The newest
Pope and leader of the Catholic faith from the Vatican, Francis, is working on
building bonds between the world’s other major religion (by number of followers
alone, at least), Islam. Pope Francis is discouraged by the suffering that he
sees around him and feels that there is a more productive way to affect positive
change, namely by forging better relations with Islam and its charitable and
humanitarian capacity. He stressed the necessity of people of faith banding
together to help perform positive acts the world over.
Moreover, the
Pope has divisions within Catholicism that he has to deal with as well. There
are growing numbers of Catholics who no longer feel that contraception and
other traditionally forbidden facets of life for those who follow the direction
of the Church, especially in the West, while “African Catholics have said they
want the new pope to champion traditional Church teachings.”
This was a
shorter article than I normally would use, and it is from a source that is not
quite on par with a site like Al Jazeera or the BBC, however I think despite
all this there is a lot packed in. The necessity of coming to terms with the
fact that there are two very powerful faiths and that there are some equally
powerful divisions within the Pope’s own infrastructure – both of these aspects
will affect how the papacy works for the duration of his tenure in office.
Islam and
Catholicism of course have had a historically tortured relationship, and in the
Middle East the Crusades are not as much a thing of the past as they are in the
West. The stereotypes of Islam are also dangerous, but so are the beliefs about
Catholics that some people have; in England they still are not technically
allowed to have a Catholic Prime Minister and in the United States many
rebelled at the idea of a Catholic President in John F. Kennedy. The Pope is
taking a bigger step than it may seem – from a regime that has the potential to
be very rigid in its tenets, the capacity to try to keep the peace, on both ends,
could help ease the traditional tensions between Catholics and Muslims.
On the home
front for Pope Francis, the fact that Catholics are no longer as united as they
might have been also reflects the division between the more developed countries
of the world and the global south. With modernization may come secularization and
the shift in beliefs, especially in the position of women in the world and what
their rights are, and whether or not contraception and/or abortion are human
rights for women. The Pope has to, in all likelihood, address and appease two
sects of the same faith that used to be more monolithic, especially when
Catholicism used to be confined to Europe.
One of the
buzzwords in education for at least the last ten years is “Twenty-First Century
Learners” – the Pope may now be dealing with “Twenty-First Century Catholicism,”
something that other Popes have not necessarily had to struggle with.
Pope urges dialogue with Islam, more help for the poor
Posted at 4:14 PM on 3/22/13
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