Areas of study

• Philosophy and theology

• Social sciences and philosophy

• Canon law, constitutional law, philosophy of law

• Economy and social doctrine of the Church

Lecturers and members of the International Scientific Committee

Prof. Robert Spaemann (Universität zu München, Germany); Prof. Margaret Archer, (University of Warwick, UK); Prof. Angelika Nussberger, (Universität zu Köln, Germany); Prof. Guy Bédouelle OP, (Université Catholique de l’Ouest, Angers, France); Prof. Rubio de Urquia (Universidad CEU San Pablo Madrid, Spain); Prof. Juan Manuel Blanch Nougués (Universidad CEU San Pablo Madrid, Spain); (Prof. Roberto Gatti (Università di Urbino); Prof. Giuliano Segre (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice); Prof. Simona Beretta (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan)

Activities

The research project offers seminars, interdisciplinary workshops, and a summer school.

To whom is the initiative addressed?

• PhDs (incl. doctoral candidates) and researchers working in university or research institutions, interested in this cultural training opportunity

• Professors and researchers of the Studium Generale Marcianum

• Members of associations working on the topic of pluralism in society

• Staff of NGOs

• Public officers at regional, national and European level
• 
  

Further information

See the pages dedicated to ASSET at www.marcianum.it

Studium Generale Marcianum Foundation, Dorsoduro, 1, 30123 Venezia

tel: 39 (0)41 27.43.911 f :39 (0)41 27.43.998. Email: altascuola@marcianum.it

UK contact : Stratford Caldecott (Centre for Faith & Culture, Oxford) : s_caldecott@yahoo.co.uk

In the Eucharistic supper his disciples participate in it beforehand. but we also, two thousand years afterwards, have the immense gift of joining it. Let us taste and adore Christ present here and now, winner over time and space, master of the cosmos. The blood of the Redeemer circulates through the Eucharist as a vital lymph in the Church…”

Homely given by H.E. Angelo Card. Scola, Patriarch of Venice for the Corpus Domini Sunday.

Ex 24,3-8; Ps 115; Heb 9,11-15; Mk 14,12-16.22-26

1. After rising early in the morning, Moses builds an altar and, aided by “young men of the children of Israel” (Ex 24,5), draws from the sacrificial oxen the blood which, after having been poured into basins, he is going to sprinkle half on the altar and half on the people. The people, summoned for this purpose, listens to Moses reading the Book of the covenant. Above all, the people consents to it by shouting in one voice “All the commandments that the Lord has given, we will obey” (Ex 24,3).
Let us, in this moment, pull ourselves away from any possible distraction in order to immerse ourselves into this sacred scene. What does it express?
In the Old Testament blood is life and belongs to God. It signifies that, because of the covenant, from now on the same life is participated by God and by His “firstborn” Israel. God and his people belong to each other because, in a sense, what is created between them is a blood relation. Thus, we understand the concluding act of that most ancient liturgical action, which Moses brings to a close with a sober but solemn statement: “Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you based on all these words” (Ex 24,8).

2. “Not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood” (Heb 9,12) Jesus places himself as “the mediator of the new covenant” (Heb 9,15). The life that springs from His blood is eternal life. The blood of Christ has the disarming power of reality. In order to expiate for man’s sin, for our sin, Christ offers His own life. This is why Christ’s redemption, unlike the ancient liberation, is not transitory and does not need to be continuously renewed, but rather is unique and definitive (“an eternal redemption” Heb 9,12). “This is thus the man who in himself alone offered all that he knew was necessary for the fulfillment of our redemption, he who is at the same time priest, sacrifice, God and temple: priest, through whom we are reconciled, sacrifice, which reconciles us, God, to whom we are reconciled, temple in which we are reconciled” (St. Fulgentius of Ruspe. from the treaty: On the faith in Peter).

3. The sublime prayer pronounced by Jesus when he institutes the Holy Eucharist reveals forcefully that his Covenant brings us the gift of unending life.
On the stump of the ancient memorial Jesus grafts the radical novelty of his redemptive sacrifice: “This is my body… This is my blood” (Mk 14, 22 and 24). In the semitic language “Take, this is my body” (Mk 14,22) simply and paradoxically means “This is myself.” By operating the substantial transformation of the bread and the wine into his body made into a gift and his blood poured out, Jesus anticipates the glorious passion on Golgotha. In the Eucharistic supper his disciples participate in it beforehand. but we also, two thousand years afterwards, have the immense gift of joining it. Let us taste and adore Christ present here and now, winner over time and space, master of the cosmos. The blood of the Redeemer circulates through the Eucharist as a vital lymph in the Church and gives us a foretaste of an intimacy with God without any shadows and any boundaries.
And we, through our full, aware and active participation in the Holy Mass, are progressively educated to that “worship fit for a human being” (“spiritual worship” Rm 12,1) which is the offering of our whole life. Thus, nothing of what we live is banal if we receive it from His hands, but everything – every circumstance and every relationship – is taken over by the same sacramental power as the Eucharistic act.

