GERMANY: Pope Benedict XVI has said that intercultural dialogue with the Islamic world is doomed to failure as long as the Christian world is "deaf to the divine".
The German pope said Mass and visited the grave of his parents in his "true home" of Regensburg, where he has a house and taught theology for eight years from 1969.
Back at his old podium, the university professor re-emerged in a dense lecture on "faith and reason" and the relationship between Christianity and Islam.
"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures," he said. The aversion to religious "insights" that underlies western rationality created an "unacceptable restriction" of humanity.
"The world's profoundly religious cultures see [ the] exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions," he said. Only a new marriage of faith and reason would overcome "the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable".
The pope had strong words for the Islamic world too, drawing on remarks of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, on jihad or holy war.
"God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature," said the pope, quoting the emperor. "To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death . . ." The pope was elaborating on his homily at an open-air Mass earlier in the day about the "the ways God's image can be destroyed by hatred and fanaticism".
He called on Catholics to "proclaim confidently" that their God has a "human face". In an evening vespers with leaders of other faiths, he called for joint action to help non-believers discover God.
