Saturday, January 16, 2016

Pray!

Pope Francis' typical political correctness strikes again.
Flirting with indifferentism.

Why everyone cannot pray together, according to Joseph Cardinal Ratizinger. Three necessary foundational questions need to be answered for that to happen.


1) Who is God? We can pray with each other only if we are agreed who or what God is and if there is therefore basic agreement as to what praying is: a process of dialogue in which I talk to a God who is able to hear and take notice...Any confusion of a personal and an impersonal understanding, of God and the gods, must be excluded. The First Commandment is true, particularly in any possible interreligious prayer.

2) What is Prayer (content and form)? Yet there must also be fundamental agreement--on the basis of the concept of God--about what is worth praying about and what might be the content of prayer...Petitions contrary to those of the Lord's Prayer cannot be for the Christian the subject of interreligious prayer or of any kind of prayer at all.

3) What is True Religion? Any common interreligious prayer would have to be so arranged that the relativistic misinterpretation of faith and prayer can find no foothold in it. This criterion relates not only to Christians, who should not be led astray, but equally well to non-Christians, to whom no impression should be given that "religions" are interchangeable, that the basics of Christian belief are not of ultimate significance and thus replaceable. That would be pointing backward instead of forward, in the history of the way to God.

Truth and Tolerance, San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004, 108-109