but it’s not because the excommunication is lifted that these twisted thoughts have been approved.”
Although the Vatican said that SSPX leader Bishop Bernard Fellay had pledged to respect the pope and Church teachings, Fellay posted a letter on an SSPX site saying the bishops still opposed some reforms of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965. Asked about this apparent discrepancy, Vingt-Trois said he had not read Fellay’s letter. But he indicated that the SSPX could not have it both ways:
“One cannot both say that one recognises the primacy of the pope and wants to respect him and also set oneself up as the judge of the authenticity of the Catholic tradition. In the Christian tradition, in the Christian experience, the interpretation of the tradition is not a private exercise. It is a church exercise and it is done by the magisterium, notably by the pope as the first of the apostolic college, but also by the other bishops. So an individual group is not going to say what the authentic teaching of the church is … well, until now…”
Vingt-Trois stressed that the lifting of the bans on the four bishops was a first step meant to allow both sides to sit down and thrash out their differences: “One cannot say today how (the SSPX) will respond to this proposal and how they will engage in this work.” This is not an international negotiation under United Nations auspices, he added. “The pope is not the symmetric interlocutor of Bishop Fellay,” he said. “Bishop Fellay’s letter doesn’t say that either. He recognises the primacy of the pope. If there is a primacy of the pope, there is a dissymmetry.”
The cardinal said today’s step did not change the status of SSPX priests, who remain outside the Catholic Church until their status is clarified. The lifting on the excommunications concerned only the four bishops and had no further immediate consequences.
to me as an outsider this move is puzzling. it looks a lot like an act of desperation by a church that has taking an accounting and has abruptly realized that it is in the midst of a precipitous slide in its integrity and in its influence worldwide
Is the pope planning visit to cradle of Protestantism?
Is Pope Benedict planning a visit to a cradle of Protestantism? Should a Catholic pontiff tour the medieval castle where Martin Luther translated the Bible into German at the start of the Reformation? It’s far too early to get confirmations or denials from the Vatican or the German government, since the visit — still only in the rumor stage — is not due until the spring of 2009. But a local newspaper in the eastern state of Thuringia, where the Wartburg is located, says security planning has already begun.
According to the Erfurt daily Thüringer Allgemeine, an advance team from the German president’s office in Berlin has already met local police. Dieter Althaus, the state premier who invited Benedict to Thuringia during a visit in Rome in April, has also met mayors from towns in the area “to discuss the emergency case of a papal visit. Also in Eisenach, the words ‘pope’ and ‘Wartburg’ are mentioned together more frequently.” An earlier German press report about a possible trip mentioned that Benedict would visit Eichsfeld, a nearby island of Catholicism in an otherwise Lutheran region, so he would be in the neighborhood.
Apart from the security, a visit by any pope to the Wartburg would need careful preparation to ensure it helps rather than hurts Catholic-Protestant relations. If that pope is Joseph Ratzinger, the task becomes even more tricky. Pope Benedict has studied the writings of Martin Luther — he’s probably the only pontiff who ever has — and impressed Lutherans with his knowledge and appreciation of his fellow German theologian. At the same time, he has also been blunt in describing Protestant denominations as “not proper churches.” In fact, he doesn’t refer to them as churches at all, but “ecclesial communities.” Not surprisingly, Protestant leaders feel offended.
Do you think a papal visit to the Wartburg would help or hurt ecumenical relations?
From offering a “prayer of conversion” for the Jews, to
orating protestants don’t go to church(even though they
do), should make one tremble. Being offended says your
feelings are hurt. Does it bother you that the vatican
does not recognize you or your church or Jesus Christ? Nor, does the vatican recognize anyones’. Christianity
came from the Jews. Christ is a Jew. Only someone pro-
fessing to be god would ask God to step down.
The fear of the vatican is that they are afraid someone
will find out they have assumed their power while creat-
ing havoc world-wide. History reveals the United States
banned the Roman Catholic Church from it’s shores in the
1800′s. They are back, as you see, and they do not intend
on stopping because you are offended. Their ultimate goal
is to eliminate, yes, Christianity. A prayer of conver-
sion to the Jews is the last, of first, step. Then it’s
the U.S.’s turn to turn. Turn, convert, to what? Never.
Do Christian paradigms work for Islamic problems?
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?
Yes it is becoming a real debate. See this article for an incite into and a history of the muslim headscarf and why the debate is moot since it is not mentioned in the Koran.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article /447120/muslim_girl_has_head_scarf_ripp ed_off.html
-
Resident FaithWorld Expert
-
