the pope and Islam

On my recent plane flight to Germany, I caught up on a stackful of New Yorkers.  One of the articles was The Pope and Islam. Given my recent interest in Catholicism, this was an interesting article for me. The pope was not presented in a particularly good light; it was a political/critical analysis of the new ideologies put in place by Benedict.

While I was reading this article, my seatmate started chatting with me. On flights these days, I find that while I do not seek out conversation, I do start to chat if someone makes an overture. As we we continued chatting, she revealed more about herself. She grew up in Chicago but had been living in Rome for more than 20 years. She travels a lot, with recording/interviewing equipment. She had been in town for the big to-do for Cardinal George’s tenth anniversary as Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Chicago. George apparently has dinner at her house whenever he is in Rome. She works now for EWTN [sadly enough, I knew that this was the Catholic Cable Channel]. And then the biggie: she worked for almost 20 years in the Vatican’s press office, as the primary English writer and followed the pope around on some (all?) of his trips. She had been in Regensberg when the current pope made his unfortunate reference to the Prophet Muhammed.

I kept my opinions to myself and asked more about her work, her family, etc. We were going to be on this flight for 8 hours, and we were sitting very close to each other. She was on the inside of all of the Catholic in-groups. Apparently some large percentage (70%?) of all Vatican web site readers read the site in English. She had been around when the previous pope died and Benedict was elected. She had a really good explanation for why Benedict said what he had said in Regensburg - and she wasn’t ‘explaining’ it away. It was just a part of her to know that the pope was speaking from his heart, he is a great theologian, etc.

At the end of the flight, after breakfast, I said that I was reading this article in the New Yorker, and asked if she had seen it. She hadn’t. So I ripped it out so she could take it. I don’t think people will think this is heresy, actually.  I have a better impression of the current Catholic church than that.  I think that they accept dissenting opinions as opinions and don’t try to suppress the news media’s opinions about the church.  Like those Scientologists.

Posted by Marie on May 13th, 2007 under Uncategorized

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