Catholic Church: Courtyard of the Gentiles – Outreach to Atheists and Agnostics but not Myers, Dawkins, Hitchens et al.
As part of Pope Benedict XVI’s efforts to further the New Evangelisation, the Pontifical Council for Culture is setting up a new foundation aimed at reaching out to atheists and agnostics.
Called ‘The Courtyard of the Gentiles’, the foundation will be a network and forum for nonbelievers and believers, consisting of a series of major meetings and events.
Militant and prominent atheists need not apply:
The Vatican is planning a new initiative to reach out to atheists and agnostics in an attempt to improve the church’s relationship with non-believers. Pope Benedict XVI has ordered officials to create a new foundation where atheists will be encouraged to meet and debate with some of the Catholic Church’s top theologians.
The Vatican hopes to stage a series of debates in Paris next year. But militant non-believers hoping for a chance to set senior church figures straight about the existence of God are set to be disappointed: the church has warned that atheists with high public profiles such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will not be invited.
The “Courtyard of the Gentiles”, as the foundation is known, is being set up by the Pontifical Council for Culture, the influential Vatican department that is charged with fostering better relations with non-Catholics. It was founded by Pope John Paul II in 1982 to spearhead his attempts to create a better dialogue with other cultures and faith, including those with no religion at all.
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But in an interview with the National Catholic Register, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, made it clear he would not be willing to give a platform to certain prominent atheists.
The foundation, he said, would only be interested in “noble atheism or agnosticism, not the polemical kind – so not those atheists such as [Piergiorgio] Odifreddi in Italy, [Michel] Onfray in France, [Christopher] Hitchens and [Richard] Dawkins”.
Such atheists, he added, only view the truth with “irony and sarcasm” and tend to “read religious texts like fundamentalists”.
As you might imagine both Richard Dawkins and P Z Myers have featured this on their websites.
Tags: Church Life, Religion Society