Look for Benedict to raise more forcefully — and publicly — the plight of Christians and other minorities in the Muslim world. In the case of Saudi Arabia, for instance, lack of reciprocity means that there’s not a single church (or publicly-acknowledged Christian cleric) in the kingdom while Saudi money funded a gargantuan $30 million mosque in Rome erected several years ago with the Vatican’s tacit consent. But the situation is actually far more dire, since at least one million Christian expatriates working in Saudi Arabia (many are Filipinos and south Asians) are prohibited even from private worship, much less any public expression of their faith (such as wearing a crucifix or even possessing a Bible). These unfortunates — whose plight I became familiar with while living and working in Jordan — are denied any pastoral care whatsoever in circumstances that the local bishop (based elsewhere, of course) rightly called “reminiscent of the catacombs.”Fourth, Benedict quite delicately raises the pressing question of who exactly speaks for Islam. He observes that the September 25 meeting was attended by “religious authorities” on the Catholic side and “political leaders” on the Muslim side.
| “Not only does the pope have no counterpart in the Muslim world, there’s nothing remotely equivalent to the Roman Catholic episcopal hierarchy and ordained priesthood.... ” |
Finally, it’s relevant that the Holy Father has begun to install prelates in whom he has confidence at the highest levels of the Roman curia. This may seem like inside baseball, but personnel is policy. Earlier this month Benedict installed two prelates now serving in effect as his prime minister and foreign minister. Relations with the Muslim world were just one factor in these selections, but that was decidedly not the case with Benedict’s earlier replacement of the midlevel long cleric responsible for dialogue with Islam (a British prelate widely regarded as overly accommodating). Look for much closer coordination — regrettably absent in the past — between Vatican officials responsible for inter-religious dialogue and Vatican diplomats responsible for state-to-state relations between the Holy See and Muslim-majority states.
Perhaps the Muslim diplomats gathered at Castel Gandolfo this week were expecting some further expression of “regret” for the “reaction” of their co-religionists to the Regensburg remarks. What they got instead is a challenge.