Interreligious Current Events

Pope Benedict XVI has ordered a rewrite of a section of the Latin Tridentine mass that mentions Jews.

The Tridentine mass was the official mass of the Roman Catholic Church from the Council of Trent (from which it takes its name) in 1570 to Vatican II in the 1960s.

The Latin mass has grown in popularity in the last few decades and in 2007 Pope Benedict XVI announced that Catholic congregations could celebrate the mass in Latin without Vatican permission.

Now, a year later, Benedict XVI and the curia have decided to make a change to the version of the Latin mass that is used on Good Friday. The change comes to a section that mentions Jews.

Previously, the mass had called the Jews ???blind??? and had asked G-d to ???lift the veil from their hearts.???

Pope Benedict???s new mass reads:

???Let us pray for the Jews. May the Lord Our God enlighten their hearts so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, the savior of all men.

Almighty and everlasting God you who want all men to be saved and to reach the awareness of the truth, graciously grant that, with the fullness of peoples entering into your church, all Israel may be saved.???

This new language is doubly controversial. It???s controversial to Jewish people who don???t like being asked to convert. It???s controversial to Catholic traditionalists who believe that Catholicism is the one true faith, and therefore that non-Catholics should convert.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/world/europe/

Gallup has just released a new poll of Muslims with 50,000 respondents from across the Muslim world.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080227/ts_alt_afp/usislamreligionethics

Gallup's poll shows that 93 percent of Muslims condemn the 9/11 attacks. Of the 7 percent who support the attacks, most gave political reasons for supporting them, not religious ones.

Though the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not radical, having 7 percent who are radical translates into tens of millions of radicalized people. The radicals are wealthier and better educated than moderates and are more likely to see a positive future for Islam.

The poll is part of Gallup's world survey. The results are being released in a book called "Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think" by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed.

http://www.gallup.com/press/17473/Gallup-Press.aspx