4. Let us ask ourselves with a contrite heart: are we worthy of such a great gift? Do we really desire above everything else that our life take this Eucharistic shape? (Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, 70). Our way of participating in the Eucharist opens us up to share with our fellow human beings every aspect of life starting from the liberation that was inaugurated by the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Let us begin by not forgetting the still enormous mass of people who do not have bread to eat.
In this solemn vesper, may these questions reach the heart of all the Christians of Venice, who by now have been engaged for five years in the Pastoral Visitation: let the Holy Eucharist make us rediscover the sweet Christ among us and in us.

5. Shortly we will carry in procession the sacramental Jesus in the heart of our city. We will do this so that His presence may bless our Venice, and Venetians and guests may adore God truly present in the Most Blessed Sacrament. With this gesture we want to remind visually Venetians and guests that the inexhaustible fascination of Venice is indelibly marked by this new and eternal covenant with God that lives and pulsates in the Eucharistic reality.
Venice, never forget your Lord, the Nicopeia Virgin, your saints!
Humbly proud of belonging to the new people of God that travels across history, we shall walk behind the white host certain that Jesus present and alive is the power that gives new strength to every human being. We too, the so-called post-secular and post-modern people, are pilgrims, more than ever. Why should we then forgo the Panis Angelorum, factus cibus viatorum? Amen.

English translation by Carlo Lanellotti

]]> http://english.angeloscola.it/2009/06/17/let-us-taste-and-adore-christ-present-here-and-now-the-inexhaustible-fascination-of-venice-is-marked-by-this-new-and-eternal-covenant-with-god/feed/ 0 http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/06/10/between-the-east-and-the-west-a-mexican-suggestion/ http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/06/10/between-the-east-and-the-west-a-mexican-suggestion/#comments Sun, 10 Jun 2007 10:06:28 +0000 ufficiostampa http://english.angeloscola.it/?p=59 Man walks when he has a good idea of where he is going. However where for the Christian, and generally for religious man, the destination is clear the eternal life towards which from this very moment we are walking nobody can dispose a priori of the steps that lead to it. We do not possess the future. For this reason, we abandon ourselves with reasonable faith to God who is its master, adhering, through circumstances and relationships, to His design of good for the whole of mankind. This religious reading of history permits a sober critical capacity in relation to the present and requires a strong sense of the past.

Oasis each issue of this review well reminds us that the choice of the title is connected with the famous statement of John Paul II in his address in Damascus at the Omayyade Mosque on 6 May 2001 indicates here a precise pathway. That of an encounter with merciful God, with our brothers and with our sisters within the bond of religion. It will not be useless to remember, as well, that the method with which we want to operate a dialogue to the full in relation to the questions and issues that derive from the process of an unprecedented mixing of peoples, is that of passing humbly through the presence of minorities, who are tested but intensely witness-bearing, made up of our Christian brethren. The effectiveness of this method has already been documented on a number of occasions at the level of its capacity to force we Christians of the West to go beyond the intellectualism that afflicts us endemically, and to provoke our brethren of the East to take on to the full the task of accompanying us to the encounter with religions, and in a particular way with Islam in its various forms.

In the first issue of this review, with a ‘bold metaphor’ we spoke about the ‘inevitable imposition of a kind of hybridisation of civilisations’. And we went on by detailing
this hybridisation in a figurative sense as a ‘mixing of cultures and spiritual facts that are produced when different cultures enter in contact’, concluding, however, that ‘we have in common human nature on which is based the family of peoples’. At a distance by now of almost three years since those first statements, it was necessary to explicitly focus in on this interpretative category. We did this during the annual meeting of the scientific committee, an occasion for an assessment, both theoretical and practical, of the objective limits within which to maintain or forgo the thesis of hybridisation; many of the articles that follow are the outcome of this shared work.
The choice of the category of hybridisation had in me the character of an intuitive in-ventio which was provoked in me by a question posed by a journalist. It was not born from the study of the literature in the field but rather from my trips in Mexico and in particular from a consideration of the strongly hybridised character of the Mexican people. Recourse to this category also arose from the dissatisfaction that the employment of traditional terms such as identity, dialogue, integration, multiculturality and even interculturality continued to produce in me in the face of the many forms that the process takes.

