Pope Benedict 6's first encyclical

(First posted to GR Net on 24 Jan 06)

 Benedict XVI's first encyclical "Deus Caritas  Est," (God is love) was released on 25 Jan 06.
Three days earlier, he revealed that it was inspired in part by the work "Divine Comedy" by  Dante, a medieval Italian poet (1265-1321). For Benedict XVI, as for Dante, "Light and love are but one thing. They are  the primordial creative power that moves the universe."
The Pope recalled that these words are based on Aristotle's thought, "who saw in the 'eros' the power that moves the world."

Note the lack of awareness that he is writing for a global and multicultural church. How familiar are Asian and African Christians of the 21st century with Dante or Aristotle? Are these figures relevant in their cultural context?
The pope went on to say he seeks to recover the meaning of the word "love" with the theme of his first encyclical.
"Today the word 'love' is so tarnished, so spoiled and so abused... It is a primordial word, expression of the primordial reality. We must take it up again, purify it ... so that it might illuminate our life and lead it on the right path."

Here's our pope at ease dabbling in abstractions and dishing out platitudes while in the real world, Muslim civilians are being killed in their thousands and their lands devastated by powerful Christian states who bomb (with cluster bombs, depleted uranium, phosphorus, daisy cutters), who lie shamelessly, who abuse and torture, who detain suspects without trial in remote places, who flout all international norms of decent conduct.
Israel (a European state) likewise terrorises the Palestinians.

But our good pope is not prepared to write on these grim developments and confront the western leaders over their monstrous crimes. Popes have generally been unmoved by the sufferings of non-Christians & non-Europeans
inflicted by imperialists. When Leo XIII wrote his famous Rerum Novarum (1891), his concern was with European workers. He didn't even mention the major social sin disrupting Asian life: European colonial domination.
The church's social concerns are relatively recent and as usual the Catholic Social Teaching (CST) revolves around European conditions. Participants at the seminar held for Asian theologians in Hong Kong in 1992 noted that the
modern Vatican CST is culturally foreign to Asia. Today, although there are more practising Catholics in Asia than in Europe, the Vatican is still not prepared to welcome Asian views or include the Asian context in their writings .

Pope Ben's interests and priorities are consistent with those of his predecessors.
Let us put forward the following broad propositions:

1. The popes, though supposedly Head of the Universal Church, have always written official documents in the social and economic context of Europe (the West) and with European audiences in mind. Non-European Catholics were left
to somehow adapt the papal message to their own situation. Given the deep malaise in western society today, the Vatican focuses on issues like sex, celibacy, gays, abortion and such. The popes are not comfortable writing on
war, poverty or social injustices because these are largely the creation of the west while their impacts are borne by Third World people.

2. The church remains an authoritarian organisation and communication with the people is one-way (top-down). As Indian Jesuit Stan Lourdesamy put it in the  1980s, "the Vatican is suspicious of anything that springs from the
life experience of the people."

3. Over the centuries, the official church has routinely sided with the western ruling classes, thereby ensuring its own survival. It backed conquest and colonialism. It never openly denounced the oppressive & racist policies of the West nor sided with the Third World masses in their struggles for justice & equality.
The term 'barbarian' was invariably used to refer to non-Europeans  from the days of Columbus right until the 1930s.

4. Euro theology itself is flawed. It distanced itself from the lives of ordinary people and became 'scholastic' (academic) over the centuries. A fondness developed for dry doctrinal formulations and doctrinal purity.
In January 1997, the  Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (under Cardinal Ratzinger) decided to excommunicate Fr Tissa Balasuriya, a Sri Lankan theologian. His books portrayed Mary as "role model for working class women", challenging the traditional portrayal by "the capitalist and colonialist West".
Fr Tissa (72) asked pointedly: "Is there a different criterion for Asian theologians?" As the progressive US Z Mag put it (May 97): "Ratzinger's racism showed when he picked on a brown-skinned man without powerful friends and living half a world away."

5. Pope Ben is an intellectual in the classical European tradition - fond of pedantic and turgid constructs. For example, in Sept 2000, as head of the CDF, he issued a document with the title " Dominus Jesus: The Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ & the Church".
How would this be translated into Asian or African languages? Would Christ himself have understood the title?
The document insisted that other faiths are "gravely deficient" compared to Christianity which alone "has the fullness of the means of salvation".

In sum, the church still fails to read the signs of the times. No wonder that Christianity is seriously in decline in Europe. In Britain, a Christian Research organisation produced a report (Oct 05) on the Future of Christianity and projected that church attendance, today at about 7%, would drop to 2% in 35 years while Christians will become a minority (declining to about 35%).

Meanwhile, Hinduism and Islam are flourishing.