Muslim reactions to the Pope's remarks are "politicised", Moscow Patriarchate says
Moscow (AsiaNews) The Russian Orthodox Church has come to the defence of Pope Benedict XVI. Believing that his remarks have not been correctly interpreted, it urges Muslims to give "more balanced assessments to [the Pope's] statements and lectures on Islam".
"The harsh reaction of some in the Islamic community to the address of the Roman pontiff to an academic audience in the context of modern theological discussion appears to be inadequate," wrote Igumen Filaret Bulekov, the Moscow Patriarchate's observer at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, in an article published on Tuesday in the Russian daily Vedemosti.
For Father Bulekov, this reaction was not so much a disagreement of representatives of one religion with the attitude of a theologian expressing the position of another religion as 'a politicized assessment of a religious statement".
"The non-religious nature of some protests, hostile to any dialogue, has been revealed in their rude and sometimes even aggressive forms as well as in the fact that those who expressed this protests before cameras in the streets were apparently ignorant of the full text of the Pope Benedict XVI's lecture and received incomplete and distorted information about its contents from incompetent or confrontational sources', he wrote.
At the same time, he remarked that not all the statements made by Muslim leaders to their coreligionists concerning Christianity can be regarded as quite tolerant and "inoffensive" for Christians.
"Yet we have not witnessed so far any protests or violent actions on the part of Christians similar to the reaction to a fragment from the pope's lecture, lifted out of its context," he added.
For this reason, he pointed out that the Muslim world should "meet us halfway on our way to true dialogue" if it really wants to be understood and heard in Europe and in Christendom as a whole.
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02/12/2021 10:41
06/12/2008
