Vatican seeks common ground with Athiests

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

A Vatican initiative to promote dialogue between believers and atheists, ended over the weekend with the Pope urging youth to put God back in the debate and to “tear down the barriers of fear of the other, the foreigner, of those who are not like you” that mutual ignorance can create.

Benedict said religions had nothing to fear from secular society as long as it had “an open secularism that lets all live as they believe, in accordance with their conscience.”

The Paris discussions were held at UNESCO, the Sorbonne and the Institut de France and ended with Pope Benedict, speaking via video link, to a youth rally outside Notre Dame Cathedral.

“This is a quite remarkable initiative of the Church at the highest level reaching out, in what hopefully will be a dialogue of mutual respect, to an atheism that is open to discussions of faith and reason,” Catholic Communications Auckland spokesperson Lyndsay Freer said.

The decision to start the series in France, where strong secularism has pushed faith to the fringes of the public sphere, reflected Pope Benedict’s goal of bringing religious questions back into the mainstream of civic debates.

According to the Vatican’s Culture minister, Cardinal Ravasi, the dialogue is meant not to confront believers and atheists but to seek common ground. It is “an invitation to non-believers … to start a voyage with believers through the desert,” he said.

In addressing the first gathering former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato said “We must make sure that they are open to this question and to the yearning concealed within it”.

Amato said a honour killing in Italy in which a Pakistani murdered his daughter for behaving as freely as Italian youth do, presents a challenge to open democracies that believers and atheists have to think about.

“Courtyard of the Gentiles,” takes its name from a section of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem accessible to non-Jews, which Pope Benedict XVI has used as a metaphor for dialogue between Catholics and non-believers.

“I believe that the church should also today open a sort of ‘courtyard of the gentiles’ where people can in some way hook on to God, without knowing him and before having gained access to his mystery,” Benedict said when launching the dialogues in February.

“We must be concerned that human beings do not set aside the question of God, but rather see it as an essential question for their lives.”

Dialogues also planned for Italy, Albania, Sweden, Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Spain, Russia and the United States, are called “Courtyard of the Gentiles” and were announced by the Vatican in early February.

Sources