Pope Benedict has been criticised for his handling of relationships with the world’s other religions. On Monday Tuesday, he is due to receive at the Vatican Japan’s Prime Minister Taro Aso, who has little difficulty with mixing and matching various faiths.

Though an avowed member of Japan’s tiny Roman Catholic minority, Aso regularly pays respects and offers gifts at Shinto shrines. Japan’s indigenous religion of Shinto is polytheistic — its doctrine says the world is crowded with divinities, mostly in natural phenomena such as the sun, moon, wind and mountains. Combining this with Christianity’s monotheism may sound like a contradiction, but it is something many Japanese Catholics take in their stride.

(Photo: Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, 31 May 2007/Kim Kyung-Hoon)

Aso’s visits have in the past included trips to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, which is dedicated to war dead and to 14 people judged by an Allied tribunal to be Class A war criminals. Many in Asia see it as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism. But Aso has stayed away since becoming prime minister last year, probably more to avoid offending China than for religious reasons. For more on Aso and his faith, see our post about him when he took office.

Whether visits to Yasukuni overstep the boundaries of Catholic doctrine is a difficult question, according to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan. “This a very delicate problem,” a spokesman for the conference told me. “There is the issue of how far the Vatican understands the real nature of Yasukuni.”

In the 1930s, when visits to Shinto shrines were made compulsory by the military government, Japanese Catholics asked the Vatican for advice on whether this was acceptable. The reply was that the visits were an expression of patriotism and loyalty, and therefore permitted, the spokesman for the conference said, adding that this may have been an attempt to avert a repeat of the persecution that all but wiped out Christianity in Japan in the 16^th century. A second request for instructions from the Vatican after Japan’s World War II defeat and the official separation of religion and state got the same answer in 1951.

“But the problem is that Yasukuni shrine treats those who died in the war as gods. The Catholic teaching is that people cannot be gods,” the spokesman said. “So worshipping is not allowed. It is not forbidden to go there to think of those who died, but worshipping is not allowed.”

(Photo: Taro Aso visits the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on 14 Aug 2007, when he was Japan’s foreign minister/Ronen Zvulun)

“It is the same for other Shinto shrines. As far as we are concerned, there is no god other than the Holy Trinity,” he added.

Visits by ordinary members of the public to Shinto shrines do not usually require the recitation of any prayers, which would be beyond the pale for a Catholic because they would be prayers to gods that Christians do not believe in. Visitors usually conduct a ritual purification by washing their mouths at a well outside the shrine entrance, then clap their hands and bow at the entrance to an inner courtyard, often throwing offerings of money into a box, or buying good luck charms at shops within the compound.

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The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Nicolas Senèze is deputy editor of the religion service at the French Catholic daily La Croix and author of La crise intégriste, a history of the SSPX. He wrote this for FaithWorld (translation by Reuters) after covering the ordinations in Ecône for La Croix.

(Photo: Bishop Fellay greets children in Ecône, in Valais canton in southwestern Switzerland, 29 June 2009/Denis Balibouse)

Bishop Bernard Fellay has gone and done it. On the morning of June 29, before crowds of the faithful gathered on the large meadow outside the Saint Pius X seminary in Ecône, Switzerland, the Superior General of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X (SSPX) ordained eight new priests. Just like Bishop Alfonso de Galaretta did on Friday in Zaitzkofen, Germany, and Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais 10 days ago in Winona, Minnesota in the United States. They went ahead and ordained these men despite the Vatican’s declaration that the ordinations were “illegitimate”, i.e. illegal according to the law of the Roman Catholic Church.

Was this a provocation by the SSPX against Pope Benedict, whose flag flies above the seminary? Absolutely not, a very self-confident Bishop Fellay responded to journalists who had journeyed to this Swiss Alpine village for the ceremony. “There is a tacit tolerance from Rome,” said the Swiss-born bishop, whose 20-year excommunication was lifted in January along with the three other bishops drummed out of the Church in 1988. “We did not have an explicit order not to do this. I have contacts with Rome, I’m not just making this up out of thin air. Rome knows this is not a provocation on our part.”

In any event, for Bishop Fellay, the SSPX is in the “state of necessity” which canon law mentions when it allows derogations from Church rules. “If everything went well in the Church, our gesture would have been disobedience. But all is not well in the Church,” he said calmly. “We see such scandals at Mass, we hear sermons so contrary to the faith!”