Historical processes first and foremost belong to the order of events and are thus in the final analysis unpredictable and uncontrollable. However, because of the interaction and duration of the factors that make them up, not only can they be better known about but they can also, within certain limits that definitely cannot be established a priori, be directed. The process of the hybridisation of civilisations and cultures as well, albeit with its tumultuous and often violent realisations, demands to be addressed with this positive critical aptitude. In the final analysis it is based upon a dual firm belief to which we have referred in the past on a number of occasions. First of all, the aspiration to the universality and the constitutive unity of the human heart, which is made for truth. The elementary human experience, which is common to all men of all times and cultures, is the most striking confirmation of this. Each man and each woman, every day, lives by affections, by work and by rest. These are the symbols of a universal dynamic language that never ceases to make the members of the human family brothers. And we well know the reason. This and this is the second belief lies in the fact that a Father opened His home by creating the whole of mankind and, lovingly welcoming us from everywhere, He is taking us to His home with open doors. God guides history with a precise design which the contradictory movements of our freedom and the power of freedom of evil cannot, in the end, resist. He wants all men to be saved, He wants them to be ‘sons in the Son’. The human adventure of the freedom of every individual and of every people only demonstrates the profundity of the love of God who chose, in order to communicate Himself, to pass, with the cross of Christ, through finite freedom and constant wandering.
This state of things calls us to the responsibility of the hard work of reading historic circumstances. A reading that can never avoid self-exposition witness. Religions and cultures, in their insuperable polarity of the universal and the particular, are within this unitary design. Indeed, they exalt it in the interplay of differences which through the power of the Trinitarian event exist, ultimately, solely in unity. Unity, and thus universality, is the alpha and the omega of history because it does not fear difference, given that it lives in a perfect and non-contradictory way in the same supreme foundation (the Trinity). From where and why in the final analysis does a religion arise if not from the humble recognition that the mystery of God goes beyond all human understanding? ‘Si comprehendis, non est Deus (Augustine). ‘Incomprehensibile incomprehensibiliter comprehenditur’ (The in-comprehensible [the foundation] becomes understood in-comprehensibly: a formulation taken from a passage of De Trinitate of St. Augustine, echoed by Anselm in his Monologion and by St. Thomas in Summa). This is the way in which the mystery of God attracts us to It as is demonstrated, in a freely-given and splendid way, by the wonders of Christian Revelation. This takes place at the level of personal intelligence but what applies to personal intelligence, which is anyway an ‘incarnated’ intelligence and solidarity-inspired in relation to the whole of humanity, takes place also for cultures and religions, which in essential terms are nothing but a personal and communitarian expression of the self-awareness of a specific people. Thus God after a fashion gives Himself to men, all of whom are marked by an inextirpable religious sense. He gives Himself fully in Jesus Christ, His living and personal Revelation. He, as the Second Vatican Council puts it, comes ‘for all men of good will , in whose heart grace works invisibly’ [GS 22].

This means that Christian Revelation is by its nature meta-cultural As Fides et ratio states in sections 70-72, it can be received in every form of culture and specifically for this reason it cannot be reduced to any specific culture. The Revelation of the One and Triune God is revelation of the Ineffable, it is like the burning bush of Moses that is never consumed, to which one cannot draw near in a direct way without covering one’s face, without taking off one’s shoes. Cultures and religions are like the veil and the shoes of the history of mankind. Nothing more and nothing less. Something that historically cannot be renounced but which is never absolutely definitive. This vision, emphasised authoritatively in Fides et ratio, is extraordinarily important because it is doubly liberating. On the one hand, it makes us understand that the conversatus est cum hominibus of God in Jesus Christ proclaims the infinite mercy of the Absolute in relation to our contingency. This is embraced to the point of the lowest and most secondary cultural and religious expressions of the customs and life of a people, and sent on into eternity. On the other hand, the otherness in which mystery maintains itself opens up to the human experience the critical capacity for purification and possible detachment from cultures and religions, according to the insuperable methodological principle enunciated by Paul: ‘test everything; hold fast what is good’ [I Th 5:21]. The proclaiming of the love-logos in John, the incarnated Son of God, Jesus Christ, very God and very man, allows those who adhere to this in the faith to appreciate to the full cultures and religions specifically, also, by forgoing what shows itself to be perishable.

