John L. Allen Jr., NCR senior correspondent, writes weekly on the goings-on in Vatican and in the church around the world.
While pundits fill the airwaves debating whether the American military surge in Iraq is working, another surge continues to unfold in Iraq and across the Islamic world, one potentially of far greater import for the 21st century: the emergence of Shi'a Islam as an emboldened force, from Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast all the way to Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.
Controversy continued to mount this week surrounding sex abuse charges against one of the highest-profile figures in Italian Catholicism, Fr. Pierino Gelmini, the 82-year-old founder of a movement called Comunità Incontro (Encounter Community), which works with young alcohol and drug addicts. Founded in 1963, the community has 164 centers in Italy and 74 abroad, including Thailand, Bolivia and Brazil, which have served more than 300,000 youth.
If there were any lingering question about whether there's a spiritual boom in China today, it now has a two word answer: Yu Dan.
A 42-year-old female talk show host and pop culture icon, Yu Dan is the author of Notes on Reading the Analects -- a sort of Confucian Chicken Soup for the Soul -- which has sold somewhere between 3 and 4 million copies, making it one of the biggest best-sellers in China since Mao's "Little Red Book." Dan's success illustrates that China has become, according to writer Zha Jianying, the "largest soul market" in the world. With a population of 1.3 billion, China is trying to fill an ideological void left by the collapse of Communism as anything more than a system of political control, and the dislocations of astonishing but uneven levels of economic growth.
One could say that summer 2007 is when the Vatican decided to go green. First came an announcement in June that more than 1,000 photovoltaic panels will be installed atop the Paul VI Audience Hall, allowing the building to utilize solar energy for light, heating and cooling. A month later, the Vatican became the first state in Europe to go completely carbon-neutral, signing an agreement with a Hungarian firm to reforest a sufficiently large swath of Hungary's Bükk National Park to offset its annual CO2 emissions.
Last Friday, I was in Washington, for a symposium that brought together a number of prominent academic and policy analysts -- plus one plebian journalist -- to ponder religious trends in Europe and what they might mean for trans-Atlantic relationships.
In the forty-plus years since the close of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), two schools of thought have circled one another in Catholicism about how to interpret what the council meant. For lack of a better vocabulary, what we might call the "change" school sees Vatican II as a significant innovation in Catholic life, ushering in a new period of reform in liturgy, doctrine, and pastoral practice. The "continuity" school instead stresses a smooth continuum between Vatican II and previous councils.
Catholic environmentalism these days seems to be an instinct in search of a cause. One can find impressive traces of awareness, from John Paul II's 1990 call for "ecological conversion," to grass-roots initiatives such as the Genesis Farm founded by the Dominican Sisters of Caldwell, N.J. Yet so far no single defining moment has come along to crank up Catholic activism in a way that changes the social and political equation.
Cultures invent new words when they've got new things to name, and so it is with the American church, which has recently contributed a new bit of taxonomy to Catholic conversation: "lay ecclesial ministry." The term refers to a new class of lay professionals performing tasks that were once the near-exclusive province of priests, such as parish administration, bereavement counseling and sick calls, sacramental preparation, liturgical planning, catechesis, faith formation, and a host of other roles. Today's reality is that, save for Mass and the other sacraments, most people's experience of pastoral ministry in the Catholic church is increasingly with a lay person rather than a priest.
The case for despair these days in Christian/Muslim relations is depressingly easy to make. June isn't even over, but so far this month has seen the following anti-Christian incidents in majority Muslim areas:
The case for despair these days in Christian/Muslim relations is depressingly easy to make. June isn't even over, but so far this month has seen the following anti-Christian incidents in majority Muslim areas:
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