{"id":4125,"date":"2006-12-08T14:38:46","date_gmt":"2006-12-08T14:38:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/once-more-to-the-blue-mosque.html"},"modified":"2006-12-08T14:38:46","modified_gmt":"2006-12-08T14:38:46","slug":"once-more-to-the-blue-mosque","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/once-more-to-the-blue-mosque.html","title":{"rendered":"Once more to the Blue Mosque"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Allen makes sense:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Why the explanatory vacuum? The answer, at least implicitly, seems to be the following: This pope is his own gloss.<\/p>\n

In other words, precisely because this was Joseph Ratzinger, it is difficult to imagine that the prayer at the Blue Mosque, at least on his side, had anything to do with a relativistic approach to religious belief. It was unnecessary to slap a warning label on the event saying, \u201cSyncretism is hazardous to your faith,\u201d because the mere presence of Ratzinger communicated in a flash all the doctrinal caveats that form part of his understanding of such events, including his criticism of the 1986 Assisi summit.<\/p>\n

Had this been another senior Catholic official — Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, for example, or Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, both known for more irenic views on Islam and other religions generally — fierce debate might have been unleashed about the theological meaning of the prayer, and one can imagine the Vatican issuing a \u201cclarification\u201d spelling out all the qualifications.<\/p>\n

Yet this wasn\u2019t Etchegaray or Fitzgerald. It was, instead, the very man who identified a \u201cdictatorship of relativism\u201d as the central challenge facing the church one day before his election to the papacy. <\/p>\n

None of this is to suggest that the prayer didn\u2019t come as a surprise, given Ratzinger\u2019s background. (In fact, prior to the pope\u2019s own comment exiting the mosque, the press corps traveling with him had been locked in fierce debate over whether to characterize what had happened as \u201cprayer\u201d or \u201cmeditation.\u201d) But it was precisely that background which, one imagines, emboldened Benedict to accept the invitation to pray, assuming that it would be seen in the context of the totality of his life and thought.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Allen makes sense: Why the explanatory vacuum? The answer, at least implicitly, seems to be the following: This pope is his own gloss. In other words, precisely because this was Joseph Ratzinger, it is difficult to imagine that the prayer at the Blue Mosque, at least on his side, had anything to do with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nOnce more to the Blue Mosque - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/once-more-to-the-blue-mosque.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Once more to the Blue Mosque - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"John Allen makes sense: Why the explanatory vacuum? The answer, at least implicitly, seems to be the following: This pope is his own gloss. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}