I agree with Jim Fredericks when he says there are “no easy answers” to the challenge of interreligious dialogue. I also agree that our “dialogues should be seen as ministry, a form of the Church’s service to the world.” Perhaps a “common search for the truth,” in which all religions could witness to their traditions with “humility and frankness,” could be found in telling those religious stories within a larger story that embraces them all, mutually, reciprocally, and equally. Our larger evolutionary story might be a good place to start. Here we might ask different questions. Rather than, “What does it mean to be Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu etc.?” the question of identity for our age might be, “What does it mean to be human on the planet and in this evolving universe today and what does Catholicism, Buddhism, Judasim, etc. have to offer our understanding of this?” Here, each individual “witness” contributes to an understanding of the whole. This would be the humble starting place in a conversation with other religions of what we share in common. Here, perhaps also, is where a deficient theology of the Holy Spirit might find its universal appeal. We live in a world imbued with Spirit and mystery, the locus of divine activity from the very beginning. The Vatican II identity of the Church as the “Sacrament of Christ in the world, the unity,” not just of the “human,” but of all creation, echoes the passion of Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin (whose influence is felt in Lumen gentium) when he passionately proclaimed, “Even if I were to lose in succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.”
Alice MacDonald, Santa Barbara, CA
Catholics should be grateful to Jim Fredericks (a personal friend, I should point out) for clarifying the nature and need of dialogue, and some of the impediments that the present Pope has raised for responding the Nostra Aetate's call for Catholics to engage in dialogue. I especially appreciated the way Fredericks shows that if Vatican II was not clear about the religions as "ways of salvation," John Paul II was. It should be recognized as "common teaching" that God is offering God's presence and saving grace in and through other religions.
In his final three recommendations, he might have recognized that Benedict would not agree with the second: that dialogue deal not just with solidarity and cooperation (always first on the agenda, I would agree) but with "theology" and matters of belief. In his introduction to Marcello's Pera's book, WHY WE MUST CALL OURSELVES CHRISTIANS, the Pope, in flat-out contradiction to John Paul and REDEMPTORIS MISSIO, held that "interreligious dialogue in the strict sense in not possible." "The strict sense" means dialogue about what one believes. For Benedict, dialogue can only deal with what Fredericks calls "solidarity" and with matters of culture.
I sense a real disconnect between the way Benedict understand interreligious dialogue and the way the Catholic community of believers have been carrying out dialogue since Vatican II urged them to do so. But the tension of disconnects can be theologically fertile. At least, I hope so.
I agree with Jim Fredericks when he says there are “no easy answers” to the challenge of interreligious dialogue. I also agree that our “dialogues should be seen as ministry, a form of the Church’s service to the world.” Perhaps a “common search for the truth,” in which all religions could witness to their traditions with “humility and frankness,” could be found in telling those religious stories within a larger story that embraces them all, mutually, reciprocally, and equally. Our larger evolutionary story might be a good place to start. Here we might ask different questions. Rather than, “What does it mean to be Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu etc.?” the question of identity for our age might be, “What does it mean to be human on the planet and in this evolving universe today and what does Catholicism, Buddhism, Judasim, etc. have to offer our understanding of this?” Here, each individual “witness” contributes to an understanding of the whole. This would be the humble starting place in a conversation with other religions of what we share in common. Here, perhaps also, is where a deficient theology of the Holy Spirit might find its universal appeal. We live in a world imbued with Spirit and mystery, the locus of divine activity from the very beginning. The Vatican II identity of the Church as the “Sacrament of Christ in the world, the unity,” not just of the “human,” but of all creation, echoes the passion of Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin (whose influence is felt in Lumen gentium) when he passionately proclaimed, “Even if I were to lose in succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.”
Alice MacDonald, Santa Barbara, CA