{"id":4278,"date":"2006-12-01T10:59:01","date_gmt":"2006-12-01T10:59:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/summing-up-3.html"},"modified":"2006-12-01T10:59:01","modified_gmt":"2006-12-01T10:59:01","slug":"summing-up-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/summing-up-3.html","title":{"rendered":"Summing up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sandro Magister:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

On the feast of saint Andrew, Benedict XVI entered the Blue Mosque in Istanbul with the cross of Jesus clearly visible upon his chest. He paused before the mihrab facing Mecca, and prayed in silence beside the grand mufti, who murmured the opening words of the Qur\u2019an: all this took place with the freedom and clarity marked out by his lecture in Regensburg. <\/p>\n

But a no less symbolic gesture took place shortly before this, with the pope\u2019s entrance into the Hagia Sophia, now a museum, previously a mosque, and before that the cathedral church of the patriarch of Constantinople, in the land where early Christianity flourished. <\/p>\n

In the Hagia Sophia, Benedict XVI did not immerse himself in prayer; he did not repeat the gesture of Paul VI when he visited there in 1967. Surrounded and hemmed in at every moment, he was able only to admire \u2013 in the impressive architecture of the Hagia Sophia, in its Byzantine mosaics, and in its Qur\u2019anic inscriptions \u2013 the magnificent and sorrowful image encapsulating the Christian East of yesterday and today. First there was Greek civilization and then early Christianity, then Roman culture and then the Islam that conquered but did not erase what came before it, and finally the little flock surrounded by wolves that keeps the Christian faith alive in today\u2019s Turkey. <\/p>\n

It was to this little flock that Benedict XVI brought the comfort of Peter: and also to the Churches that do not recognize his primacy in the form it took on in the second millennium. <\/p>\n

Because this was the true aim of the visit. Peter, visiting Andrew. The successor of the chief of the apostles embracing the successor of the other missionary apostle among the Greeks. The \u201cFirst\u201d and the \u201cSecond\u201d Rome in the persons of the pope and of the ecumenical patriarch, divided for centuries of schism but now determined to journey toward a new unity: it is a journey begun in 1964 with the embrace between Paul VI and Athenagoras, followed by the revocations of excommunication and by the documents of Vatican Council II, and most recently revived with the theological dialogues taking place on the theme of \u201ccounciliarity and authority\u201d and with the meeting this November 30th between the pope and the patriarch. <\/p>\n

Bartholomew I is the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. He has fewer than three thousand faithful with him in Turkey, but he is the royal gate through which Benedict XVI wants to reach Churches of the East as a whole, including the Church of the \u201cThird Rome\u201d that is Moscow. <\/p>\n

But there\u2019s more. The apostle Andrew \u2013 Benedict XVI recalled \u2013 \u201crepresents the meeting of primitive Christianity and Greek culture.\u201d And what is this, if not the encounter between the Gospel and the Logos, which was at the heart of the lecture in Regensburg? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sandro Magister: On the feast of saint Andrew, Benedict XVI entered the Blue Mosque in Istanbul with the cross of Jesus clearly visible upon his chest. He paused before the mihrab facing Mecca, and prayed in silence beside the grand mufti, who murmured the opening words of the Qur\u2019an: all this took place with the…<\/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-4278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSumming up - 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\/summing-up-3.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Summing up - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sandro Magister: On the feast of saint Andrew, Benedict XVI entered the Blue Mosque in Istanbul with the cross of Jesus clearly visible upon his chest. 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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\/4278","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=4278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}