Alberto Melloni
If the Pope opened the courtyard of the Gentiles
dialogue with atheists, a problem (historical and lexical) for outstanding Church
Corriere della Sera - January 5, 2010
"The Church should also open today a kind of "Court of the Gentiles", where men can engage in some way to God, without knowing it and before they have found the 'access to its mystery. " So Pope Benedict XVI, in his speech for the Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia, proposed a formulation of the relationship between faith community and humanity in search of the lexical and historical influences which deserve to be carefully unraveled. The "yard" to which the Pope was reported in the temple of Jerusalem by Herod riadornato and ended a few years before Titus destroyed. In that majestic structure, after the doors and porches, c 'was the' Hall of the Gentiles: a large square where they were vendors and money changers - those which Jesus drives out to purify the heat of the prophet also the space where they could enter the uncircumcised peoples 'others', as distinct from what it was 'the' people of the promise. Over a railing that enclosed the atrium, in addition to writing threatening death to the uncircumcised, which had breached that boundary profanely sacred, was the heart of the temple with the place of worship and sacrifice. These areas were excluded from the 'peoples' goyim in Hebrew, ethni in greek, latin gentiles from the plural of gens.
These "people" who speak the language born of Babel, in the tradition rabbinic are not numerous, but they are commensurate with the Menorah, the seven candles which, says the Hebrew text Hachajim Ohr, "correspond to the Gentile nations, who are seventy. Each alludes to ten, as they shine all the light in front of 'the West', namely Israel. When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, shows how the Gentiles "peoples" of the Torah, is still in a culture that recognizes the role of Israel infungibile. What about Latin Church of the Gentiles, the daughter of Grace, in front of a Church of Jews coming from the Law already point: and in Paul, 'the apostle to the Gentiles', the access to a Gospel which now is independent from circumcision . But the Gentiles whenever changes meaning in Christianity faces the claim to have "replaced" Israel to be his "successor" in the promises (for this ideology is often used the 'anglismo supersessionism), forcing the expressions that the New Testament pronounced almost like the paradoxes of Grace. We have many traces of this reshaping of the term in the patristic and medieval theology, until the 'work of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles headed: written around 1260, this treatise devotes three of the four books that make up the truth accessible to reason because it intends to discuss with Muslims, the Gentiles of the thirteenth century, which boasts of the Qur'anic revelation 'to be the most rational among the rigor of 'Jewish observance and the folly of the Christian cross. Today, those who are the Gentiles? Benedict XVI - a theologian who had written a 'work on the new people of God (Queriniana) - returns on this line and shows how the Gentiles, evoking the space of' lobby in the Herodian temple, not the uncircumcised, but the atheists. Those non-believers before the "new evangelization" (key word 'order of the Church wojtyliana), says the Pope, "they are frightened," because "they do not want to see themselves as objects of mission, nor give up their freedom of thought and will. " To those who "want the Pure and the Great, although their remains unknown God", Benedict XVI offers a 'equal attention attractive than the predecessor to the men of religion and interpretation of their anxiety similar to the bankruptcy of Paul preaching to 'the unknown God Areopagus in Athens. The theme - already crucial to the Council in the commission of which Wojtyla was a member - has been in recent years of experience very significant and far between. One was that started 23 years ago in Milan by Cardinal Martini, and known as the "chair of the non-believers": it was born, according to Martini, the fact that "each one of us (ha) in itself a non-believer and a believer that speak in that they question each other, continually reminding the prickly questions' to an 'other', the chair was not therefore a space for outsiders, but a way appropriated for that internal dialogue without which there is no human maturity and faith. Of everything 'another sign the vision of "cultural project" launched by Cardinal Ruini years later by opening the recent conference on God, he expressed the conviction that the dynamics disobedience / Grace joins the' humanity, but the question of meaning, 'not There is no room for neutrality: the 'direction of life is reflected for all, believers, atheists, agnostics, and the answer even before the weight we give to the question about God "' s former president of the CEI therefore," the 'existence of a personal God, while solidly defensible, is not the subject of an apodictic demonstration, but still the 'best guess'. Benedict XVI makes his proposal for the less distinct than those: the Pope's' narrative rests on the Gospel (Jesus is camouflaged among the sinners and the Gentiles, to hear the Baptist and of his anger) does not develop a theology of the Church of Dear Pauline type. He begins with the conviction that God is an issue that the Church must keep open to all, a "nostalgia" that the 'apostolate of bishops not to let it off: it can be grown in that' Hall said at the opening of the Gentiles and is not connected at random to interreligious dialogue. What Benedict XVI, in fact, is an approach that the theology of religions would call 'inclusive' because it seeks to show how the living conditions of non-Christian is already part of the plan of salvation announced by Jesus But history teaches that the inclusive formulas have strange destinies. Take extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, "outside the Church there 'is no salvation": the way in which Origen was explained as the prostitute Rahab, who helps explorers of Israel during' Exodus, had become part of the history of salvation and 'the future of a Church which participates in the faith, a few centuries later, that formula was so open pronounced in exactly the opposite way: to say that salvation would belong only to the children of the Roman Church and found a catechesis of the contempt of the' other of which Jubilee would made mea culpa in the millennium. What will happen 's hope the pope will say the time for debate has now shown in a figure - that of the Gentiles - that seemed to have disappeared from the lexicon and that always speaks to the children of Abraham'. PLAYBACK RESTRICTED theologians and faith St. Thomas Aquinas' (1225-1274), author of "Summa Contra Gentiles" Pope Benedict XVI during the midnight mass in St. Peter's St. Jerome (347-420) translated the Bible in Latin (the famous "Vulgate")
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