These notations appear at first sight to be more referable to the category of interculturality than to that of hybridisation. At first sight the category of interculturality seems to allow the more effective construction of a shared area of recognition, beyond the trenches of identity but also behind chaotic hybridisations and dangerous forms of syncretism. Personally, however, I take the liberty of laying stress on a certain preference being given to the category of hybridisation. All the more because, given that it is unthinkable to attribute the description of the process of the mixing of men and peoples to a single category, it is inevitable that the privilege given to one will involve the need to have continual recourse to all those others that can be brought into play so as to be more effectively aware of the process in the attempt to direct it. In this sense no category, even that of hybridisation, can become ‘the’ method by which to address the phenomenon of mixing. It would be grave were we to transfer it from the level of a description of facts to the level of prescriptive direction. And all the more because, like every category, it is heavily prejudged not only biologically but also ideologically.
However, if well maintained within the limits imposed by the specification ‘hybridisation of civilisations and cultures’, it seems to me that despite the risks to which it is exposed it is a category that we should privilege. And to which, after a certain fashion, we should subordinate the others (interculturality, integration, dialogue, etc.) and not vice versa, The reason for this preference of mine comes from the extremely realistic character, which is sanguine so to speak, that the term ‘hybridisation’ expresses. This makes it more capable of reading the historical process underway while leaving it open to necessary rigorous delimitations, something which, for that matter, would be required all the other categories as well. Indeed, in this sense I take the liberty of adding that, while returning often over recent years to this subject, albeit, obviously, not in a rigorously academic way, I have been convinced that even the metaphorical use of this category must be attenuated and that connection with the nexus with its biological genesis must not be lost. Must Christianity I return here to the example of Mexico perhaps fear the fusion of races and peoples that has taken place through the generation of people by parents from different peoples? With all the pain that this involves, does this fact not conserve an echo of that breaking down of the wall that separates so as to make ‘us both one’ to which the Letter to the Ephesians [cf. Eph. 2:14] refers?
Does not the given fact of hybridisation, which implies a recognition of the fact that history is inevitably a place of encounter that often, however, passes by way of clashes, and the fact that peace, which should always be pursued, is given to us, as Paul says, ‘if possible’ [cf. Rm 12:18], tell us that only God is the lord of the future?
Without falling into examples of facile Irenism or ingenuous forms of optimism about a process that calls us to think anew about our cultural and also juridical instruments (passing, to take up the phrase of Prof Cesare Mirabelli, ‘from a hybridisation of laws to a law of hybridisation’), we can, however, be certain that this, at the level of facts, is the road that is outlined before us today. A road that has perhaps not been thought of, one that is certainly difficult, but which we have already begun to walk down. It is of no use, therefore, to tarry in the illusory trenches of an identity, understood as closure, forgetting that the danger for the West lies, rather, in becoming increasingly, as the poet Eliot said brilliantly, ‘straw men’.

Card. Angelo scola, the Patriarch of Venice

]]> http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/06/10/between-the-east-and-the-west-a-mexican-suggestion/feed/ 0 http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/04/01/drawn-in-his-sacrificial-act-the-passion-sundays-homily/ http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/04/01/drawn-in-his-sacrificial-act-the-passion-sundays-homily/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2007 17:34:26 +0000 ufficiostampa http://english.angeloscola.it/?p=101 “Each one of us, even the absent-minded, here summoned by the Eucharistic Sacrament of love, are involved in the heart of the action, becoming aware that we have an active part in this story which did not happen only long ago but it continues to happen in every instant. We are not spectators. Let us then identify ourselves, as much as possible, in an alert consciousness with Christ who undergoes the titanic clash between good and bad: ” I offered my back to those who struck me, my cheeks to those who tore at my beard. I did not cover my face against insult and spittle” (First Reading). The Servant of Yahweh is the figure of Jesus…

Reading during the Procession Lk 19: 28-40
The Mass. Scripture Readings: Is 50:4-7; Psalm 22(21): 8-9.17-18.19-20. 23-24;
Phil 2: 6-11; Lk 22: 14-23,56

1. The Greatest Tragedy of history
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” (Gospel according to St. Luke, before the procession). Jesus enters triumphantly in Jerusalem, acclaimed as the Messiah by the crowd. However, Jesus refuses to silence his disciples as some of the furious Pharisees ask him to do: “If these keep silence the stones will cry out”. He only required a donkey stating that he needed it, as a King, and as a King he has ridden over the clocks on the road.
Yet, he knows exactly what is expecting him. Having just gone through the door of the city, a short distance away from the clocks placed on his way, from the merry waving of the palm branches, from the approved acclamations, the power of evil lies in ambush. The flight and the betrayal of his friends, solitude and anguish, the cry Crucify Him!, the mockery of the leaders of the people, his dreadful dead were expecting him…
The violent and furious opposition of evil seems to have the best over the power of good. The Gospel passage which during this celebration has been given in recitative, instead of being proclaimed, is the greatest tragedy of history; every tragedy is only the echo repeated and repeated infinitively.
Each one of us, even the absent-minded, here summoned by the Eucharistic Sacrament of love, are involved in the heart of the action, becoming aware that we have an active part in this story which did not happen only long ago but it continues to happen in every instant. We are not spectators.

