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When Things Go Wrong in Interreligious Relations
Michael McGarry, C.S.P.
Relationships with the other don’t always proceed as we wish. We Catholics, relatively new to positive, active relationships with our Jewish or Muslim neighbors, occasionally find ourselves at a loss as to why things go wrong and what then to do. In a very short space, I wish to recall three moments which stand as rough spots in recent interreligious relations: recriminations after Pope Benedict’s lecture at the University of Regensburg in September 2006; the recent accusations around the reworded prayer “For the Conversion of the Jews” in the Tridentine Good Friday Service; and the struggle for equal rights for Catholics and other Christians in the Holy Land. Finally, I will muse, ever so superficially, on what we have to learn from these experiences.
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Fr. McGarry in front of the entrance to the Tantur Ecumenical Institute |
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When in 2006 Pope Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor in his critical description of prophet Mohammad’s work, stormy reactions erupted around the Muslim world. In a speech that sought to address the importance of reason in religious discourse, Pope Benedict seemed to unleash an emotional volcano of counter-accusation and protest. Many Muslim clerics called for a full apology from the Holy Father. Three times the Pope or one of his representatives assured Muslims that the Pope did not wish to insult the Prophet or his followers and that the emperor’s quoted words did not reflect the Pope’s opinion. But there was to be no apology, perhaps because Benedict’s advisors recognized that an apology, in many parts of the world, was tantamount to admitting that Christianity was wrong. In many parts of the world, an apology is the mark of a weak man which entails that he is not fit to be a leader. Nonetheless, recognizing that he could not leave matters in a stalemate, Pope Benedict invited Muslim leaders to the Vatican for a meeting from which more dialogue was promised. Indeed, within a few months, a very thoughtful response to Christianity’s challenge to Islam was drafted by more than a hundred Muslim scholars and leaders to be used as a starting point for a common discourse.
Recently, Pope Benedict authorized a wider use of the Tridentine (pre-Vatican II) liturgy, including the Good Friday service, for Catholic worshippers. The Good Friday Service contains numerous prayer-petitions for various groups, including prayers for “schismatics, infidels, and heretics” and for the conversion of the Jews. Although the Second Vatican Council had not prohibited proselytizing Jews or praying for their conversion, the trajectory of Catholic teaching from Nostra Aetate to the present led many Jews and Catholics to believe the Church had abandoned its conversionist posture vis-à-vis the Jews. After some external prodding, Pope Benedict softened the prayer’s harsh language by removing the text’s more negative descriptions of Jews (still the prayer was called “For the Conversion of the Jews”). At this writing, the controversy continues and, in places, grows, even though a minuscule number of Catholics will even hear the prayer, and, because it is in Latin, even fewer will understand it. Nonetheless, many Jews rightly queried, what had years of dialogue meant if the Church could still include a prayer in its official liturgy asking God to convert all Jews to Christianity?
Finally, although not a matter of interreligious relations as such, another matter – that of the treatment of Catholics in Israel and the Occupied Territories – throws into question the positive effects one might have hoped for from cooperation between the Holy See and the State of Israel. In 1994, the long-awaited Fundamental Accords acknowledged the Vatican’s official recognition of the State of Israel, symbolized by the exchange of ambassadors.
However, to date, the Knesset has failed to approve this agreement; therefore the Accords do not have the force of law in Israel, now almost fifteen years later. As a result of this and other actions, Church life in Israel and the Occupied Territories continues to suffer: expropriations of Church land, denial or delay of visas for church personnel, denial of building permits (e.g., the Focolare has been waiting for seventeen years for a permit to build on its Jerusalem land), and humiliations of Church leaders at border crossings, to say nothing of continually stressful treatment of Palestinian Church workers by Israeli bureaucratic permit procedures--all these raise troubling questions of what exactly is the purpose of dialogue if this is the way the Church will in fact be treated in the Jewish State? As one Israeli veteran in the dialogue put it, “If any other state had been treated as Israel has treated the Vatican, they would have walked out of the talks long ago.”
What should we conclude from these examples of interreligious relations when things go wrong?
Firstly, and simply, actions from one side or the other in interreligious relations are not expressions of a whole people, as if all Jews are this way, all Catholics are that way, and all Muslims are another way. This simple observation is as important as it is fundamental. Each of the examples above requires a nuance about oneself and the other that belie easy “headline” abbreviations.
Secondly, interreligious relations are not a matter of keeping score: who has abused the other the most, or, its corollary, who has been more victimized? In vain, but sometimes deliciously, each side may wish to count up its victimhood in order to achieve some supposed moral high ground. But then we end up gazing at one another across a chasm, helplessly separated with and by our accusations and hurts, and further from a world at peace.
Finally, what each of these simplistically described incidents tells us is that those of us involved in the dialogue must continue, not because we have racked up victories over the other, but because a world separated from itself withers in isolation.
If relationships necessarily include dialogue, then we imply two things: that we have something to say--we’ve always believed that--and that we’ve got something to learn--we haven’t always believed that. As a Catholic involved in dialogue, I believe that we have much to learn from these incidents. When we are frustrated and even hurt in our relations with the other, whether Muslim or Jew, we must examine more closely what we have said and what the other has said and then we begin again. Dialogue does not provide the cheap victory of proving we are right or that we are the victim. Nor does dialogue make for automatic healing or even agreement. But we can guarantee suspicion and impasse if we allow these incidents to be the end of talking rather than the mark of a new beginning.
Michael McGarry, CSP, is the director of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem.
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