The Last Word.

As you can probably guess I am a bit of a pluralist when it comes to religious belief – or at least more so than many, if not all of my fellow seminarians. As time here has progressed I have been more and more shocked by the attitude of some students and student priests towards other Christian denominations and religions. I couldn’t believe some of the comments, especially from one student priest in the house. He is usually a genuinely nice person, but when you get him talking about Islam, he morphs into someone completely different. It begs the question, how many of the students here have actually sat down and had a chat with a Muslim or person of any other religion?

I took these concerns to my spiritual director (a fellow Geordie). Who unequivocally said that there is no place in the Catholic faith for religious intolerance of any kind. He then proceeded to point me towards some Vatican documents, one from the Second Vatican Council, ‘Nostra Aetate’, concerning the Church’s relationship and regard for non-Christian religions and ‘Dominus Iesus’ an encyclical launched in response to pluralist and relativistic attitudes, stating that the Church has the fullness of salvation in Jesus and anything else is deficient.

It goes without saying that every religion believes it has the fullness of truth and I don’t think anyone would argue with that. . ‘Nostra Aetate’ seemed to be very open to the possibility of dialogue and spoke of the inherent goodness in all religion, but, once I began to read ‘Dominus Iesus’ I felt the Church had taken a step backwards and become very arrogant. I was shocked by some of the content. One of the statements in particular caught my attention; “Religions other than Christianity are considered to be "gravely deficient." Their rituals can constitute "an obstacle to salvation" for their followers.” It also spoke of religious dialogue being important for the purpose of evangelisation;

“The Church has been willed by God and instituted by Christ to be, in the fullness of time, the sign and instrument of the divine plan of salvation. . . . Against this background it becomes easier to see why and in what sense inter-religious dialogue is an integral element of the Church's evangelizing mission.”

Now this to me seems to come across as incredibly arrogant and egocentric. The Church is, in effect, putting down other religions and saying that they are not as important as it is. The document even goes so far as to say that; "Churches such as the Church of England, where the apostolic succession of bishops from the time of St. Peter is disputed by Rome, and churches without bishops, are not considered 'proper' churches." They suffer from "defects."
Now undoubtedly statements like this sparked a great deal of reaction form the Church of England and representatives of other faith communities. The World Council of Churches stated that; “This document not only damages unity, but could be in danger of stopping relations altogether.”

Vikram Masson (A Hindu) is a co-chairperson of Navya Shastra wrote in response to the document that:

"Ratzinger has described Hindu meditative practices as 'auto-erotic' and has stated that the Hindu doctrine of karma is 'morally cruel.' Clearly he is misinformed about the central practices and tenets which bind the world's 800 million Hindus."

The news release continued: "At a time when religions must work together to spiritually regenerate an increasingly secular planet, such doctrinal narrowness and lack of understanding of other traditions will only serve a divisive function."

There were many more angry responses to the document, each one essentially stating that the Catholic Church is unequivocally wrong and inward looking.

I don’t know what to think on this matter. When reading the responses of the other religions and Christian denominations to this document, it was like reading a political manifesto from an opposition party belittling the party in power. None of them simply said the Catholic Church is entitled to its views but I don’t agree with them because of x, y and z. People seem to have such clear ideas on what God is; father figure, personality watching over them, distant, close etc. Many religions are fighting for their right to monopolise God and place him in a nice tidy package. Surely it doesn’t matter what you believe - be that ‘traditional’ spirituality or not - as long as it works for you and leads you to compassion. To take a quote from Karen Armstrong (an ex-nun and religious writer) “Nobody has the last word on God.”