....even of that horn ...
...whose look was more stout than his fellows.
Daniel 7:20
"Pope Francis aspires to be the "chairman of the board" for religious moderates around the world, and two recent bits of blowback from hardliners within both Hinduism and Islam could be taken to suggest that he's getting through.
Pope Francis gets high marks for his inter-religious outreach, which has been a core feature of his papacy from the beginning.
Since then, he’s traveled to Israel and impressed Jews with his commitment to the Jewish/Christian relationship, he’s become only the second pope to enter a Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka, and, while in the country, he also donned a saffron robe given to him by a Hindu holy man during an interfaith meeting.
Of course, there have been discordant notes. In Sri Lanka, for instance, hardline Buddhist leader Galagoda Atte Gnanasara largely dismissed the pope’s gestures as meaningless until he apologized for “atrocities committed by Christian colonial governments in South Asia.”
Recently, Francis has attracted two other bits of interfaith blowback.
In mid-June, an Indian politician named Gorakhpur Yogi Adityanath, who’s linked to the country’s right-wing Hindu nationalist movements, ripped the pope’s decision to proclaim Mother Teresa a saint on Sept. 4, claiming the iconic “apostle of the poor” had been engaged in a plot to “Christianize” India.
Then last Saturday, Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nurettin Canikli, blasted the pope’s use of the word “genocide” to describe the slaughter of Armenians in 1915 by the Ottomans, asserting that it reflected a “crusader’s mentality.”
In truth, neither criticism of Pope Francis is really all that surprising - especially the Turkish reaction, since it’s more or less pro forma anytime a world leader or body recognizes the Armenian genocide.
While the substance of such complaints may not have much merit, there’s nevertheless a sense in
Obviously without using that language, that’s a role to which every recent pope has aspired - trying to galvanize a coalition of authoritative moderates within the world’s religious traditions to demonstrate that, as much as religion can be part of the problem, it is also
On the interfaith front, the recent bricks hurled at Francis from within both Hinduism and Islam could actually be seen not as a problem, but as proof that the “chairman of the board” has their attention."
Crux