2. “Christ was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross”
Let us then identify ourselves, as much as possible, in an alert consciousness with Christ who undergoes the titanic clash between good and bad: ” I offered my back to those who struck me, my cheeks to those who tore at my beard. I did not cover my face against insult and spittle” (First Reading). The Servant of Yahweh is the figure of Jesus. In the third Canticle of the Servant according to Isaiah the lament is subdued, not as in Jeremiah and in other figures of the Old Testament; therefore a positive consent to suffering is put in evidence. Not the search of suffering, which would be inhuman, but the surrendering oneself when faced with suffering. This is a revolution not only in Israel, but in all the ancient world. On which bases can this surrendering happen? Because the Servant is sure that God is on his side: “The Lord comes to my help, so that I am not untouched by the insults. So, too, I set my face like flint; I know I shall not be shamed”(Second Reading).
And the Second Reading induces us into the heart of the appalling struggle between good and bad. Though being the Son of God, “Christ did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave, and become as men are; and being as all men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross”(Second Reading). “I am among you as one who serves” (Gospel).
Today’s liturgy lead us to understand the authentic focus of the whole history. In this radical lowering of himself, in this becoming obedient and accepting death on a cross the greatest and total love is accomplish, as the Pope has reminded us in his encyclical letter: “His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form” (Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, 12).

God does not answer to evil by opposing himself to evil front to front through the use of power, but defining it from every side through the suffering love of the Innocent par excellence. This is why in the course of history evil often seems to be winning, but at the end God destroys it. Jesus dissolves evil through his victorious redemption (John Paul II, Memory and Identity).

3. Drawn in his sacrificial act

Let us go further onto another step with Jesus. “I have longed to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Gospel). With the Last Supper Jesus initiates consciously and freely (every act of love is not human if it is not conscious and free) towards his Passion. At the ecclesial meeting of Verona last October the Holy Father has reminded us: “in the Last Supper he has anticipated and accepted death on the cross for our sake and therefore transforming death in his self-giving, the gift which gives us life, frees and saves….Giving himself to his disciples in the bread and the wine, his body and his blood, Jesus anticipates his death and resurrection”. During this celebration as well as in every Eucharist, we are drawn in the sacrificial act of Jesus. The victory of the Risen over evil becomes a commitment to each one of us. Our personal and communitarian struggle against evil becomes possible day after day through the active participation of the Self Total Gift accomplished by Jesus. Thinking over the Passion of Jesus with this conviction we will manage to deal with the evil experience as a trial, never as a defeat.

4. The itinerary of trial

“My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” (Responsorial Psalm); in the rending cry of the Psalmist every human suffering is acknowledged. The impotence of freeing ourselves from evil – starting with the dreadful experience of physical illness over which not even science can do anything, to the moral and spiritual which threat to destroy us – produces the experience of solitude and isolation. And when a man feels abandoned he is tempted by despair, “to plug off” that is to put an end to life. The Son of God who made himself obedient until death on the cross, drunk to the end the chalice of this fearful anguish to teach us the positive side: the hopeful abandonment in the arms of the Father.
Jesus, the Crucified Innocent has experienced personally the human itinerary of trial: from the feeling of being abandoned – first of all the terrible experience of the “Silence of God” – to the confident abandoning himself into the arms of the Father: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Gospel). This is the itinerary of Christian death – the most con-venient to man – that the Church continually proposes to every man. The Church does not propose it only through words, but through an effective witness of love which supports and encourages. This is why the Holy Father and the Pastors are tireless in recalling to everyone, but especially to the governments, the need to respect life, every life from its conception to its natural end.

