{"id":5746,"date":"2006-09-18T10:52:46","date_gmt":"2006-09-18T10:52:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/less-diplomacy-and-more-gospel.html"},"modified":"2006-09-18T10:52:46","modified_gmt":"2006-09-18T10:52:46","slug":"less-diplomacy-and-more-gospel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/less-diplomacy-and-more-gospel.html","title":{"rendered":"“Less diplomacy and more Gospel”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sandro Magister’s take:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Less diplomacy and more Gospel: this is the course that Joseph Ratzinger is setting for the Church\u2019s central governance. Even in the choice of archbishop Mamberti as foreign minister, what the pope kept in mind even more than his diplomatic competency was his direct familiarity with the Muslim world and with the related questions of faith and civilization. Born in Marakesh, with French citizenship via Corsica, Mamberti was a pontifical representative in Chile and to the United Nations, but also in Algeria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and most recently in Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia. <\/p>\n

And it was again this criterion \u2013 less diplomacy and more Gospel \u2013 that led the pope, in the course of his trip to Germany, to say such politically incorrect, and such potentially explosive, words. <\/p>\n

Anyone who is an expert in the art of diplomacy and a proponent of \u201crealism\u201d in international relations would certainly have censured as inopportune and dangerous many passages of the homilies and speeches delivered by Benedict XVI in Germany. <\/p>\n

But this is not a pope who submits himself to such censorship or self-censorship, which he sees as being inopportune and dangerous indeed when it concerns the pillars of his preaching. His goal on his trip to Germany was to illuminate before modern man \u2013 whether Christian, agnostic, or of another faith; from Europe, Africa, or Asia \u2013 that simple and supreme truth that is the other side of the truth to which he dedicated the encyclical \u201cDeus Caritas Est.\u201d God is love, but he is also reason, he is the \u201cLogos.\u201d And so when reason separates itself from God, it closes in upon itself. And likewise, faith in an \u201cirrational\u201d God, an absolute, unbridled will, can become the seed of violence. Every religion, culture, and civilization is exposed to this twofold error \u2013 not only Islam, but also Christianity, toward which the pope directed almost the entirety of his preaching. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sandro Magister’s take: Less diplomacy and more Gospel: this is the course that Joseph Ratzinger is setting for the Church\u2019s central governance. Even in the choice of archbishop Mamberti as foreign minister, what the pope kept in mind even more than his diplomatic competency was his direct familiarity with the Muslim world and 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-5746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n"Less diplomacy and more Gospel" - 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\/09\/less-diplomacy-and-more-gospel.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""Less diplomacy and more Gospel" - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sandro Magister’s take: Less diplomacy and more Gospel: this is the course that Joseph Ratzinger is setting for the Church\u2019s central governance. 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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\/5746","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=5746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5746\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}