There’s no doubting Pope Benedict motivation, actions in Blue Mosque
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There’s no doubting Pope Benedict motivation, actions in Blue Mosque

3 commentsDecember 11, 20062 min read
Written by Domenico Bettinelli

“Analyzing Benedict’s prayer with Ratzinger’s criteria”

When Benedict XVI stood alongside Istanbul’s chief Islamic cleric, Imam Mustafa Cagrici, in the famed Blue Mosque on Nov. 30, praying silently in the direction of Mecca, those who know Ratzinger’s track record no doubt asked: What happened to the man who once worried that inter-religious prayer can mean “a concession to that relativism which negates the very meaning of truth?”

This was, after all, the same champion of Catholic identity who said of Pope John Paul II’s 1986 summit of religious leaders in Assisi to pray together for peace—or, at least, of the way that event was understood in some circles—“This cannot be the model!”

... Why the explanatory vacuum? The answer, at least implicitly, seems to be the following: This pope is his own gloss.

In other words, precisely because this was Joseph Ratzinger, it is difficult to imagine that the prayer at the Blue Mosque, at least on his side, had anything to do with a relativistic approach to religious belief. It was unnecessary to slap a warning label on the event saying, “Syncretism is hazardous to your faith,” because the mere presence of Ratzinger communicated in a flash all the doctrinal caveats that form part of his understanding of such events, including his criticism of the 1986 Assisi summit.

Had this been another senior Catholic official—Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, for example, or Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, both known for more irenic views on Islam and other religions generally—fierce debate might have been unleashed about the theological meaning of the prayer, and one can imagine the Vatican issuing a “clarification” spelling out all the qualifications.

Yet this wasn’t Etchegaray or Fitzgerald. It was, instead, the very man who identified a “dictatorship of relativism” as the central challenge facing the church one day before his election to the papacy.

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  • Actually I found this part of John Allen’s analysis more pertinent to the situation:

    <i>

    It’s an interesting thought exercise to ask if Benedict understood his moment of prayer alongside the imam in the Blue Mosque as an instance of “multi-religious” or “inter-religious” prayer, as he defined the terms in 2003. Given his doubts about the latter, one presumes he saw it as a “multi-religious” act, meaning separate prayer in the same context….

    Yet if this was “multi-religious prayer” according to Ratzinger’s standards, where, one might fairly ask, was the “careful explanation” which Ratzinger said must always be part and parcel of such events?

    The lone comment offered by Benedict XVI at the end of his visit was, “Thank you for this moment of prayer.”…

    “It was a recollection, a meditation, but this can be done. If it was a prayer, at least it was not an official prayer, it was not a public prayer, because this can’t be done,” Kasper said.

    With all due respect to Kasper, widely recognized as one of the best theological minds in the church, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that something carried live on TV across much of the world was not “public.”

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