c. 2008 Religion News Service

Bush talks faith, won’t say God chose him to be president

(RNS) President Bush says he prays in the Oval Office and his faith has changed his life but he can’t say if God chose him to be president, ABC News reports.

“I just, I can’t go there,” Bush said in an interview that aired Monday (Dec. 8) on “Nightline.” “I’m not that confident in knowing, you know, the Almighty, to be able to say, `Yeah, God wanted me of all the other people.”’

Speaking at length about his beliefs, the president said he’s “not a literalist” when reading the Bible and he “would have been a pretty selfish person” without his faith. He also thinks belief in God and evolution are not mutually exclusive.

“I happen to believe that evolution doesn’t fully explain the mystery of life,” he said.

The president said he thinks he prays to the same God as others with different faiths, but that doesn’t include terrorists.

“I think anyone who murders to achieve their religious objective is not a religious person,” he said. “They may think they’re religious, and they play like they’re religious, but I don’t think they’re religious. They are not praying to the God I pray to … the God of peace and love.”

He also said that going to war in Iraq “was not a religious decision.”

Bush hopes President-elect Barack Obama will continue aspects of his White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

“I think he knows that in certain communities, in order to help achieve a national objective there needs to be something more powerful than government, and you can find that there’s something more powerful than government on nearly every street corner, in a house of worship,” he said.

As he looks beyond the presidency, he said he would strive to stay on the Christian walk, endeavoring to continue to learn about his faith.

“I’ve come to this conclusion _ maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know _ that the full understanding of Christianity is going to take a full lifetime of study,” he said.

_ Adelle M. Banks

Pope cautions against blurring lines of religious differences

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Benedict XVI praised collaboration with other faiths in pursuit of common social goals but cautioned against dialogue that could lead to blurring of religious differences.

Benedict’s statement, released on Tuesday (Dec. 9), was addressed to participants in a Vatican-sponsored academic event connected to the current European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.

“Let believers always be ready to promote initiatives of intercultural and interreligious dialogue, in order to stimulate collaboration in areas of common interest, such as the dignity of the human person, the search for the common good, peace-building, and development,” he wrote.

Benedict added that “to be authentic, such dialogue must avoid yielding to relativism and syncretism,” which is the blending of elements from different religious traditions.

The pope has often emphasized the limits of interreligious dialogue, which he recently described as “not possible in the strict sense of the term,” even as he has supported “intercultural dialogue” among different faith communities.

In Tuesday’s message, Benedict also described the “principles and values springing from the Gospel” as the basis for contemporary European culture, and repeated earlier calls for recognition of the “Christian roots of Europe.”

Like his predecessor Pope John Paul II, Benedict has been a consistent supporter of the 27-member European Union, but the Vatican has failed in attempts to include any reference to the continent’s Christian heritage in the proposed (and still unratified) European Constitution.

_ Francis X. Rocca

Faith treated as “private eccentricity” in England, says top Catholic cleric

LONDON (RNS) The leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales warns that liberalism has turned Britain into a nation where religious belief is seen as a “private eccentricity” and atheism is becoming increasingly more “vocal and aggressive.”

Writing in a book released this week, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor came down hard on what he said was Britain’s growing degeneration into a land free of morals and hostile to Christian values.

The book, called “Faith in the Nation,” was published by the Institute for Public Policy Research and counts among its supporters Prime Minister Gordon Brown, himself the son of a hard-line Church of Scotland minister.

Murphy-O’Connor cites “serious tensions” between Christians and secularists in his book. The result, he said, has become an “unfriendly climate for people of all faiths” that has, as a result, united Britain’s three major faiths: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

“Religious belief of any kind now tends to be treated more as a private eccentricity than as the central and informative element in British society that it is,” the cardinal writes.

“Although the tone of public discussion is skeptical or dismissive rather than anti-religious,” he contends, “atheism has become more vocal and aggressive.”

Murphy-O’Connor claims that Catholics have become the prime target of “liberal hostility” and that “the vocal minority who argue that religion has no role in modern British society portrays Catholic teaching on the family as prejudiced and intolerant.”

But “Catholics are not alone in watching with dismay as the liberal society shows signs of degenerating into the libertine society,” said the cardinal, who is nearing retirement from his role as the nation’s senior and most powerful Catholic figure.

“British society champions tolerance and freedom,” he said, “but that freedom is dependent upon responsibility.”

Murphy-O’Connor’s tough stance irked Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society in London, who told journalists that “secularists and atheists are finding it necessary to express their views more vocally because of the increasing demands made by Christians and minority faiths.”

_ Al Webb

Quote of the Day: Florida megachurch pastor Joel Hunter

(RNS)“The more seriously we take God, the less seriously we need to take ourselves.”

_ Florida megachurch pastor Joel Hunter, speaking about the need for evangelicals to be able to laugh at themselves. He was quoted in USA Today.

DSB/AMB END RNS