Scottish Catholic Observer

Okay, fingers on the buzzers. According to the latest census 65 per cent of Scots identify themselves as Christian but what is the next largest religious category? Judaism?  Islam? Hinduism? Well the answer with 28 per cent is… no religion.

And in terms of everyday behaviour that figure is probably much higher. As the late Cardinal Thomas Winning once observed: “If truth be told, we Scots live as though God didn’t exist. Our culture is a culture of practical atheism.” Well, Pope Benedict XVI has a message for all such agnostics and atheists—let’s talk.

That is why the Holy Father took the step of inviting some significant agnostic and atheistic voices—including the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva—to his World Day for Peace in Assisi last week.

The Pope told the gathering of world religious leaders that agnostics are ‘people to whom the gift of faith has not been given, but who are nevertheless on the lookout for truth, searching for God.’

The week previous during a Vatican audience I attended, Pope Benedict analysed the intellectual cul-de-sac that many agnostics find themselves in.

“Modern man is often confused and cannot find answers to the many questions which trouble his mind in reference to the meaning of life,” he said, and yet we “cannot avoid these questions which touch on the very meaning of self and of reality.”

Hence modern man often despairs and simply withdraws ‘from the search for the essential meaning of life,’ settling instead for ‘things which give him fleeting happiness, a moment’s satisfaction, but which soon leaves him unhappy and unsatisfied.’

Thus Pope Benedict is boldly launching a New Evangelisation that aims to re-propose Jesus Christ to western nations, such as Scotland, in a way that is intelligent, reasonable and compelling.

His firm belief is that if all things emanate from God—faith, reason and science included then all these things should be compatible one with the other and, thus, can all intellectually assist modern man to find his way back to God.

In the words of his Papal predecessor, St Peter himself, Pope Benedict aims to ‘give reason for the hope that is within,’ particularly to those many agnostics who have good hearts.

As he said last month in the German town of Freiburg, ‘agnostics who are constantly exercised by the question of God, those who long for a pure heart but suffer on account of our sin, are closer to the Kingdom of God than believers whose life of faith is ‘routine’ and who regard the Church merely as an institution, without letting their hearts be touched by faith.’

The Proclaimers once sang, “Lord I want to be a Christian, in my heart.” Pope Benedict believes in beginning with the 21st century mind in the firm hope that the heart will then follow.

Catholics and the throne

So Commonwealth leaders have decided to permit the British monarch to be married to a Catholic although not actually to be a Catholic themselves. Two cheers? Well up to a point.

As an eminent canon lawyer in Rome pointed out to me this week, the proposed rule change will make no difference. Why? Well, the Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law—Canon 1125 —permits a mixed marriage when the Catholic party makes ‘a sincere promise to do all in his or her power in order that all the children be Baptised and brought up in the Catholic Church.’

Think the Royal Family will go for that one? Naw. Neither do I.

Pope Pius XII

Gary Krupp is perhaps an unlikely front man in the campaign to clear the name of wartime Pope Pius XII of anti-Semitic accusations.

“We grew up hating the name of Pius XII. We believed that he was anti-Semitic, we believed that he was a Nazi collaborator,” he told me upon a visit to Rome last week. All that changed five years ago when Gary began to delve into the archives which, he says ‘completely disproved everything we had believed. My emotions then went from shock to anger. I was lied to.’

He explained to me how the actions of Pope Pius actually saved an estimated 882,000 Jewish lives during the war. What is more,  he has amassed 46,000 pages of original documents and news articles as well as eyewitness and scholarly interviews to make his case.

That includes evidence that the Soviet KGB were behind the 1963 play The Deputy which began the tarnishing of Pius’s wartime reputation which, up until then, had been a heroic one. Their aim says Gary, was to diminish the moral standing of the papacy as well as drive a wedge between Jews and Catholics. Want to make your own mind up on the issue? Go to his “Pave the Way Foundation” website at http:www.ptwf.org and judge for yourself.

n David Kerr is the Rome correspondent for a US-based news agency. He is also a former SNP parliamentary candidate