Yes, the Pope Is Catholic - He Gets To Decide What Catholicism Is. You Don't.
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.
If a liberal Catholic got elected Pope, then he could make the rules.
Many people - Jews, Catholics, and Muslims - really do treat their religion as just one more subculture that they occasionally participate in. We've got names for them: High Holiday Jews, Cafeteria Catholics, Ramadan Muslims. And the way that they want to participate is obviously not something that anyone outside of friends and family should really be concerned about - for all the fact that it's a big planet, things seem to go badly every single time a country tries to start regulating how often people pray.
But the self-esteem idiocy of the 1970s and 80s has created a situation where literally millions of people nonetheless insist that they are being religious even though they're not really praying or taking sacraments / mitzvoth or studying canonical texts. Rather, they're doing whatever they want but still insisting that because they 'feel' like it's part of their religion, it is part of their religion. We've heard justifications like: (a) it makes them feel closer to something they don't understand or (b) because 'God is always present in everything they do' or (c) because they have a special relationship with the divine and this is how they and God communicate. These are all incredibly stupid things to believe.
Some religions hold that followers establish a personal relationship, no doubt. But that doesn't mean that any religion supports your ability to choose how to go about establishing that religion. In fact, it is exactly. the. opposite. The entire point of organized religion is that there are revealed truths about the proper way to commune with the divine - so while you're welcome to come up with your own little rituals, and while it could well be that no one will particularly mind when you do, you can't unilaterally decide that you're participating in the religious life of your religious community. The trick here, of course, is in the irreducible tension between an individual and a community (irreducible because every time you try to get rid of it a couple million people die and suddenly there it is again). Religions are social institutions that have a life of their own, albeit one that is constantly being pushed and pulled by individuals. How much can an individual get away with and still be part of that community? It depends on the community, the individual, and what they're trying to do - but as a theoretical matter, it can't be that anything goes just because it 'feels right' to you.
Seriously, don't pretend that you can decide for yourself what's part of your religion based on what 'feels right'. Or rather, feel free too, but don't make the rest of us cringe when you insist that you get to declare what you're doing part of an age-old set of norms, guidelines, and beliefs worked out painstakingly over thousands of years. And certainly don't write something like this...
One of the things I learned as a young child in church was never to spit in the church. It was a very bad thing and I think I was four or five. I haven't done it since so I must have learned something. You don't do or say things that will disrespect your faith or anyone else's. One of the other things I have learned as an adult with faith is that God does not favor one faith over the other. He or she and I have a bond that nobody else will understand because it is simply between me and my God. I have to admire my Muslim friends and respect their right to have that same personal relationship with God too.
You have to ask yourself where he "learned" that such a comfortably tolerant and wonderfully accepting concept was Catholic. Not from the New Testament (no one shall get to the Father etc etc). Not from the Hebrew Scriptures (Chosen People, etc). It's nice that he has a bond that nobody understands with the divine presence, but we usually have a name for people who go around asserting the "uniqueness" of their personal relationship to God (old: prophets, new: lunatics). Where did people get this idea that they could just have any old relationship with the divine and declare that it fit within their religion and so they were a devote x (Catholic, Jew, Muslim, etc)? How did this happen? Because before, there were very large books written by very smart people who said 'there are only certain ways to have what we could reasonably call a Catholic (or Jewish or Muslim) relationship with God'. They didn't define those ways, but they sketched out their limitations and contours. If you have a relationship with a God that is both all Good and all Evil, you do not have a Catholic relationship to God. We don't care how 'intuitive' Manichaeism, sounds to you, you can't take it and then declare it Catholic - they call that 'heretical'. Do multiculturalists who claim to be Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim claim to fall outside of these basic frameworks, established by the best thinkers that Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam have produced? Or does this guy think that the Catholic framework does not require the belief that God favors one faith over others?
And just to definitively end the debate, productive interfaith dialogue is more or less impossible on a large scale for... er... logistical reasons:
I think we can safely say that a "genuine dialogue of cultures and religions" is unlikely to occur considering that one of the cultures and one of the religions seems to be in a constant state of quasi-psychotic paranoid agitation. Having adopted the mantle of victimhood, muslims seem intent on demonstrating their persistent irrationality and the absurd lengths they will go to in order to remain in denial about what the increasingly fanatical adherents of their religion are doing around the world.
Oh we dunno - maybe you can have successful dialogue with crazed and illiterate mobs that are burning you in effigy because of something someone told them that you said. It could happen.
