“A hardening of line”: that, according to the French Catholic weekly La Croix (11/7), is how the almost simultaneous publication of the Pope’s “Motu proprio” on the Latin Mass and the “Responses” of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on “certain aspects of the doctrine of the Church” will be read by the secular press. “In both cases – says the editorial signed by Michel Kubler – what’s at issue is the relation with Vatican II. For the historians of the Council, the formula that has now returned to favour represented an unprecedented opening, which said that the Church of Christ (the only community of faith of the disciples of Jesus) ‘subsists in the’ Catholic Church (the concrete reality of the Roman Church). For the first time, Catholicism as social body renounced identifying itself purely and simply with the mystic Body of Christ. The new document, which resumes the declaration Dominus Iesus issued by Cardinal Ratzinger in 2000, will on the contrary be perceived as a closure to non-Catholic Christians”. “Latin returns not to divide but to enrich”, writes Carlo Cardia in the Italian Catholic daily Avvenire (11/7) commenting on the Motu Proprio. Regarding possible criticisms, the editorialist observes that “it’s better to say, with all frankness, that the profane observations on the language of the liturgy, apart from the understanding of what is meant by prayer, have no sense; they are alien to our sphere”. The recent abortive terror attacks in London represent a “particularly strong challenge” for the fight against terrorism. That’s the basic thesis of the cover story of the last number of Time (18/7), in which Amanda Ripley writes: “The terrorists may be sophisticated incompetents. They may also be amateur assassins. The only real option is to try to reduce their ability to inflict mass casualties, in whatever way they can do so. In other words, with limited resources it is more important now to protect Times Square from relatively easy terrorist attacks that could cause thousands of victims than seek to protect a airplane from attacks with explosive liquid”. A furore has been caused in Germany by the recent statements of the Minister of Defence Wolfgang Schäuble on anti-terrorism measures. Stephan Hebel ( Frankfurter Rundschau – 10/7) comments: “Schäuble will certainly know that he cannot get his way with the ridiculous idea, for example, of killing suspected persons just on the off chance that they might be terrorists. But he knows very well that by exploiting the fear of terrorism that we all feel, he is preparing the ground for other limitations of civil rights. Limitations that, in contrast to his extreme requests, seem more innocuous that they really are, such as searches on line. The Chancellor should use harsher words to rein in this man”. And a comment in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (12/7) says that Schäuble “is accused, for example by the President of the FDP Westerwelle, of ‘treacherous preventive tactics’… But what is treacherous, rather, is the way in which the FDP and the Greens compete with each other in denigrating Schäuble to underline their role as guardians of civil rights. After 2001, when a certain elasticity temporarily reigned in relation to ideology, the Greens in the government passed a series of laws on security. But today they don’t want to know anything about them. The FDP of Westerwelle campaigned for half a decade to reduce taxes and for private healthcare, before recently rediscovering itself as the party of civil rights. But what is strange is this: how come shortcomings are now being discovered even where decisions and intentions to guarantee greater security have long existed? And why does the present government – like its predecessors – pay so little attention to the suspected abuse of surveillance measures?'”. “In the 1980s the experts predicted that with the re-acquisition of freedom and democracy the Poles would no longer have such a need for the Church. They thought that Polish religious sentiment was linked to the national identity and that the Church compensated for the lack of sovereignty”, writes Tygodnik Powszechny (28/2007): “But the statistics of the dominicantes (regular participants in Sunday Mass) demonstrate that the political changes of 1989 have not impacted on the participation of Poles in religious services”. The Polish Catholic weekly refers to the opinion of the sociologist of religions, Krzysztof Rosela , who says that “the faith of the Poles does not only spring from the need to assert their own national identity nor is it the result of the suffering caused by the damage inflicted on the nation”. According to the sociologist, “in comparison with other countries the percentage of participants in religious life in Poland is high and, in contrast to what has happened in Ireland, EU membership has not influenced the religious sentiment of the Poles. It may therefore be said that, in an ever more secularized Europe, Poland is a country very different from others from this point of view”.
