{"id":5221,"date":"2006-01-23T09:40:51","date_gmt":"2006-01-23T09:40:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/benedict-and-islam.html"},"modified":"2006-01-23T09:40:51","modified_gmt":"2006-01-23T09:40:51","slug":"benedict-and-islam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/benedict-and-islam.html","title":{"rendered":"Benedict and Islam"},"content":{"rendered":"

Magister tries to sort out conflicting reports:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Joseph Ratzinger has written little on the topic of Islam over the years. But it is a topic very much on his mind, and all the more so since he became pope. Last September, in Castelgandolfo (see photo), Benedict XVI dedicated two days of study to Islam, behind closed doors, together with two experts in Islamic studies and a group of his former theology students. <\/p>\n

The news of the meeting leaked out, but until last January 5 nothing was known about what was said there. <\/p>\n

But on January 5, one of Ratzinger\u2019s former students who participated in the meeting, American Jesuit Joseph Fessio, provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, and founder of the publishing house Ignatius Press, gave an ample account of the meeting during one of the most popular radio talk shows in the United States: the Hugh Hewitt Show. <\/p>\n

During the interview, Fr. Fessio also reported the thoughts expressed by the pope in the course of the discussion. In Fessio\u2019s view, Benedict XVI holds that Islam and democracy cannot be reconciled. <\/p>\n

But one of the other participants at the meeting, Samir Khalil Samir, an Egyptian Jesuit and professor of Islamic studies at the Universit\u00e9 Saint-Joseph in Beirut and at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, when consulted by www.chiesa, gave a different interpretation of the pope\u2019s thought. In Fr. Samir\u2019s view, Benedict XVI holds that it is very difficult, but not impossible, to reconcile Islam and democracy. <\/p>\n

In his contribution to the discussion, the pope supposedly wanted to explain precisely the reasons for this difficulty. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Magister tries to sort out conflicting reports: Joseph Ratzinger has written little on the topic of Islam over the years. But it is a topic very much on his mind, and all the more so since he became pope. Last September, in Castelgandolfo (see photo), Benedict XVI dedicated two days of study to Islam, behind…<\/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-5221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nBenedict and Islam - 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\/01\/benedict-and-islam.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Benedict and Islam - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Magister tries to sort out conflicting reports: Joseph Ratzinger has written little on the topic of Islam over the years. 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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\/5221","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=5221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}