5. The Dawn of Resurrection
Today, our meditation of the “Passio” would not be complete if we do not foresee the hope that pervades the whole account. The words of Jesus on the Cross: “Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing….” “Indeed, I promise you, today you will be with me in paradise…”"Father into your hands I commit my spirit” (Gospel) illuminate something about the grace he procured by his suffering. Neither death nor evil are the last words; solely resurrection and mercy are the last words. The dawn of resurrection which can already be seen in the new humanity of those who recognize Him and follow Him. “Me, but no longer me”: this is the formula of Christian existence based on Baptism, the formula of resurrection within time, the formula of the Christian “novelty” called to transform the world” (Benedict XVI, during the ecclesial meeting of Verona).

“The Lord has given me a disciple’s tongue (a better translation than ‘beginners). So that I may know how to reply to the wearied” (First Reading). The Church Mother and Teacher proclaims unceasingly and openly this fascinating vocation. Therefore, together with the affirming of the value of life, the Church upholds vigorously the sound and fecund union between a man and a woman in a family based on the sacred bond of matrimony. Every direct or indirect attempt to weaken this precious ecclesial and social cell is a wound inflicted to the whole community.

6. At the foot of the Cross, with Mary

The journey done by Saint Luke proposes again at the end, with another image, the same tragedy of the beginning: the struggle between good and bad. The two criminals hanging on the right and on the left side of Jesus represent the two alternatives given to the fallen humanity: refusing Christ (evil) or abandoning ourselves to Christ (good). This tragedy is still acted today. Let us ask Mary, the mother who has followed Him courageously until the Calvary, under the cross, to sustain us in our abandoning ourselves to Him. Let us beseech her with the incomparable words of the “Stabat Mater” with which the Church invites us to pray in these days: “I yearn to be with you under the Cross, to enjoy your companionship” Amen!

]]> http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/04/01/drawn-in-his-sacrificial-act-the-passion-sundays-homily/feed/ 0 http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/02/04/jews-muslims-and-christians-talk-about-god/ http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/02/04/jews-muslims-and-christians-talk-about-god/#comments Sun, 04 Feb 2007 09:07:26 +0000 ufficiostampa http://english.angeloscola.it/?p=29 On February 2007 cardinal Scola has met Rabbi Israel Singer and Seyyed Hossein Nasr at a forum sponsored by the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations. Here’s the article appeared in the National Catholic Register by Pete Sheehan.

NEW YORK – Despite difficulties, Christianity, Islam and Judaism can work together for peace, but only by each remaining faithful to its own beliefs.
That’s the view of leaders and scholars from the three religions who shared a podium at a Jan. 17 forum at the United Nations. “We live in a desert,” amid the growing secularism, religious divisions, and other conflicts that plague the world, said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, author and professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, one of the panellists. “The words ofJesus Christ, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ were at no time as true as today.”
Religion can help foster that peace, “but only if it continues to be religion,” remaining faithful to its own identity, the Iranian-born Nasr said. “We must not relativize our path to God, but we must accept the validity of other paths.
Nasr spoke along with Cardinal Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice, and Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the Policy Council of the World Jewish Congress, and the Venice, Italy-based Oasis International Studies and Research Center.
About 200 people filled the United Nations’ Dag Hammarskjöld Library, Auditorium for the forum, which was held to introduce the work of the Oasis Center and its publications. Oasis, a bi-annual magazine that deals with issue of Christian, Muslim and other interfaith concerns, is being given a U.S. editions for the first time.
The Jan. 17 forum included the three “Abrahamic” religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Cardinal Scola founded the Oasis Center and its journal to forster dialogue among Christians and Muslims, beginning with Christian communities living in Muslim countries.
In addressing the audience, Cardinal Scola emphasized the need for dialogue beyond scholarly circles to included individuals in their daily lives.”Listen to the experiences of people”, he urged.
Father James Massa. director of the U.S. Catholic Conference’s Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, who met Cardinal Scola when he was in Washington the previous day, called Oasis a “marvellous instrument” that offers was to “bridge the divides” between Catholics and Muslims.
Fahter Massa noted that the name comes from a comment by Pope John Paul II that “the place of prayes is dear to both Christians and Muslims ad an oasis in which one meets with the merciful God along the walk toward eternal life and with one’s brothers and sisters in the bonds of religion.”
Carl Anderson, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus and who works closely with the Oasis Cener, moderated the panel.

