Ratzinger new pope - Title will be Benedict XVI [View All]

[Mandate My Ass]

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formerly the Vatican’s chief doctrinal officer, a uniter, not a divider.

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By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
NCR Staff
Rome


Aiming to stop a new movement in Catholic theology in its tracks, the Vatican issued a major document this week emphatically denying that other world religions can offer salvation independent of Christianity and insisting that making converts to Catholicism remains an “urgent duty.”

The push within Catholicism to accept other religions as vehicles for divine revelation and saving power is often called the “theology of religious pluralism,” and is most closely linked to theologians and bishops in Asia. One consequence of this view is that dialogue with members of other religions, rather than attempts to convert them, becomes the focus of interreligious exchange.

The new document, titled Dominus Iesus, or “The Lord Jesus,” and presented by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in a Sept. 5 news conference, firmly rejects this stance. Ratzinger, the Vatican’s chief doctrinal officer, was joined at the news conference by his top assistant, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, and by two priests who worked on the document: Salesian Fr. Angelo Amato, vice rector of the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome, and Msgr. Fernando Ocáriz, vicar general of Opus Dei.

While allowing that followers of other religions can be saved (though only in a mysterious fashion and only through the grace of Christ), Dominus Iesus insists they are nevertheless in a “gravely deficient situation” in comparison to Christians who alone “have the fullness of the means of salvation.” The full name of the document is “Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church.”

The document was swiftly branded a “pastoral disaster” by theologians involved in interreligious dialogue. In Asia, some experts predicted it could inflame already tense relations between Catholicism and other religious communities.

http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives/091500/091500a.htm