Why Benedict XVI Is So Cautious with the Letter of the 138 Muslims
Because the kind of dialogue he wants is completely different. The pope is asking Islam to make the same journey that the Catholic Church made under pressure from the Enlightenment. Love of God and neighbor must be realized in the full acceptance of religious freedom
by Sandro Magister
ROMA, November 26, 2007 – The letter from the 138 Muslims addressed last month to Benedict XVI and to the heads of the other Christian churches received a spectacular collective reply in a message signed by 300 scholars and published in “The New York Times” on November 18.
The message originated in the Divinity School of Yale University, specifically through the initiative of its dean, Harold W. Attridge, a professor of New Testament exegesis.
The signatories belong mainly to the Protestant confessions, of both “evangelical” and “liberal” strains, and include such a celebrity as the theologian Harvey Cox. But the list of the 300 also includes a Catholic bishop, Camillo Ballin, the apostolic vicar in Kuwait. Other Catholics include the Islamologist John Esposito of Georgetown University and the theologians Donald Senior, a Passionist, and Thomas P. Rausch, a Jesuit from Loyola Marymount University. Also Catholic – although at the margins of orthodoxy – are Paul Knitter, a specialist on interreligious dialogue, and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, a teacher at Harvard and a feminist theologian.
The message lavishes praise upon the letter of the 138. It endorses the letter’s contents, or the indication of the love of God and neighbor as the “common word” between Muslims and Christians, at the center of both the Qur’an and the Bible. And it prefaces everything with a request for forgiveness to “the All-Merciful One and the Muslim community around the world.”
This is the reason given for the request for forgiveness:
“Since Jesus Christ says: ‘First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye’ (Matthew 7:5), we want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the ‘war on terror’) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbor.”
In releasing the message, its promoters announced that it will be followed by meetings with some of the signers of the letter of the 138, in the United States, Great Britain, and the Middle East, meetings that will also be open to Jews.
Frank I believe the letter posted above is not the same one from the christian group. The dates, for one, don’t match and the sole signatory is Cardinal Bertone.