Word: vaticans
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There is no real precedent for this. The last time Christianity and Judaism had knockdown debates was during medieval "disputations" convened by Christian authorities and decisively rigged against the Jews. Although the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 renounced the Roman Catholic teaching that Jews were Christ killers and John Paul II acknowledged Jews' ongoing presence by visiting a synagogue, postwar papal discourse has focused on Christianity's view of Judaism, not the reverse, and steered serenely around fundamental controversies. Jesus of Nazareth takes the next huge step: "a Pope taking seriously what a Jew says--and says critically--about...
Such open theological aggression is rare in post-Holocaust interfaith parley--or buried amid affirmations of commonality and practical issues like those impacting the state of Israel. But Neusner had collected an interesting fan. He and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had struck up a professional correspondence after the rabbi wrote the Cardinal an admiring note about something he had published. Ratzinger blurbed A Rabbi Talks as "by far the most important book for the Jewish-Christian dialogue in the last decade...
...speeches, which by all accounts are the work of his pen alone, are consistently clear and often quite potent. But more and more, it seems, there will be some sentence or citation - or a blatant omission - that inadavertently ignites controversy, if not outright rage against the Pope. The Vatican eventually kicks into damage-control mode, and finally, Benedict is left with the awkward task of serious papal (and public) backtracking. Indeed, there was a "here-we-go-again" buzz circulating among Vatican insiders as the Pope went out of his way this week to clarify his view of the Christian...
When he ran the Vatican's doctrinal office, one of the nicknames slapped on Joseph Ratzinger was "Cardinal No." As Pope John Paul II's enforcer of orthodoxy, he condemned errant personal behavior among the Catholic faithful, and reined in dissident Church theologians. Now, as pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI spends most of his time trying to convince his followers to say yes to the Christian gospel. Indeed his one Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love), surprised some of his longtime critics by the positive note on which he was beginning his now two-year-old papacy. There have, though...
...persist about just how and if welfare policy and religious piety should cohabitate. But after the specter of Marxism faded and John Paul proved to be a great champion of the poor, new alliances have formed. Liberation theologians still say and write things that are at odds with the Vatican hierarchy, but liberation theology as such is no longer at the center of the debate, although the issues it raised remain so - today, the Church is conducting a more broadly defined debate about how to fight for social justice. For example, a group of progressive bishops last week sent...