Posts Tagged ‘Pope’
The Chief Rabbi, the Pope and the Soul of Europe
1. According to the Jewish Chronicle, in the Chief Rabbi’s lecture at the Pontifical Gregorian University he said: “When a civilisation loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. For the sake of our children, and their children not yet born, we – Jews and Christians, side-by-side – must renew our faith and its prophetic voice. We must help Europe rediscover its soul.”
2. It strikes me that this is about as inappropriate a moment as one could find for it to be suggested that all that Europe needs to rediscover its soul is co-operation between the Catholic church and institutionalised Judaism.
3. Organised religion in general seems to be doing as much as any other force in today’s world to sow the seeds of dissension and violence. While the Catholic church has particularly acute present crises of conscience, all the major religions about which I know anything at all seem to be contributing more to the sum total of human misery than to the sum total of human happiness.
4. The Chief Rabbi is undoubtedly right that Europe – and not just Europe – is in moral crisis, and to describe that as needing to rediscover the soul is entirely apt. Hundreds of thousands of people of all ages are desperately in need of moral direction and focus; and the lack of these is leaving a horrendous mark on the development of societies throughout the world.
5. But what these people need is not a new gang to belong to, or a new dogma to excuse intolerance and thuggery; rather they need help to rediscover the inherent appreciation of moral values that are the image of God in which we are all created. All religions worthy of the name – and many non-religious philosophies and approaches to life – are capable at a personal level of reigniting a human being’s spark of holiness; but organised religion, as distinct from personal religion, is as in need as anyone else of rediscovering its soul; and until it has healed itself it will not be ready to be part of the solution rather than an exacerbation of the problem.
The Pope and Good Manners
1. Scottish atheists are welcoming the Pope with a special “Good Without God” protest.
2. I know of no religion (including Judaism) that denies the ability to be a good person without religious belief.
3. The more important question, however, seems to be whether people, religious or not, can bring themselves to behave decently nowadays, by the exertion of a modicum of commonsense and self-control.
4. The journalists who managed to catch a photograph of the Pope with his face covered by his own shawl in the wind doubtless thought “what a scoop”; that is a reasonable first thought – but the second thought should have been “come to think of it, though, not very kind to publish such an indiginified picture – let’s just quietly bin it”.
5. Similarly, whether or not atheists are right, might not sheer good manners lead one to think that a billboard denying God is an impolite welcome to Scotland?
6. And the Cardinal expressing trenchant views about secularism in Britain may or may not have been airing an important issue, but simple good manners might have suggested that this was not the time, place or manner in which to do it.
7. Perhaps we are all so busy nowadays being right, and fervent in our protestations of how right we are, that we forget to be well-mannered.
8. I don’t know who first said “manners maketh man”, but it has something to be said for it: manners are more than a superficial social etiquette – they are part of our instinctive knowledge of what is good and bad behaviour that forms part of the Divine image in which some of us believe we were created.
9. The Pope has plenty of policy and religious issues to address (and so far as I can see he does not seem to be an unhelpfully complacent or self-satisfied personality): but there is a time and a place for everything – he is the head of a religion to which a few million of our fellow human-beings belong, and we owe it to ourselves to give him a welcome that exudes human warmth and a respect for human dignity.
The Sceptic Blog 