Strange Bedfellows

 

Gaia Pianigiani of the NY Times (online) quotes a statement from the Holy See and personally signed by the free-love Pope Francis himself in reference to Muslims as they celebrate the Feast of Id al-Fitr and the end of their Ramadan month of prayer and fasting.

The "Who Am I To Judge" Pope wrote:

We are called to respect the religion of the other, its teachings, its symbols, its values. We have to bring up our young people to think and speak respectfully of other religions and their followers, to avoid ridiculing or denigrating their convictions and practices.

The last pope to address the Muslim world in such a direct way was John Paul II in 1991 following the Gulf War. Pianigiani continued to recount the 2006 statement by Pope Benedict XVI when he quoted a Byzantine emperor calling Islam “evil and inhuman”; only to later apologize.

      

Of course interreligious dialogue is not new having been perhaps championed by Pope JPII and also later in his Papacy continued by Benedict, but certainly it is becoming increasingly popular into this third millennium, with the current Pope saving special praise for Muslim leaders who had come to salute him at the beginning of his papacy.

 

On the surface of it, the Vatican and Islam do not appear to have much in common. However, there are considerable connections between the two religious powers (for example, see

How the Vatican created Islam).