Pope Benedict XVI’s emphasize on the evangelical mission of the Catholic Church alarms the Muslim side of interreligious dialogue, Sandro Magister reports at chiesa.com. Magdi Cristiano Allam’s baptism by the Pope at the Easter Vigil caused consternation in the Islamic world, as well as in some parts of the Church. Magdi Allam maintains a high profile in the Italian Church, on which more below.

Mustafa Cherif, an Algerian Islamic scholar involved in discussions with the Church, singled out a December 3, 2007, doctrinal note from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith affirming that “evangelization is aimed at all of humanity,” and seeking to correct “a growing confusion which leads many to leave the missionary command of the Lord unheard and ineffective.”

Cherif warned against efforts to convert Muslims in the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions’ monthly publication Monde e Missione. Cherif characterized as “incomprehensible and deplorable” the conviction earlier this month of four Algerian Muslims converts to Christianity under a new law that punishes apostasy with prison. But he added that Christians should not proselytize: “Our Catholic friends in Algeria, who have been here for fifty years, have never tried to convert anyone, although they do have the right to witness to their faith. This, in spite of the fact that the current pope frequently recalls the central nature of the evangelizing mission for the Catholic Church.”

“Last December,” Cherif added, “the Vatican published a doctrinal note that reaffirms the mission of evangelizing non-Catholics. . . . Sometimes, nonetheless, after leaving to evangelize the world, many priests and pastors have set themselves to learn from the people they have encountered and from their culture, without necessarily seeking to divert them from their original religion.”

Cherif is one of the 138 Islamic scholars who will meet with the Vatican next November as part of the Muslim response to Benedict XVI’s September 2006 Regensburg address.

As Magister reports, unease at the prospect of Catholic efforts to evangelize Muslims overshadows the high-profile efforts at interreligious dialogue now underway, notably the June 4 conference in Mecca at which Saudi King Abdullah called for “meetings with brothers belong to other faiths.” On June 9, Pope Benedict XVI met with the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, which had convened in Rome under Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran to draft new guidelines for Catholic clergy to interact with other religions.

Cardinal Tauran stated that evangelization will be at the center of such interaction: “We know that the Holy Spirit works in every man and every woman, independently of his religious or spiritual creed. But on the other hand, we must proclaim that Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. God has revealed to us the truth about God and the truth about man, and for us this is the Good News. We cannot hide this truth under a bushel basket.”

In a June 10 interview with terrasanta.net, Cardinal Tauran put the dialogue with Muslims in context: “What was interesting about our discussions was that we did not concentrate on Islam, because in a way we are being held hostage by Islam a little bit. Islam is very important but there are also other great Asiatic religious traditions. Islam is one religion.” Regarding the Saudi conference, the cardinal said, “The King has in mind this tripartite dialogue between Christians, Muslims and Jews, and I think he’s beginning to convince his own people.”

Magdi Allam, meanwhile, was one of the readers of texts introducing a Mass at the Macerata Stadium before thousands of pilgrims preparing to leave for the Loreto shrine. Angelo Cardinal Bagnasco, the archbishop of Genoa, officiated, and the Mass meeting was addressed by Father Julian Carrion, the president of the Communione e Liberazione movement.

Good point, Steve. That’s the crux of the matter. The rich theology takes some understanding. Do we catechize the laity so that when they hear “ancient bondage” or “ineffable,” they will understand what they mean and have their faith deepened as a result? Or do we dumb the liturgy down to substance-free spiritual sentiment and leave them where they are? Let’s hope the bishops, contra Trautman, decide to go with the former.

Nathaniel calls our attention to Bishop Trautman’s difficulties with the word ineffable as reported in the Erie Times-News. The same newspaper article relates the following:

Trautman called parts of the proposed translation “archaic” and “just clumsy language.” One proposed change, for the first week in Advent, would replace “old way of life” with “ancient bondage,” the Erie bishop said. “Ancient bondage” is very ambiguous and not clear enough to the people,” he said.

It strikes me that the phrase “ancient bondage” conveys much more than “old way of life.” In fact, there is a remarkable amount of doctrine packed into those two little words. They remind us what was wrong with our old way of life, namely that we were in bondage to sin, enslaved by the devil. They remind us not only that our way of life was wrong but that we were powerless to escape it, and therefore needed to be rescued from it — in other words, that we needed a savior. They remind us that this bondage goes way back, indeed back to the very beginning of mankind. That small phrase contains the whole Exodus story and the whole story of redemption. Bishop Trautman would prefer an airy phrase that could be referring to nothing more than a change of occupation.

