Weigel and Allen on Pope Benedict, the Trip, Islam, Catholic Education

Amy Welborn has linked to an informative, serious discussion involving George Weigel, John Allen, Jr., and various media folks that was sponsored by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and was held on April 1st. There is plenty to highlight, but I'll just select one brief section:

SALLY QUINN, ON FAITH: I want to go back to Regensburg because you all have talked about how that was really an opening for dialogue. But a lot of Muslims don’t see it that way, and there is a lot of contention about Regensburg. I was at a conference at Georgetown recently between Catholics and Muslims, and the Muslims were universally upset by this and essentially saying that Regensburg set dialogue back years. How do you all feel about that?

WEIGEL: Well, it set the dialogue in which those people have been engaged back. But that dialogue was going nowhere and the pope knew it. An inter-religious dialogue that is an exchange of pleasantries – aren’t we all wonderful; wouldn’t it be nice if everyone else was as wonderful as we are – there are no real issues here. That’s not dialogue and that’s not tolerance.

Tolerance doesn’t mean ignoring difference as if difference didn’t make a difference. Tolerance comes from the Latin, tolerare, to bear with. Tolerance means to engage differences with civility and respect. So I’m not surprised that those people who have in a sense owned the inter-religious dialogue franchise for the past 30 years are a little bit bent out of shape that somebody came along and rearranged the pieces on the chessboard.

If you’re looking at this in 100-, 200-, 300-year terms, as John correctly suggests this pope thinks, what’s really of interest is not what those people think, but what King Abdullah has done. What is of interest is not that certain people complained about the Magdi Allam baptism, but that the guy who raised the loudest complaints is still coming to the Catholic-Muslim Forum meeting in Rome because he knows that’s where the action is.

So I think that’s what has to be said, Sally, on that front, that this conversation had gotten into a set of grooves that were leading really nowhere. And a new set of grooves had to be created in which these two questions – come back to this again – religious freedom as a human right that can be known by moral reason, whether you’re religious or not, and the separation of religious and political authority in the state. Two issues that have tended to be back-burnered, pushed to the side of the plate in inter-religious dialogue precisely because they’re neuralgic, have now been put in play and in a way that serious people have responded to in a serious way. And I suspect those who are of the old school, if you will, will catch up with the program eventually when they see that’s where the bus is moving over time.

A recommended read. Weigel, of course, has written a number of notable books on John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Catholicism in general, Europe and secularism, and, most recently, on terrorism: Faith, Reason And The War Against Jihadism.

Comments

[Augustine II]

Interesting discussion, especially about how the Holy Father thinks in centuries.