This is the same “state of necessity” that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre invoked in the 1970s and 1980s, when he went ahead with priestly ordinations without having the power to do so. At the time, the SSPX, which had been dissolved by the bishop of Fribourg with the endorsement of Pope Paul VI, had no official status in the Church. Pope John Paul had asked the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to settle the Lefebvre case. The CDF prefect at the time was named … Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

(Photo: Candidates for SSPX priesthood in procession before their ordination in Ecône, Switzerland, 29 June 2009/Denis Balibouse)

Early this year, the same person, who became pope in 2005, lifted the excommunications pronounced after the collapse of the talks he had conducted in 1988 with Archbishop Lefebvre. Again, the case will now be entrusted to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - a sign that the differences with these fundamentalists are primarily theological. But that means there is also a red line not to cross — the fundamentalists must accept the authority of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the post-conciliar magisterium of the popes.

“The biggest problem is philosophical,” Bishop Fellay observed. “Two philosophies meet: the classical scholastic philosophy and modern philosophy. The pope is very eclectic and we feel that he has been marked by a subjective philosophy — less when he talks about morality than when he speaks in the abstract. Our scholastic philosophy is more objective.”

So Bishop Fellay thinks that Rome and Ecône may speak “about the same thing, but differently.” This is a timid opening, but it must be appreciated for what it is. Only a little while ago, the SSPX Council firmly rejected Vatican II as a council tainted by error.

In essence, Bishop Fellay is saying that the fundamental issue is less the Council itself than its interpretation. “There are differences of position within the Catholic Church that are larger and more serious than those we have with Rome,” he said. “The Council texts opened the door to interpretations. It may be necessary that the pope clarifies them, as Paul VI did on collegiality. But when the pope condemned the hermeneutic of discontinuity, he condemned 80% of what is happening in the Church!”

What’s your opinion? Is 80% of what goes on in the Catholic Church wrong?

(For readers of French, here are La Croix readers’ reactions to the ordinations)

It’s not every day that the Vatican newspaper suggests that a man accused of paedophilia and said to have converted to Islam might be immortal. But that’s what L’Osservatore Romano did today. In a tribute to Michael Jackson — itself another sign of the “new look” that editor-in-chief Giovanni Maria Vian has given it — the paper included him in a pop music heaven at an unusually earthly location:

“But will he really be dead? It wouldn’t be surprising if, in a few years, he was spotted in a gas station in Memphis, perhaps with his former father-in-law Elvis Presley, another of those myths - like Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon - that never die in the imagination of their fans. And Michael Jackson, who died yesterday at the age of fifty, is definitely a pop music legend.”

The tribute reviews Jackson’s career, from the time “when he was still black” through his “humanly difficult … crossover” to “new genres not entirely attributable to any specific area, where one cannot distinguish between black and white.” It praises his mega-album Thriller “which is known also to those who do not frequent these musical worlds” and calls him a “great dancer” (grande ballerino).

The article ends on the delicate issue of accusations of paedophilia, a cloud that hung over Jackson’s later years and has dogged the Catholic Church as well. The singer hit his artistic peak with Thriller, it said, but always stayed enormously popular. “Not always, unfortunately, for artistic reasons,” it wrote. “His judicial ups and downs following allegations of paedophilia are well known. But no charge, even as bad and shameful, was sufficient to diminish his legend among the millions of fans around the world. The proof of the emotional reactions aroused by the news of his death. News many don’t believe. Maybe someone in Memphis has already seen him.”

(Photo: Michael Jackson in Munich, 9 June 1999/Michael Kappeler)

When Gian Maria Vian took over as editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano in late 2007, most observers yawned. No-one really expected much change at the staid newspaper. But within a few months, the paper started to rock and roll — at least as much as a paper like that can.

Slowly but surely, change has come to the 148-year-old mouthpiece of the Vatican, considered by many in the past a bland broadsheet at best and once called the “Catholic Pravda”, a reference to the communist party organ in the former Soviet Union.

It started publishing color pictures and more articles by and about women — not bad for an institution that is still a male bastion. It also began including more international cover, war cover and economic cover.
Some of its unorthodox commentaries have also been lighthearted and provocative. To wit: it ran an editorial saying that perhaps the washing machine had done more to liberate women than the pill or the right to work. It post-humusly forgave John Lennon for once boasting that the Beatles were more famous than Christ. And, it finally set the record straight that no, the pope does not wear Prada.

