Back to basics
titerrorist promises is also a legitimate question.) Placing the CIA in the middle of such an inherently difficult and politically delicate situation is fraught with risks. It is, in short,...
...Right-wing Israelis have issued only slightly more veiled warnings...
...involvement had become a necessity...
...Catholics are pretty much of one mind in rejecting this stance...
...In this regard, the greatest potential for "original new, and constructive" thinking lies with efforts to build on a tradition of Christian philosophizing, relating contemporary thought to a long and living heritage...
...BACK TO BASICS Fides et ratio, the encyclical with which John Paul II marked the twentieth anniversary of his papacy, has a message for a searching, thinking, believing church and a searching, thinking, sometimes believing, sometimes doubting, sometimes despairing world...
...Fides et ratio notes that such rigorous analytic and speculative thinking, rooted in a long tradition, has been overshadowed since Vatican II by the renewal of Scripture studies and interest in sociology, psychology, comparative religion, and history...
...The human heart is haunted by fundamental questions about life's meaning that cannot and should not go unaddressed...
...Precisely because of this memory, some Catholics may be wary of the pope's call...
...Both messages provide the kind of common ground that could unite Catholics, not in unanimity perhaps but in fruitful dialogue and initiative...
...In return for Palestinian cooperation, the Israelis will release more than 700 political prisoners, will guarantee safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank, and will permit the opening of an airport in Gaza...
...It is, in short, almost a certain recipe for turning the United States into an object of mutual Palestinian and Israeli mistrust...
...Most important of all the Wye Memorandum keeps Israel and the Palestinian Authority on the path to the final-status negotiations promised in the original Oslo accords...
...Not that all those who share this longing would necessarily agree on exactly how the church's intellectual fitness can be achieved, or how a venerable and rich philosophical tradition can be maintained and invigorated...
...The Wye Memorandum was one such step...
...The encyclical could have added that this shift was also due to the abstract, enclosed, and self-satisfied character that marred too much of this thinking in preconciliar years...
...Between these extremes, however, a great many Catholics long for a tuning of the church's intellectual muscles, a stretching and strengthening of the sinews of belief, and a more demanding standard of discourse, whether from the pulpit, in religious education programs, from conservative and liberal protagonists, or in the pages of Catholicinspired journals like this one...
...Human reason, especially when expanded and perfected by faith, is capable of revealing the deepest truths about life and human destiny...
...They vary only in the degree of their awareness of the stark gulf that can separate them from some of their cultural peers or, if equally aware, in the particular mix of empathy, adaptation, and confrontation with which they think it best to communicate the Good News...
...Fides et ratio stops well short of spelling out practical strategy...
...Fides et ratio, in other words, is a frontal challenge to the cult of meaninglessness which may have legitimate roots in the bloodshed and cruelty of the twentieth century but which has often become as much the fashionable, unexamined stance of our time as sentimental optimism was of the nineteenth century...
...Commonweal 6 November6,1998...
...The pope's message to the world...
...The pope's message to the church...
...It is almost certain that extremists on both sides will try to sabotage the Wye agreement by resorting to terrorism or assassination...
...Here, then, is common ground for fruitful dialogue among Catholic thinkers...
...Nonetheless, there is a growing sense, at least in the United States, of the need for what could be termed a "re-intellectualization" of Catholicism...
...To be sure, there are Catholic fundamentalists (either of Scripture or Vatican decrees) as well as those whose faith and spiritual life seem organized around apparitions and special revelations...
...There are social activists who shrug off doctrine as inconsequential and seekers who reduce it to therapeutic and meditative practices...
...and, like most papal documents, it could even be read and used in authoritarian ways fatal to the very enterprise the pope urges...
...That would betray the encyclicars spirit and squander an opportunity for productive discussion rather than polemical squabbling...
...It will take courage and fortitude and yes, even some trust--on both sides if the promise of peace envisioned in Oslo is ever to come to fruition...
...The philosophical dimension of theological training must be strengthened because the complicated interaction between faith and reason requires a mutually supporting relationship between theology and philosophy...
...Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas, was defiant: "It is an illusion to think the agreement will put an end to our military activity...
...However, the alternative to peace--the continued disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people and a bloodier Israeli occupation--is no real alternative at all...
...The road to liberation, for both Palestinians and Israelis, leads in only one direction and has to be walked in small steps...
...It is clear, however, that guaranteeing Palestinian antiterrorist efforts was the linchpin of the agreement, and hands-on U.S...
Vol. 125 • November 1998 • No. 19
