By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor
PARIS | Thu Mar 24, 2011
7:01pm EDT
PARIS (Reuters) - The
Vatican launched a series of public dialogues with non-believers
Thursday, choosing leading intellectual institutions in Paris to
present its belief that modern societies must speak more openly
about God.
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.
The dialogues, called "Courtyard of the Gentiles" after the part
of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem where Jews and non-Jews met,
will continue in at least 16 cities in Europe and North America
over the next two years.
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican's culture minister, told
participants at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) the dialogue was meant not to
confront believers and atheists but to seek common ground.
Rather it was "an invitation to non-believers ... to start a
voyage with believers through the desert," he said.
The meeting was due to continue Friday with sessions at the
Sorbonne university and the Institut de France, home of the
prestigious Academie Francaise.
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Pope Benedict, who recently launched another Vatican drive to
revitalise the faith in traditionally Catholic countries, proposed
these meetings with non-believers in 2009.
"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," he said in a speech to the Vatican hierarchy.
"We must make sure that they are open to this question and to
the yearning concealed within it." Addressing the UNESCO meeting,
former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato said a so-called honor
killing in his country, in which a Pakistani murdered his daughter for behaving as
freely as Italian youths, presented a challenge to open democracies
that believers and atheists had to think about.
"Democratic societies are founded on the hypothesis that
everyone can differentiate between just and unjust, good and evil,
and everyone can find the limits" he said. "If one is no longer
conscious of this, then democracy doesn't work anymore."
Although he said Christianity offered a moral compass, Amato did
not present it as the only way to counter the problems challenging
affluent liberal societies.
Even Ravasi, despite his Roman collar, did not present his views
as a sermon for more Catholicism. Instead of the Gospels, he quoted
secular thinkers such as the German poet Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the
Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges.
The discussions are due to end Friday evening with a youth rally
outside Notre Dame Cathedral highlighted by a video address by the
pope from Rome.
Further dialogue meetings are planned in Italy, Albania, Sweden,
Czech Republic, Germany,
Switzerland, Canada, Spain, Russia and the United States.
Source:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/24/us-vatican-atheists-dialogue-idUSTRE72N88720110324
just sharing (: wonder what atheists think of such dialogues