Vian has become a player in his own right, giving interviews on a range of topics from Pius XII (Vian has just written a book defending him) to President Barack Obama. He came under fire from Catholic conservatives in the United States after he stated that Obama was not a “pro-abortion” president. He has now given a very interesting interview to Rome-based religion expert Delia Gallagher in the National Review. The interview, which is very readable and insightful, is worth reading in its entirety.

Gallagher, a Californian with a masters in philosophy and theology from Oxford University, has returned to Rome, where she started her professional career as managing editor of the magazine Inside the Vatican in 1998. She was a Rome-based Vatican analyst for CNN from 2002-2005 and was CNN’s Faith and Values Correspondent from 2005-2009, based in New York.

The Vatican warning to the ultra-traditionalist SSPX not to ordain new priests this month without Roman approval had no discernible effect on the rebel Catholic group. Soon after the Vatican declared the ordinations would be illegitimate, Father Yves Le Roux, rector of the SSPX’s St Thomas Aquinas seminary in Winona, Minnesota, said the ordination of 13 new priests there would go ahead on Friday.

“Absolutely. We are doing it,” he told our Vatican correspondent Philip Pullella by telephone. “This is something the Vatican feels it has to say. It’s a political statement but the reality is totally different.”

(Photo: SSPX ordains deacons in Écône, Switzerland, 3 April 2009/Valentin Flauraud)

The SSPX seminary at Zaitzkofen, in the German state of Bavaria, declared its intention to go ahead with its June 27 ordinations in a statement posted on its website on Monday (here in German original and in English). It argued that Pope Benedict’s decision in January to lift the excommunications of the four SSPX bishops was a “confidence-building measure for the coming theological discussions with representatives of the Holy See” meant to thrash out an official position in the Church for the SSPX.” Further ordinations are due at the SSPX headquarters in Écône, Switzerland on June 29.

Defying a papal warning against ordaining new priests before its official status was clarified seems to be the opposite of a confidence-building measure on the SSPX’s part. As the BBC’s David Willey put it in his report from Rome tonight, Pope Benedict “gave them an inch and they took a mile.”

So the SSPX has thrown the ball back into the Vatican’s court. The Vatican statement said “the ordinations should still be considered illegitimate” and “doctrinal and, consequently, also disciplinary questions still remain open.” That leaves open the option of a further reaction from Rome, or possibly from Regensburg Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller. Or there might be no reaction, just that curious Vatican silence that caused it such trouble after the Regensburg speech and the readmission of the Holocaust-denying SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson. That would leave the narrow issue unresolved and pose wider questions about Pope Benedict’s leadership.

The Vatican has thrown down the gauntlet to the ultra- traditionalist Society of Saint Piux X (SSPX), which planned to ordain 27 new priests this month without approval from Rome. A statement by the Vatican press office today declared that the ordinations would be illegitimate. The four SSPX bishops were only readmitted into the Roman Catholic Church in January after 20 years of excommunication. If they go ahead and ordain the priests anyway, they could risk being disciplined — possibly even excommunicated — again.

The SSPX claims its fidelity to the old Latin Mass and rejection of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) reforms represent authentic Catholicism as opposed to the “modernism” practiced in the world’s largest church since then. It has also claimed to be loyal to the pope, although this was always hedged with reservations about his authority because of the doctrinal dispute over Vatican II. Having won its bishops’ readmission without making any concessions, it looked set to test the limits again by ordaining priests without Vatican permission.

The Vatican statement quoted a March 10 letter by Pope Benedict to Catholic bishops saying the SSPX did not have any official status within the Church and would have to negotiate it in discussions with Rome. “Until the doctrinal questions are clarified, the Society has no canonical status in the Church, and its ministers – even though they have been freed of the ecclesiastical penalty – do not legitimately exercise any ministry in the Church,” he wrote.

After quoting that, the Vatican statement said: “So the ordinations should still be considered illegitimate.” It added that there were “reasons to think that the definition of that new status is near” and that “doctrinal and, consequently, also disciplinary questions still remain open.”