‘Misunderstandlngs’

Nasr noted that “many profound misunderstandings need to be overcome,” especially the miss-association between Islam and violence.
Both Islam and Christianity have, at different times in their history, practiced violence “in the name of religion,” he said. While Judaism has less of a record of violence, “for most of its history ii hasn’t had the power” to inflict violence.
“You can’t compare your favourable periods with the unfavorable periods of other religions” or confuse the influence of religion with the influence of the civilization in which a people of faith live, Nasr said.
In understanding the differences in history and theology of each religion. “the freedom to be oneself,” and not be subject to coercion, whether military or economic.
While recognizing the differences among the three religions, Nasr said, “Look at how much they have in common. They all believe in the same God”, as well as “the beginning and end of human history, the immortality of the soul and responsibility for one’s actions before God.”
“Let up hope and pray that all those who believe in God, in his mercy and his wisdom” Nasr continued, “will be able to speak together as a single family in a world so alienated from the divine.”
Rabbi Singer also shared that hope for all religions. He found encouragement from the closer relationship between the Church and Judaism since the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 document Nostra Aetate (The Relation of the Church to better relations with Judaism. Yet dialogue between Jews and Catholics went far beyond what was imagined in Nostra Aetate, Singer said.
He cited the leadership of Pope John Paul II for fostering the healing. Jewish-Catholic dialogue can be a model for reconciliation, he said.
“If Jews and Catholics can get along,” Singer said, “almost anything can happen.”
Singer praised Islamic figures who have denounced violence, in particular Shaykh Ali Gomaa, Grand Mufti in Egypt and one of the highest-ranking clarics in e Sunni Muslim world.
The rabbi read a statement in which Ali Gomaa repudiated violence committed in the name of Islam as “the actions of e misguided criminal minority” who “contradict the central theme of peace in Islam.”

]]> http://english.angeloscola.it/2007/02/04/jews-muslims-and-christians-talk-about-god/feed/ 0 http://english.angeloscola.it/2006/09/11/september-11-five-years-after-cardinal-scolas-message/ http://english.angeloscola.it/2006/09/11/september-11-five-years-after-cardinal-scolas-message/#comments Mon, 11 Sep 2006 09:39:11 +0000 ufficiostampa http://english.angeloscola.it/?p=50 Five years have passed since 11 September 2001, the day of the Twin Towers, the day when all of us, even the most lacking, even the most shallow, even the most distracted, were shocked and opened our eyes, with our hearts troubled. What is happening? What kind of a world is this? Nobody was able to avoid these questions and nobody, still today, can avoid them. Not that 11 September was an isolated explosion: a history preceded it, and a very long history. But perhaps we did not have the eyes or the energy or the desire to look at this history. However on that day something happened that had the force of a beginning, such was its terrifying drama, These are the thoughts and the questions that beset us when think again of what happened five years ago.

Nobody is able to weigh up the ‘balance’, even though many propose conclusions; nobody is able to provide comprehensive interpretations, even though many exhibit deductions and explanations, including ones that are about plots and behind the scenes activity.

Our contribution to the debate begins with a different assumption: the entry onto the scene of a subject who asks questions and reacts to the consequences of an extraordinary event. Christians and 11 September, this is the title, the subject, of this fourth edition of Oasis. That is to say: faced with a circumstance, even a circumstance with a terrible and disturbing face, we ask ourselves what God is asking of us through this circumstance, what he asks of we Christians. I believe that first and foremost the event of 11 September brings to the fore the question of evil in the world. This is a question which has always in an acute way besieged the mind of man. With Leibniz and the Teodicea, the West even transformed it into an objection: ‘If God exists why does evil exist in the world?’ And like a game of hide and seek, in looking for the responsibilities for evil different answers are attempted. Perhaps it is thought that God is not responsible for evil, but does not impede it and thus at the least He is quiet up there, in the heights of heaven. Or He is not responsible because simply He is not there and thus the curse of man is not to be redeemed in any way: nothing has meaning.

But in order to address the question of evil in an authentic way it is necessary first of all to go to the original experience of man. From there perhaps we will find some outline of an answer. ‘In the face of evil what am I? Am I able to eliminate evil?’ If a man is sincere, in front of his own evil and that of others, his first act is to recognise that he needs salvation, a salvation that he cannot alone give to himself. It is here that the message of Christ becomes dramatically evident: the possibility of the redemption of evil and thus of the salvation whose indispensability man perceives lies in One who did not engage in discourses about evil but proposed himself as liberation from evil; even though he had not sinned he allowed himself to be treated as a sinner; and as an innocent he allowed himself to be crucified for our sake. Salvation is not only the explanation of the constitutive enigma of man (‘what a strange being is a being that does not have in himself the foundation of his being? Who before did not exist and now does exist, and then will not be?’), but is even the concrete offer of Jesus himself as the Eucharistic way to life and truth. Thus the answer to the question of the Teodicea is not a theory about evil it is the person of Jesus who was crucified and rose again.

