Vatican: Focus on Islam Criticized
World Briefing - Europe - Vatican City - Focus on Islam Criticized Vatican City: Focus on Islam Criticized By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO Published: June 11, 2008A senior Vatican official said that the West had become “obsessed by Islam,” to the detriment of other religions involved in interfaith dialogue. The Roman Catholic Church “has to have regard for all religions,” said the official, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, in an interview posted on a Web site of The Holy Land Review, which is published by an American church organization.
Is this a joke? When the Pope visits America and Europe, all the headlines are about the fact that he visited…a synagogue. When he was chosen, all the news chatter was how he would handle Catholic-Jewish relations, and practically zero mention of how he would relate to Muslims. While the issue of how an ex-Hitler-Youth German Pope would relate to Jews is an important and highly relevant issue, the Muslim community is 10714.3% bigger (at least) and bridges need to be built with it, let alone improved. Of course little attention was paid to that realm, outside of the Pope visiting a (single?) mosque. Followed by that tone-deaf speech he gave that bashed Muslims; the equivalent of using David Duke as a citation source in a speech on Jews. Considering that pre-papacy, the man formerly known as Ratzinger was known for some anti- (Muslim) immigrant sentiments in the press, you would think it obvious he needs a lot of work to even catch up to John Paul II, let alone surpass him in this aspect.
I feel that Islam is given a disproportionately small amount of attention by the Vatican. I’ve actually read into the Vatican’s recent edition of the Catechism to find…about 2 paragraphs. De Jure, they’re pretty indifferent to their 1400-year-old neighbor, but maybe that’s a good thing if you consider the alternatives in the past. When Ahmed Deedat was growing up in South Africa, he said that he lived across the street from a seminary where priests-in-training would practice their conversion strategies on him once they left the building and found it a one-way dialogue.
My ranting aside, let’s try to look at the facts objectively. Look at the world religions pie chart.
Ignoring Islam’s position in a strong second place, after that is Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 Billion. Pope Benedict has been very active in reaching out to them, which is how he stepped on Muslim toes in his Regensburg speech (he was talking about reason and religion existing when he dropped the Muslim comment to make a different point). He’s made numerous speeches on the matter, and his PR staff have indicated it’s an important cornerstone of his papacy (my words and not his). After that is Hinduism, but that’s very heterogeneous and hard to dialogue with on account of its seeming henotheism. After that, the rest go into single-digit percentages. I can’t see the Vatican all that concerned about Buddhism and Sikhism and Baha’i. Judaism is 12th place in that list , but as I said before, it seems either over-represented in Vatican dialogue or over-scrutinized.