Monday, November 27, 2006
WAITING WITH BAITED BREATH
Catholic news seems to be focused on only one thing today as we wait for Benedict to make his historic trip. With prayers, with concern for his safety, with the desire that a better understanding with Islam can result, with longing for peace in the world, and with hope that we can move closer to unity with Orthodoxy, all eyes are focused on Benedict XVI.
Dr. Robert Moynihan's "Inside the Vatican Newsflash" sent in email in part sums up the longing as Moynihan reflects on his arrival in Istanbul:
Here Constantine, recognizing the strategic "lynch-pin" of his empire, which encircled the Mediterranean Sea, set up the city he wished to be called by his name, Constantinople, laying the cornerstone on May 30 in 330 AD, and titling the city "New Rome," much in the manner of "New York." And just as "New York" surpassed York, so "New Rome" in time surpassed Rome, attracting to itself the riches of the east, and developing into "Byzantium." This is the city that the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, contended had reached the highest possible level of human culture, art and artifice, becoming for him a metaphor for all human striving to represent reality in art, for all attempts to shape this sometimes shapeless natural world. In his poem "Sailing to Byzantium" it was the golden nightingale of the emperor which typified the artifice and art of the Byzantines - a nightingale made by a goldsmith, and somehow endowed with the mechanical ability to sing before the lords and ladies of Byzantium.
Thus did this city come to sum up all that the classical world strove to produce in human culture, in architecture, in religion, in art, in mosaics, in legal codes, and even in government, as the Byzantine Empire extended in time from 330 until 1453.
And then, the city fell.
To the Turks.
Who had embraced the Muslim faith.
So ended the glory that was Byzantium, after eleven and a half centuries, and twenty-two centuries after the founding of Rome itself, on the Tiber, in 753 BC.
What the World Needs to Hear
Five hundred and thirty-three years have passed since Byzantium's fall, and on this November in the Year of Our Lord 2006, the Pope of Rome, Benedict XVI, with the eyes of all the world turned upon him, is about to make the most significant journey of his pontificate. He will arrive in Istanbul in two days.
The bishop of old Rome will come to what once was called "new Rome" and here seek to cement the ties of friendship and understanding which have been growing for half a century between the Orthodox and the Catholic world. He is invited here by Patriarch Bartholomew, to celebrate with him the Feast of St. Andrew, the brother of St. Peter, who is believed to have come to this city in the first century, to evangelize Byzantium before it was Byzantium. The feast falls on November 30. Since Patriarch Bartholomew has visited Rome on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, which falls on June 29 each year, the pope has decided it is appropriate to return the gesture, and visit Bartholomew on the Feast of St. Andrew. Christian relations, internal Christian matters, are one chief motivation of this trip: the healing of the "Great Schism" which has divided the Orthodox - the Eastern Christians - from the Roman Catholics since 1054, now 952 years.
But there is another focus of this trip, which destiny, or history, or personal choice - it is impossible to say which - has imposed. And that is the dialogue, and confrontation, with Islam.
For this trip falls 77 days after Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg, Germany, where he spoke of Islam, and cited a Byzantine emperor's accusation that Islam was spread by coercion, by force. He spoke also of the West's own form of "violence" and "irrationality" in its denial of the transcendent. Indeed, his comments were more directed toward the West and the danger of its renunciation of the transcendent than they were toward Islam and its alleged embrace of coercion in matters of religion.
But his words fell like sparks on dry tinder and enflamed outrage throughout the world. Many Muslims felt the pope had insulted their faith. (Many secularists said he had done precisely that, though it is difficult to see what standing they have to make comments in this matter.) In any case, following the Regensburg talk, which occurred precisely five years and one day after 9/11 and the fall of the Twin Towers in New York City, the prospects and significance of this papal trip to Istanbul altered. Instead of concentrating on Christian questions, on relations with the Orthodox, the trip was transformed into an opportunity to attempt to grasp and clarify the issues that now increasingly divide the Muslim world from the post-Christian West.
These coming days in Istanbul promise to set the pope within a spotlight of attention to his every word, his every nuance of phrase, to discern whether he, as the "moral authority of the West" - though the West itself no longer recognizes his moral authority, but rejects and often mocks it - has something of importance to say to the entire world at this current moment of apparent impasse.
As the war in Iraq burns on; as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians remains unresolved; as the direction of European culture seems to hang in the balance with the decision of whether to permit Turkey to enter the European Union; as the problems of world energy supplies seem to grow more acute, making the Middle East ever more central to the world's economic future - as all these elements come together in November 2006 in Istanbul, the pope is preparing his words carefully. What will he say?
What, indeed, will he say? And what will be the world's reactions?
May God protect him and grant him wisdom. May he speak with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. May he find the words that the world needs to hear.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for Benedict.