(Photo: Pope Benedict, 17 June 2009/Max Rossi)

The statement comes at the last minute — 13 of the 21 were due to be ordained at an SSPX seminariy in Winona, Minnesota on Friday. The rest were planned in Ecône, Switzerland and Zaitzkofen, Germany on June 27. The ball is now in the SSPX’s court, to go ahead with them after all, or not.

Is Benedict listening more to his critics? His decision to readmit the SSPX bishops in January amid an uproar over Holocaust denial by one of them was a public relations disaster that reaped critical comments from several bishops’ conferences in Europe. In recent weeks, three German bishops — including Robert Zollitsch, president of their conference — openly criticised the planned SSPX ordinations and urged the Vatican to intervene. And now it has.

Several readers objected to the headline on our last post on this issue — “SSPX set to push the envelope against the Vatican again” and suggested that calling the ordinations a challenge was only my personal opinion. One quoted the great theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas at length to try to show the SSPX was not actually being disobedient by ignoring the pope’s warning that it could not “legitimately exercise any ministry in the Church.” As a reporter covering the Catholic Church, I have to assume the pope’s words carry weight. Measured against that warning, the ordination plan did indeed amount to a bid to “push the envelope against the Vatican again.” With this statement, the Vatican has identified the plan as a challenge and declared it illegitimate in advance.

Roma locuta, causa finita? (Rome has spoken, the case is closed?) — let’s see.

(Photo: Sikhs pray at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, 17 Sept 2001/Rajesh Bhambi)

Are some holy sites so holy or so unique that they shouldn’t be copied? Should monuments like the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican or the Western Wall in Jerusalem have a kind of copyright so nobody can replicate them elsewhere?

It seems unlikely that believers of any faith would undertake such a project, if for no other reason that most holy sites are quite complex, with artwork that would be very expensive to reproduce. But some Sikhs in India are building what looks like a copy of the Golden Temple, their religion’s holiest shrine, in Sangrur, 265 miles (427 km) southeast of the temple in Amritsar. The project has sparked off a debate in the Sikh community and the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), which maintains gurdwaras in India’s Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh states, has protested against it and called on the religion’s five high priests to intervene. The Sikhs building the new gurdwara deny they’re copying the famous temple, simply giving a facelift to their dilapidated gurdwara.

As Mumbai’s DNA daily put it: “Imitation is sometimes not the most acceptable form of flattery.”

Here’s an IBN-CNN video on the dispute, accompanied by a written report with more background.

The ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), recently in the headlines for having a Holocaust denier as one of its four bishops recently readmitted to the Roman Catholic Church, looks set to push the envelope with Rome again by ordaining 21 new priests in three different countries on June 27.* Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller of Regensburg, the German diocese where the SSPX seminary at Zaitzkofen plans to ordain three of those men, has declared the planned ordinations a violation of Church law and has urged the Vatican to warn the SSPX not to go through with them. He told Bavarian Radio on Sunday that he hadn’t heard back from Rome yet and would bring up the issue with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) personally on his next monthly trip there.

*CORRECTION: Not all will be ordained that day — 13 priests will be ordained in Minnesota on June 19.

(Photo: Bishop Müller, 21 Sept 2007/Michael Dalder)

In the subtle ways of the Vatican, a non-response from Rome to a bishop’s query is like the yellow signal on a traffic light. It’s neither yes nor no, in that vague way that says if it’s not openly forbidden, one might be able to live with it, but, uh, we don’t want to put that in writing, so over to you. The question now is whether the Vatican will opt to live with this latest challenge to its authority.

The Vatican has made several concessions to the SSPX, the biggest being the lifting in January of the 1988 excommunications of its four bishops. This meant they were back in good standing as Catholics, but they had no official function as bishops and therefore (presumably) should not use their episcopal privileges without permission from their ecclesiastical superiors. But once the uproar over the Holocaust denials by SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson died down, the SSPX announced it would go ahead with the planned ordinations — three in Zaitzkofen, 13 at the St Thomas Aquinas Seminary at Winona, Minnesota and the rest at the SSPX headquarters at Ecône, Switzerland. “The benevolent act of the Holy See cannot be interpreted as a desire to asphyxiate the Society of St. Pius X,” it said in a statement.

