Okay, so the title is just to grab your attention. The Catholic Church is actually extending a rather ecumenical offer to atheists. From The Independent:
The Vatican is planning a new initiative to reach out to atheists and agnostics in an attempt to improve the church’s relationship with non-believers. Pope Benedict XVI has ordered officials to create a new foundation where atheists will be encouraged to meet and debate with some of the Catholic Church’s top theologians.
The Vatican hopes to stage a series of debates in Paris next year. But militant non-believers hoping for a chance to set senior church figures straight about the existence of God are set to be disappointed: the church has warned that atheists with high public profiles such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will not be invited.
The “Courtyard of the Gentiles”, as the foundation is known, is being set up by the Pontifical Council for Culture, the influential Vatican department that is charged with fostering better relations with non-Catholics. It was founded by Pope John Paul II in 1982 to spearhead his attempts to create a better dialogue with other cultures and faith, including those with no religion at all.
Until recently, Pope Benedict has shown less enthusiasm for the type of open-armed ecumenism favoured by his predecessor. In the past five years, the Vatican’s relationship with other faiths has been severely undermined following a series of gaffes by the current pontiff, including a speech on the Prophet Muhammad that upset Muslims and the reintegration of an excommunicated Holocaust-denying bishop that severely undermined Catholic-Jewish relations.
The church is also aware that its reputation has suffered enormously in the eyes of atheists following the explosion of clerical sex-abuse scandals that broke out in Western Europe earlier this year and spread across the globe.
Pretty cool move. I can’t imagine the LDS Church doing anything similar (though the Logan LDS Institute was kind enough to invite SHAFT officers to a dinner once).
As the article mentioned, the invite is not extended to high-profile and “militant” atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. This will likely upset some, but it’s worth mentioning that the Catholic Church did have Hitchens testify (as ‘the Devil’s advocate‘) against the beatification Mother Teresa in 2002.
Hat-tip to Dr. Kleiner for the story.
I have read some of Cardinal Ratzinger’s books. He feels very comfortable with Western Philosophy and reason. I imagine that he can see common ground with western atheists. He is less comfortable with spiritualism. While John Paul II often seemed to reach out to animists and other traditions outside the Monotheist Big 3, Pope Benedict XVI has stepped back from that direction. B XVI is also uncomfortable with unreasonable monotheists. In his controversial comments (2006) towards muslim violence against apostates and infidels he was merely requesting that everyone step back and think of G-d as a reasonable G-d. He feels very comfortable with philosophers and not so comfortable with emotional religionists. Here is a part of that speech:
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The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.
At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: “In the beginning was the Logos.” This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts with logos. Logos means both reason and word – a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.