Our aetateStatement from Second Vatican Council With its first words (translated from Latin “of our time”), it is one of the shortest documents of the great assembly. However, it led to a Copernican turn and, as a result, a complete transformation of the pastoral care of the church hierarchy that remained in effect for centuries.
In fact, has significantly changed the focus of its relations with non-Christian religionswhich from that moment on was viewed positively by the Catholic faith itself.
To understand the twist, it is enough to recall the traditional equestrian image of Santiago Matamoros, whose shrine enjoys great popularity, in which the saint inflicts severe blows on the fallen bodies of the believers of Allah.
This new attitude should not be understood as a shameful abandonment of one’s own beliefs, as the most conservative minds like to interpret it, but rather as a better understanding of the dignity of people and their rights. It is not about diluting differences in syncretism, but about the possibility of being able to build a common future.
Until then, it was common among religious denominations to observe an attitude of reluctance and even resistance, due to the fact that everyone was considered alien to the religious truth revealed by God. It is not that the declaration does not change a single point of church teaching, but there is now a different perspective in the approach.
The main part of the text refers to Judaism, since Christianity finds its own matrix in it and from this origin could even be considered a kind of heresy of the same. The townspeople called Jesus Rabbi.
Christianity and Judaism represent, in a sense, two moments of the same and only truth..
But that wasn’t always the case. Christians described the Jews as a deicide people, to the point that, according to general opinion in Judaism, they cannot be considered completely free from a connection to anti-Semitism. That would actually be a contradiction, because it represents a real denial of one’s own message.
The point is that it was necessary to distinguish one from the other, and some Jewish figures such as Jules Isaac and Abraham Heschel had a decisive influence on this process, changing a history of centuries. There is still very little prejudice among Christians, but it was anchored in a historical archaism, although it was revived on the occasion of the Gaza war.
For this reason, the Declaration has been the subject of particular attention over these 60 years with regard to Judaism and interreligious relations with Judaism Islam. Other religions, such as Hinduism and the BuddhismHowever, they are far from this paradigm.
He Pope Francis has taken significant steps to reduce this difference, owing to one of its most characteristic pastoral precepts: looking at things from the periphery. This attitude has caused some confusion in countries with an ancient Christian tradition, which have interpreted this peripheral interest as a disregard for their historical identity.
In this context the Spanish writer Javier Cercaspublished a bestseller this year that describes a trip to Mongolia that he took almost at the end of his life in the company of the Argentine pope. Cercas is an atheist and thinks that the language of the Church is old, rusty, corny and often incomprehensible, but the story of his itinerary is very friendly and, without meaning to, shows an enormously positive and, one might even say, moving face of Christianity. A few days ago the President of Mongolia, Ukhnaa Khurelsukhreturned this visit at the invitation of the Pope Leo XIV.
Mongolia is a marginalized, poor, depopulated desert country with winter temperatures of 40 degrees below zero. A typical example of a periphery that not even the Vaticanists considered worthy of attention, and they suspected that the Pope was targeting China in a strategic two-way shot. In the text Cercas does not mention anything that could even justify a geopolitical perspective, but upon reading it appears a very evangelical explanation.
One of Francis’ most characteristic features was his desire to bring different religions closer together, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, but also reaching out to the most forgotten Catholic communities in the manner of Jesus Christ..
An example of this is Mongolia, where a handful of Christians live.
One of the rare predecessors John Paul IIFor example, he had the opportunity to meet with the Buddhist patriarch in Bangkok, but there were no significant rapprochements. It was a Pope Francis-style trip to the periphery. On his recent visit to Turkey and Lebanon to mark the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, Leo also appears to be attempting to follow the same path.
Before Our aetateOne could have judged the dialogic attitude as syncretic and accused it of betraying the true faith. Today, however, religions are seen as different expressions of the same connection to the sacred. The statement characterizes Buddhism as a path through which people with a pious and trusting mind can achieve the state of supreme enlightenment.
Buddhist enlightenment is not comparable to Christian mysticism, which consists in union with God, but rather in Nirvana, in which there is a liberation from selfish desires, from things and from the self as a source of human suffering. He ignores the presence of God, as Cercas himself does. But Christianity does not reject what is true and holy in any religionsays the council.
Tibetan Buddhism is practiced in Mongolia. Buddhism is the fourth largest religion in terms of number of adherents and has increasingly spread throughout the Western world in recent decades (particularly since the 1960s), often embodied with a touch of snobbery in gnostic movements such as the New Age.
The Western peoples have called the Asians barbarians and a dull fear has spread of a silent invasion that would take place before our eyes, but they are reversing the accusation and viewing Christians not as paragons of virtue, but rather as filled with materialism and immersed in litigation and a corrosive corruption that results from the abuse of sex and money, to which is now added the new scourge of the drug trade.
The West does not present itself to the world as a true role model, especially not considering its history of long colonialism.
On the other hand, it appears that Christians who are in the process of secularization seem to want to discover in Eastern techniques something that they could not find in their own spiritual heritage. It often happens that you look in your neighbor’s house for what you have in your own.
just died Tatiana Gorichevathe Russian intellectual who was the author of another world bestseller: Talking about God is dangerous. The writer experienced a process exactly the opposite of that of Catholics fascinated by Eastern exoticism: she converted to Christianity in Soviet Russia and in the midst of the communist regime, a machine whose goal was to destroy religion. While many believers replace the rosary with mantras, Tatiana found the rosary in yoga when she was given the divine gift of faith while repeating the Christian Lord’s Prayer.
Talking about God remains dangerous as we witness the increase in economic persecution (one of its manifestations is cancellation) by a culture of single-mindedness, increasingly intolerant of the Other, filled with abnormal crimes and offensive hate speech.. Some observers are beginning to speak of a new hostility to Christians.
A lifestyle that Pope Leo recalled again in his exhortation Dilexit yourselfalien to the highest and sublime values, from market economy thinking to the most vulgar hedonism, which is becoming more and more resistant to the evangelical message. Is this red light a warning?
The bourgeois West, indifferent to the good, seems, according to Spengler, to continue to fall into a sustained decline, and it will not emerge from it – reflects Cercas – unless it has made an effort not only to inculturate faith in the most diverse peoples, but also to make them live their best ideology, which today certainly needs the breath of a new spirit.
It remains to be seen what will happen in the future when this original spirit, now overshadowed, in decline and decadent, is revived in its roots or reinvents itself in the winds blowing on other horizons or finally dies in its own carelessness.
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