“A fairly large proportion of the distinguished novels of the last few decades have been written by Catholics and have even been describable as Catholic novels.”

So began a New Yorker book review, penned by a prominent and decidedly non-Catholic author. Needless to say, you’ll have to dig deep into the magazine’s archives to find it. The review goes on: “One reason for this [success] is that the conflict not only between this world and the next world but between sanctity and goodness is a fruitful theme of which the ordinary, unbelieving writer cannot make use.” The year?—1948. The reviewer?—George Orwell.

In the sixty years since George Orwell was reviewing Graham Greene’s novels, the phenomenon of the Catholic novel has shriveled into virtual nonexistence. I just returned to noisy New York after attending the third annual Southwell Institute creative writing workshop, and on the first evening Orwell’s observation was presented to a group of us young writers. “Who are the great Catholic novelists, poets, and playwrights of today?” we were challenged, and there was no quick response. As silence grew, the question was amended: If the human conflicts described by Orwell remain, and if art really can “hold a mirror up to nature”—showing us both good and evil, in all their power and glory—then why is “Catholic fiction” such a musty old phrase?

So much for the woes of modernity, at least for the moment. “The Church needs art,” wrote John Paul the Great in his 1999 Letter to Artists, and art isn’t made in a vacuum or bequeathed by a deus ex machina. It is created by creatures—creatures vibrantly and faithfully imaging their Creator. And who are these Christian artists? “All who are passionately dedicated,” the pope proposed, “to the search for new ‘epiphanies’ of beauty so that through their creative work as artists they may offer these as gifts to the world.”

George Orwell, I think, would agree.

Does the word “ineffable” belong in the liturgy? Donald Trautman, the Catholic bishop of Erie, PA, doesn’t think so, the Erie Times-News reports. Ordinary Catholics won’t know the meaning of the word, he said, so it shouldn’t be in the liturgy. The Times-News reporter verified this at a lunch-time Mass, where most of those filing out at the end were not comfortable with “ineffable.”

At first it might seem like this is all a question of taste, which, the Romans remind us, is not something to argue over. But there’s more than mere taste at issue.

Look at the attitude of catechesis and worship at work here. Much of the tone of the post-Vatican II Church has been one of condescending to the ordinary Catholics in their pews. They won’t understand all that highfalutin language about the faith, the story goes, so we’ll bring it down to what they can understand. Just as adults water the faith down for teenagers in devotional Bibles because they can’t (or don’t want to) really understand God, so priests should water it down for ordinary folks. After all, the laity can’t be expected to want the ineffable when they’ve got jobs and children.

It turns out, however, that we members of the laity are actually pretty bright. Many of us don’t just want spiritual drivel. We can handle real Christianity, and we want it. Instead of dumbing doctrine and prayers down to “our level,” those in ecclesiastical offices should be raising the laity up to understand the mysteries and the rich tradition. We don’t need milk, to paraphrase the Apostle Paul; we need ineffable, rich, spiritual food.

Via Whispers in the Loggia

I’ve been at Princeton for the past couple of days attending a seminar on social science and gender, marriage, and sex. It’s sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute and directed by a young star sociologist at the University of Virginia, Brad Wilcox. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Brad has a column about fatherhood in America.

Here’s the opening:

For millions of children across the U.S., this Sunday will not be a cause for celebration. Because of dramatic increases in divorce and nonmarital childbearing, about 28% of our nation’s children — more than 20 million kids — now live in a household without their father, up from 10 million kids (14%) in 1970, according to a recent Census Bureau report. Moreover, because most of these boys and girls see their dads infrequently (once a month or less), Father’s Day will offer cold comfort to many of these children.

Our nation’s epidemic of fatherlessness is just the most salient indicator of what University of Chicago theologian Don Browning has called the “male problematic” — the tendency of men to live apart from their children and to invest less emotionally and practically in their families than women do.

This situation has not gone unnoticed in America’s houses of worship. Religious leaders, particularly evangelical Protestant ones, have expressed their alarm. “As I review the latest research on family disintegration, I am repeatedly confronted with the same disturbing issue,” recently wrote Dr. James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family. “Boys are in trouble today primarily because their parents, and especially their dads, are distracted, overworked, harassed, exhausted, disinterested, chemically dependent, divorced, unable to cope or simply not there.”

But how successful have churches and synagogues been in getting the men in their congregations to put family first?

Read the entire piece to find out.

In the column, Brad mentions a report he wrote for the Institute for American Values on fatherhood and religion. It was released this week and is available here.