eChurch Blog

Insightful and interesting interview with Camille Eid, talking about the realities of Christian life inside Iran, and exposing the real danger that for the first time in some 1900 years, Iran may achieve the “cleansing” of People of the Book from their Islamic lands.

Recent events have shown how Iran likes to deal with Islamic converts to Christianity, and we can see the same exodus and treatement of Christian minorities in Egypt and Iraq and across the Islamic empire.

Zenit

As Christians flee in great numbers from Iran, for both political and religious reasons, the country’s Christian community is at real risk of extinction, says journalist and observer of Middle Eastern Churches, Camille Eid.

The journalist spoke with the television program “Where God Weeps” of the Catholic Radio and Television Network (CRTN) in cooperation with Aid to the Church in Need. In the interview, she explains what life is like for a Christian living in Iran.

Q: Iran is over 99% Muslim and Islam is the state religion. Camille, the Church’s roots in Iran are very old going back to the second century. Is Christianity the oldest religion in Iran?

Eid: No, we have two older communities older than Christianity. First we have the Zoroastrian community which goes back centuries before the arrival of Christianity and Islam. Second, we have the Jewish community.

The Zoroastrian community consists of about 20,000 people and the Jewish between 20,000 and 35,000. These two communities are older than the Christian community.

Continue Reading

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:

Independent:

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.

[.....]

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”.

Continue

As you might imagine both Richard Dawkins and P Z Myers have featured this on their websites.