Cardinal announces Vatican U-turn on interfaith council

BY MARK GREAVES AND EDWARD PENTIN IN ROME
THE VATICAN council responsible for dialogue with other religions is to be restored as an independent department one year after it was controversially "downgraded".
The decision marks a reversal of the most significant curial reform since the start of Benedict XVI's pontificate.
It is widely seen as an effort to improve relations between the Vatican and the Muslim world after the controversy caused by the Pontiff's Regensburg speech last September.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's Secretary of State, told Italian newspaper La Stampa that the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue would be "set up again as a dieastery in its own right".
The cardinal added: "The change demonstrates the importance of interreligious dialogue for the Secretariat of State."
In the interview Cardinal Bertone also acknowledged that the Holy See had made renewed efforts to engage with Islamic leaders in the last few months.
"After Benedict XVI's lecture at Regensburg the Church relaunched dialogue also with the political and religious authorities of the other religions," the cardinal said.
In March 2006 the Pope announced that the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue would be combined with the Pontifical Council for Culture under the authority of a single prelate.
The two agencies remained intact but Cardinal Paul Poupard became president of both, replacing Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald as head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. A Vatican official downplayed Cardinal Bertone's comments, suggesting that they were simply a result of 77-year-old Cardinal Poupard nearing his retirement.
The official said that there had always been considerable overlap between the two departments even when they were separate entities.
"When Archbishop Fitzgerald was president he and [Cardinal] Poupard would meet each other at the same conferences and ask what they were both doing there," he explained.
But the source added that Cardinal Poupard had been overstretched since he took on the work of both departments.
"He has had his hands full," he said, "and hasn't had time to follow everything."
There are also rumours that this year will see huge changes to the make-up of the curia.
"I've heard that before the year's end," the Vatican source said, "there will be anything up to 42 nominations to senior curial positions, that is at the under-secretary, secretary and president or prefect level."
The re-establishment of the department as a separate entity comes eight months after the Pope's Regensburg lecture provoked widespread hostility among Muslims.
During the talk on faith and reason the Pontiff quoted a 14thcentury Byzantine emperor as saying that Islam had brought only evil to the world and had been spread by violence.
In the following days Muslim extremists in the Middle East attacked churches and burned effigies of the Pope and an Italian nun in Somalia was shot dead.
The Pope twice said that he regretted any misunderstanding that his comments had caused. His visit to Turkey in November, when he appeared to pray with an imam in Istanbul's Blue Mosque, also helped to repair the Church's relationship with Islam.
But the effects of the furore have proved to be long-lasting. Before a meeting with the Pope last month the former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said that wounds between Christians and Muslims were still "very deep".
Muslims involved in dialogue with the Church also say that the removal of Archbishop Fitzgerald from the Vatican was a blow to Catholic-Muslim reladons.
The British archbishop speaks Arabic fluently and is regarded as the Vatican's most senior expert on Islam.
Relations between Catholics and Jews have also been buffeted by controversy in recent months.
In April the nuncio to Israel threatened to boycott a Holocaust memorial at the Yad Vashem museum because of a caption at the site that criticised Pius )CII.
But the nuncio backed down from the threat — which had been made in a private letter — after the museum released a statement expressing "shock and disappointment".
Archbishop Fitzgerald told The Catholic Herald this week that he did not expect to return to Rome to fill his old post.
Archbishop Bruno Forte of Chieti-Vasto, Bishop Reno Fisichella, rector of the Pontifical Lateran University, and Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, have instead been suggested as possible replacements for Cardinal Poupard.
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