Vatican Seeks Common Purpose Talks With Atheists, Agnostics

A view of Paris from atop Notre Dame Cathedral. Wiki Commons.RedTracker| The Vatican has launched a series of public dialogues with atheists and agnostics worldwide, report’s Canada’s National Post. The first event was held in Paris this past week, a country where a strong secular culture has rejected religion and specifically Catholicism as a leading voice in civic debates.

The dialogues, called “Courtyard of the Gentiles” after the part of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem where Jews and non-Jews met, will continue in at least 16 cities in Europe and North America over the next two years. They include Italy, Albania, Sweden, Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Spain, Russia and the United States.

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s culture minister, told participants at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) the dialogue was meant not to confront believers and atheists but to seek common ground.

Evidence of our own confusion and distrust of the Vatican lies in quotes from former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, addressing an honour killing in Italy, in which a Pakistani murdered his daughter in Italy, for behaving as freely as Italian youths.

“Democratic societies are founded on the hypothesis that everyone can differentiate between just and unjust, good and evil, and everyone can find the limits” he said. “If one is no longer conscious of this, then democracy doesn’t work anymore.”

Is Giuliano commenting on the father or the daughter?

Given the Vatican’s position on women worldwide, sentencing them to death from AIDS over lack of condoms, and maternal death and illness, as well as extreme poverty and lack of education because of endless childbearing, we assume that the Vatican is asserting that secularism gives traditional fathers provocation to commit extreme acts against daughters.

Our distrust of the Vatican does not reflect our views regarding the importance of spirituality in our lives.

The National Post reports that Amato did not present Christianity as the only moral compass, the only way to counter the problems ‘challenging affluent liberal societies.’

Even Ravasi, despite his Roman collar, did not present his views as a sermon for more Catholicism. Instead of the Gospels, he quoted secular thinkers such as the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges.