A note of surrender from the Vatican. It’s a far cry from the Pope’s speech at Regensburg, and a far cry from earlier publications in the same magazine.
“Jihad Finds a Strange Advocate: ‘La Civiltà Cattolica,'” by Sandro Magister in Chiesa, with thanks to Michael Rose:
ROMA, November 8, 2006 — The recent October edition of “La Civiltà Cattolica” — the authoritative magazine of the Rome Jesuits printed with the supervision and authorization of the Vatican authorities — opens with a jaw-dropping editorial on Islam.
The editorial furnishes a very detailed and alarming description of fundamentalist and terrorist Islam, behind which “there are great and powerful Islamic states”: an Islam aiming at the conquest of the world and fostered by violence “for the cause of Allah.”
But it does this without even the slightest note of criticism of this nexus of violence and faith.
And it is as if this nexus were an inescapable reality, against which the West and the Church should do little or nothing: little at the practical level — it’s enough to look over the scant measures against terrorism that are recommended — and nothing at the theoretical level.
Above all, it is as if Benedict XVI hadn’t even delivered, last September 12, his lecture in Regensburg.
In it, pope Joseph Ratzinger aimed precisely at liberating the faith — every faith — from ties to violence, and at uniting it indissolubly with reason instead: the objective is a positive and constructive dialogue between Christianity and other cultures and religions, including Islam.
But the editorial in “La Civiltà Cattolica,” for its part, seems like a manifesto of multicultural theories. Islam is the way it is, and it must be accepted as such.
Read it all.