There’s a fascinating (if rather over-long) report by Sandro Magister of L’Espresso on various aspects of Catholic-Muslim relations, focusing on the Pope’s meeting last year with the king of Saudi Arabia:
For the Vatican, King Abdullah Matters More than 138 Muslim Scholars
by Sandro Magister
ROMA, March 31, 2008
Excerpts:
On Saturday, March 29, “L’Osservatore Romano” dedicated two articles to two instances of dialogue between the Catholic Church and Islam, demonstrating how this dialogue is showing promising developments precisely during the days of the controversy over the baptism of Allam, administered by the pope. . . .
At the beginning of the [second] article, the Vatican newspaper quoted Abdullah:
“. . . I have thought of inviting religious authorities to express their views of what is happening in the world, and, God willing, we will begin to organize meetings to with our brothers who belong to the monotheistic religions, among representatives of believers in the Qur’an, the Gospel, and the Bible.”
The Vatican newspaper added that the proposal of King Abdullah has met with the
agreement of the leading Muslim scholars of the kingdom.
But the most interesting highlights added by “L’Osservatore Romano” are two
others.
The first concerns the date of the statement made by Abdullah: March 24, which
for Christians was Easter Monday.
This is to say: precisely while the accusations were erupting against Benedict
XVI over Allam’s baptism, the Saudi king not only ignored the accusations, but
he expressed himself in diametrically opposite tones.
The full English text of Sandro Magister’s report is here:
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/195781?eng=y
If “believers in the Qur’an” means the Muslims and “believers in the Gospel” means the Christians, who can the third group be that the king calls “believers in the Bible”? Why yes, it can only be . . . the Jews !!! Quite an achievement for a Pope who has allegedly committed blunder after blunder in his dealings with the Muslim world. Conclusion: Benedict isn’t really a bungler at all. He turns out to have been, all along, a very wily old pope indeed, who seems to have outsmarted the whole worldwide liberal media establishment.
