Idle speculations: Who will be the Pope’s next chief ecumenist
Walter Kasper in Oxford in 2008
Cardinal Walter Kasper, the genial Schwabian who leads the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, passed the retirement age for Curial department leaders, two years ago. He turns 77 this year. It is interesting to note that the names doing the rounds in Vaticanista gossip are mostly from German-speaking countries.
Senior Vatican watcher Andrea Tornielli has mentioned Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Mueller of Regensburg as well as the Bishop of Basel Kurt Koch who had an audience with the Holy Father on Saturday.
+Mueller, from Mainz, is a professional ecumenist and the President of the Commission for Ecumenical Relations of the German Bishops’ Conference. His doctoral thesis was on the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and entitled “The Church and Sacraments in Religionless Christendom. Bonhoeffer’s Contribution to an Ecumenical Sacrament Theology”. He served as professor of Dogmatic Theology at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilian University and still holds an honorary professorship there.
Benedict, the Equality Bill and Natural Law
As the smoke clears after the furor in the British press over the Pope’s so-called attack on the Equality Bill, the Domincan students at Blackfriars, Oxford, take the time to unpack the part of Benedict XVI’s speech to the Bishops of England and Wales at the ad limina visit in Rome last week which set off fireworks . Br Lawrence Lew OP sets out to explain the problematic aspects of the Equality Bill as well as what is meant by Natural Law. It offers a reasoned contrast to the hysteria of recent headlines and is well worth a read.
A Catholic Pat Robertson? Fr Wagner and Haiti
Where American Evangelicals have Pat Robertson who blames earthquakes, hurricanes et al on Divine displeasure, European Catholics have Fr Gerhard Wagner, (the-man-who-was-almost-auxiliary-bishop-of-Linz).
After last month’s terrifying earthquake devastated Haiti and killed over 150000 people, Mr Robertson said the country was cursed for having entered into a pact with the Devil. Fr Wagner first caught the international media’s attention in January last year when he was appointed auxiliary bishop of Linz, for suggesting that it was no coincidence that Hurricane Katrina destroyed five abortion clinics and countless nightclubs. This Sunday he told the Austrian weekly Der Kurier that while he couldn’t judge whether the Haitian earthquake was an act of a vengeful God, but that it was interesting to note that 90 per cent of Haitians practice voodo.
Publishing Pope Benedict-Jesus of Nazareth II
Pope Benedict has finished the sequel to his Jesus of Nazareth book. We know because he told Rabbi Jacob Neusner (aka the Pope’s Rabbi) during an audience last week that the book was finished, was coming out soon and would probably be his last book.
The publishing phenomenon Benedict (to be Germanic about it) is a fascinating one. Jesus of Nazareth was an international best-seller. In a move that was unusual at the time Pope Benedict XVI went away from his normal English-language publishers Ignatius in favour of Doubleday in the United States and Bloomsbury in Britain. Last year Libreria Editrice Vaticana hosted a discussion about the relationship between secular publishers and the Pope and what they brought to the table. Apparently secular publishers found it difficult to accept that Magisterial material had to be open and available to everyone, rather than under copyright.
It’s exciting news that the sequel to Jesus of Nazareth is coming out. The first book, which was very much in answer to Rabbi Neusner’s A Rabbi talks with Jesus, is wonderfully readable (once you get past the somewhat dry introduction), insightful and points to the limitations of the historico-critical method.
The question is, who will publish it in English? Bloomsbury have said that they are not planning to publish the Pope’s sequel…
The Equalities Bill
The Lords voted to drop controversial clause in the Equality Bill which Church leaders feared could force Churches to ordain women as well as make it difficult for bishops to discipline their priests.
After a heated debate in the Lords this evening, the amendment 100 tabled by Baroness O’Cathain and the Bishop of Winchester among others was passed with 177 to 172. It favoured dropping the offending clause. Another amendment, tabled by the Government clarifying the language of the bill at the last minute failed to be passed with 174 content and 195 not content.
In Linz, troubles continue…
Over on Cathcon, Christopher Gillibrand has a post on the newest wrinkle in the troubled diocese of Linz. Since Dr Wagner’s interview with the OberOesterreichischen Nachrichten which I posted on last week, the Upper Austrian Church has been in a tizzy. And they’ve taken the fight to the newspapers.
The beleaguered diocesan Bishop Ludwig Schwarz has lashed out at Wagner in public, accusing of raising the emotional temperature to an already heated debate about the future of the polarised diocese.
“Even Benedict XVI and Pius XII are victims of predjudice”
One of the world’s most glamorous public philosophers has lept to the defense of one of the world’s most formidable theologians. Bernard-Henri Lévy has written an article defending Pope Benedict as well as Pope Pius XII’s wartime record in the Italian daily Corriere de la Sera.
Bernard Henri Levy wrote that Pope Benedict had been misrepresented in the press.
Read the rest of this entry »
The bishop formerly known as André-Mutien Léonard
Lots has changed concerting Belgium’s most talked of prelate André-Mutien Léonard (and not just his name) since I last blogged on the subject. He is now no longer the bishop of Namur/Namen but the Archbishop-elect of Brussels-Mechelen.
Read the rest of this entry »
Dinoscopus sleeps, eats and blogs: Williamson Redux
After months of sensible silence in the genteel exile of Wimbledon, Bishop Richard Williamson, the Lefebvrist bishop whose Holocaust denial caused a media ruckuss and an endless headache for Pope Benedict last year has given an interview to a minor French politician of the extreme right, Pierre Panet. The French Catholic newspaper La Croix first posted the interview today.
It was published on Daily Motion on Tuesday, only days after Pope Benedict XVI visited the Great Synagogue in Rome. There is already comment on it here The interviewer, Pierre Danet was a candidate for the European elections on the anti-zionist ticket of the right-wing French comic and political activist Dieudonne M’bala M’bala.
Bishop Williamson said that he believed that the dialogue between Rome and the Society of St Pius X, working towards reconciliation, was a dialogue of deaf people. He also said that he was sleeping, eating and blogging in his “unexpected sabbatical year”. His blog Dinoscopus (a cross of Dinosaur and Episcopus) was public until last year’s bruhaha over Bishop Williamson’s Holocaust denial broke. In the interview he gives his oppinion on the State of Israel, Muslim Christian relations, Kant (a criminal), and some basic theology. He also discloses to the interviewer that he loves Beethoven.
Here is an unofficial translation and transcript of the interview:
