Pope in a Hornet's Nest
I often wonder how Pope Francis is perceived outside of the frenzied and constant analysis of those of us inside the Church. Obviously we have the secular press to help us gauge the temperature, but as we have seen, that tends to distort the picture to a quite extraordinary extent, emphasising things he hasn't said in order to feed the meme that the Church is going to change it's teaching on one dogma or another. The Holy Land, as it has been throughout history, remains a melting-pot of different faiths and cultures. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Drews, Bahá'í, and Zoroastrianism all try and live there in some degree of peace, some more successfully than others as we know. Fr. Raymond Blake posted yesterday on the Pope's visit to the Holy Land, which led me to this article in the Jerusalem Post. Fr. Ray is disappointed that the long heralded meeting between the Pope and the Patriarch Bartholomew failed to yield any exciting ecumenical breakthroughs between E...