The Pope Embraces Atheists — Awkwardly
As host of the elaborate Inter-Faith Summit in Assisi — the hometown of Francis, one of the Catholic Church's most beloved saints — Pope Benedict XVI played up his intellectual predilections by trying to forge ties between faith and reason, inviting four prominent atheist philosophers to be part of the colloquy. And so among a couple of hundred Taoist, Muslim, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh clerics were the philosophers Guillermo Hurtado of Mexico, Julia Kristeva of France and Remo Bodei of Italy and the economist Walter Baier of Austria. But the Pope wasn't exactly giving up on Jesus. Benedict declared: "[a] complex type of violence is motivated ... as a result of God's absence, his denial and the loss of humanity which goes hand in hand with it. The enemies of religion ... see in religion one of the principal sources of violence in the history of humanity and thus they demand that it disappear. But the denial of God has led to much cruelty and to a degree of violence that knows no bounds ... The absence of God leads to the decline of man and of humanity." The atheists were civil in response. Said Hurtado: "We, humanists in dialogue with believers, commit ourselves together with all men and women of good will to building a new world in which respect for the dignity of each and every person ... is the foundation for life in society."