Pope Benedict, in an extraordinary mea culpa letter after the uproar over Williamson, called the lifting of the excommunications a “discreet gesture of mercy” and “a gesture of reconciliation.” He then asked: “Can it be completely mistaken to work to break down obstinacy and narrowness, and to make space for what is positive and retrievable for the whole?” He said that welcoming back other rebel communities had “changed their interior attitudes” and “enabled them to move beyond one-sided positions and broke down rigidity so that positive energies could emerge for the whole.” So Benedict seems to see the lifting of the excommunications as a magnanimous gesture that would be matched by more flexibility from the steadfast SSPX.

(Photo: Pope Benedict, 7 June 2009/Max Rossi)

In an June 1 interview with Vatican Radio, Bishop Müller said he contacted the Zaitzkofen seminary after learning of the planned ordinations. “I told them the ordinations violated canon law and that, in such a precarious situation, one must let Rome say how to proceed … One must simply suspend everything until this society’s position in canon law is cleared up. In the letter the society wrote to the pope in January, it said it fully accepted the pope’s primacy … they are not prepared to accept the consequences.”

On Bavarian Radio, he said the CDF “should say, in a theologically clear way, that both those seeking and those performing the ordinations are not acting legally and the ordinations are therefore not allowed, even if they are formally valid.” He said he wanted to ask the prefect of the CDF, Cardinal William Levada, about this.

Do you agree with Bishop Müller that the SSPX decision to proceed with the ordinations is a provocation? Should the Vatican put its foot down and insist these bishops show the respect for authority that they pledged in their appeal for the excommunications to be lifted? Or should Rome let them go ahead, in the interest of healing the only schism resulting from the Second Vatican Council?

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

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

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

Pope Benedict has left the Holy Land bequeathing a message of peace, tolerance and love between all religions and peoples.

We hope that message also filters through to the eternally fractious relationship between journalists and security men - which gets even more strained when a high-profile visitor like the Pope is in town.

Months of elaborate preparation went in to ensuring the Pope's visit was safe and successful and also to ensure journalists got controlled access to major events to tell the stories their readers and viewers want to see.

This planning process is hostage, however, to a simple dichotomy which pits journalists against bureaucrats and security officials.

In the eyes of the security men, journalists are bothersome, quarrelsome and disobedient and need to be coralled (even though that process is often like 'herding cats'). Notions of a free press and unlimited access take a back seat to security concerns.

In the eyes of the journalists, security men are unthinking automatons with no common sense or an appreciation of the (self-)importance of journalists - and they need to be challenged and confronted whenever possible. The elaborate coverage restrictions, security sweeps, shuttle buses and byzantine pool regulations are, of course, both ridiculous and the main obstacle between the journalist and his/her exclusive, prize-winning story.

Perhaps its not unusual then that tempers occasionally overheat.

In the video below you will see what happens when very clear 'pool' rules are breached by a local photographer - who runs from a pre-ordained position towards the Pope and enters the inner core of accredited Vatican journalists who travel with Benedict wherever he goes.

The photographer in question had a different accreditation - only allowing limited access to the Pope's itinerary.

To give you an idea of how seriously these breaches of protocol are taken - the gentleman 'herding the cats' in this case is the Director of the Government Press Office which oversees many aspects of the work of foreign journalists in Israel.

In this next video you will see what happens when people spend too much time waiting around in the sun wearing suit jackets and ties and getting...well, a little cranky.

The cameraman here was doing exactly what he was supposed to do on behalf of the Host Broadcaster pool which has been providing the bulk of the live pictures of the Pope's visit to Israel. A TV Pool like this is set up to film on behalf of everyone so as to avoid a crush of journalists attending every event and making it even more unmanageable. Maybe someone should have explained that part a bit better to the security guy.

If things can get a little heated when diplomatic protocol and stringent preparations are in place, it can get even uglier when unofficial visitors attract even more attention than the leader of the world's Roman Catholics....

Cue Leonardo diCaprio visiting Jerusalem two years ago with his Israeli girlfriend Bar Refaeli and a private security escort to keep the couple out of harm's way....

Two of diCaprio's security guards were arrested for their part in the scuffle.

Perhaps its only fitting to leave the last word to the Pope himself who said, as he left the Holy Land for Rome: "It remains only for me to express my heartfelt thanks to all who have contributed in so many ways to my visit. To the government, the organisers, the volunteers, the media..."

(PHOTO CREDIT: Pope Benedict during the Nazareth mass REUTERS/Tony Gentile)