{"id":5199,"date":"2006-10-19T08:50:23","date_gmt":"2006-10-19T08:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/responding-to-the-pope.html"},"modified":"2006-10-19T08:50:23","modified_gmt":"2006-10-19T08:50:23","slug":"responding-to-the-pope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/responding-to-the-pope.html","title":{"rendered":"Responding to the Pope"},"content":{"rendered":"

Magister highlights the letter 38 Muslim scholars have written to the Pope:<\/a><\/p>\n

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The authors of the letter welcome and appreciate without reservation the clarifications made by Benedict XVI after the wave of protests that issued from the Muslim world a few days after the lecture in Regensburg, and in particular the speech that the pope addressed to ambassadors from Muslim countries on September 25, and also the reference made by cardinal secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone, in a note issued on September 16, to the conciliar document \u201cNostra Aetate.\u201d <\/p>\n

And not only that. They condemn with very strong words the assassination that took place in Somalia, in Muslim Mogadishu, of sister Leonella Sgorbati, thereby linking this to the protests that were at their peak at the time: <\/p>\n

\u201cWe must state that the murder on September 17th of an innocent Catholic nun in Somalia \u2013 and any other similar acts of wanton individual violence \u2013 ‘in reaction to’ the lecture at the University of Regensburg, is completely un-Islamic, and we totally condemn such acts.\u201d <\/p>\n

The authors of the letter appreciate Benedict XVI\u2019s desire for dialogue and take very seriously his theses. \u201cApplaud\u201d pope’s \u201cefforts to oppose the dominance of positivism and materialism in human life,\u201d while contest him on other points, adding their reasons for their opposition. <\/p>\n

In this sense, the letter signed by the 38 \u2013 together with the preceding essay by Aref Ali Nayed, previewed by www.chiesa on October 4 \u2013 goes towards what the pope meant to accomplish with his audacious lecture in Regensburg: to encourage, within the Muslim world as well, public reflection that would separate faith from violence and link it to reason instead. Because, in the pope\u2019s view, it is precisely the \u201creasonableness\u201d of the faith that is the natural terrain of encounter between Christianity and the various other religions and cultures. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The text of the letter itself<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s been a pretty fierce reaction to the news, reported last week, of the Capuchins in Genoa chipping in to help build a mosque:<\/a><\/p>\n

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The story of the Genoa mosque has become the topic of a national debate since Monday, when a well-known Islamic expert, Magdi Allam, accused the Capuchin friars of ‘selling out to extremists’ in an article published on the front page of daily Corriere della Sera. <\/p>\n

Gambaro has since found himself in the midst of a crossfire of criticisms fired at him by Allam on one side and Catholic conservatives on the other. <\/p>\n

‘The Genoa mosque will become a meeting point for those Muslims communities that we have recently seen on television lashing out at the pope,’ thundered Gianni Baget Bozzo, a Catholic priest and a close political advisor of former conservative prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Magister highlights the letter 38 Muslim scholars have written to the Pope: The authors of the letter welcome and appreciate without reservation the clarifications made by Benedict XVI after the wave of protests that issued from the Muslim world a few days after the lecture in Regensburg, and in particular the speech that the pope…<\/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-5199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nResponding to the Pope - 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\/10\/responding-to-the-pope.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Responding to the Pope - 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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\/5199","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=5199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}