Now, this salvific key is offered to the freedom of every man. Balthasar says: ‘God in Jesus Christ ends the enigma of man but does not pre-decide his drama’. The meaning of this is that each one of us is always in action and must ratify with his ‘yes’ to Christ the path of his conversion, of his change, and of his victory over evil in faith. To those who listen to him Christ says: ‘you need to change, you must change, and you must always change’. This is the ‘convert!’ that gathers within it the whole of the great appeal of the Torah, of the Prophets, and of Wisdom, concentrated after a certain fashion in the appeal of the Baptist. ‘I beseech you, be reconciled with God’, says St. Paul. Thus 11 September pushes us deeply towards a great reflection on the enigma of man, on the enigma of evil, on the possibility of salvation from this enigma, on the possibility and responsibility that each individual man has in the construction of a personal and social ‘good life’.
Today, in Christians, all of this should bring about two approaches. First of all the depth of the question. ‘Are we in a position of confession? In our daily and communal lifestyle is the approach of confession, that is to say that of those who recognise that they are sinners and invoke the mercy of the cross, normal?’ Can we, instead, observe that we rarely enter the fray, rarely feel the urgent need for a question about our faithfulness to the Christian message. I believe, for example, that it is necessary to reflect on why in the East such a total confusion between Christianity and Western civilisation has been made possible. This confusion allows very many of our Islamic brethren to condemn both Christianity and the West as though they were the same thing, linked in the same decadence; we cannot confine ourselves to dismissing this as a simplistic criticism. I do not believe that Christians must throw a veil of negativity over the whole of the modern experience which so strongly marks the West, but it is certainly important to take on board ‘Eastern’ criticism so as to engage in courageous questions about the claim to reduce religion to a private fact, the intellectualistic and abstract claim of ‘democracies for export’, and the claim to an irrepressible freedom of conscience which, however, coincides with ‘it is forbidden to forbid’. To sum up, the formula of the Second Vatican Council is of great contemporary relevance: Christianity by its nature generates cultures but it is bound to no culture in particular.

Secondly, the energy of knowledge. To know Islam; to know the forms of Islam. And here the question of the subject involved returns. I would like to observe here the path followed by Oasis. We have made a proposal to the Christians of the West: to know Islam, to speak with Islam, through our Christian brethren of the East, through their millenarian experience, through their reality and their concerns as minorities. Through a created, concrete and present subject. This is a choice that is generating two very good consequences: it forces we Westerners to ‘de-intellectualise ourselves’ and leads our Eastern brethren to adopt this task within the universal Church. In this context we want to address the questions of a most general nature, that is to say of a social, economic and political nature, that this historical moment is bringing to the fore. Can we not today ask ourselves whether the great appeal launched by John Paul II against the war in Iraq was not a prophetic voice that should have been listened to? Can we reduce the problem of security in the West to mere technical and containing factors? How can Europe speak to the United States of America? Is it right to think that one must respond to human bombs with retaliation? In what sense can one prevent a threat? To what point should the use of force be taken?

Westerners believe that they have an explanation for everything, a reflex of the great European mind that has synthesised Alexandria, Jerusalem and Rome. But after losing the subjectivity that was behind it, this great culture has become one big building game: pieces to out together and take apart in a game that is increasingly abstract and rarefied. We produce theories that are always new and which lose sight of reality. And if one departs from real subjects, the purely scientific approach, the approach of study, is destined to be partial. From our wealth springs presumption, which easily becomes a superiority complex because within our mental system we can articulate very complete theories in relation to which, measured solely on the terrain of language, the developments that come from the East can appear overly primitive. However it is on the other side, specifically in the East, that we see a force, a belief in religio, in an explicit relationship with God, in relation to which, essentially, we are nostalgic, because by now we run the risk of being without fathers, the children of no one.

In this historical moment that began with 11 September, which is so dramatic and so dark, there is the possibility of a positive way. In the East and the West this passes by way of the community of Christians, the courage with which they themselves enter the fray, how they demonstrate that they are ‘confessing communities’, knowing how to adopt and make their own the request for salvation that beats in the heart of every man.

]]> http://english.angeloscola.it/2006/09/11/september-11-five-years-after-cardinal-scolas-message/feed/ 0 http://english.angeloscola.it/2006/09/01/todays-and-tomorrows-scenarios-for-competitive-strategies-religions-and-politics/ http://english.angeloscola.it/2006/09/01/todays-and-tomorrows-scenarios-for-competitive-strategies-religions-and-politics/#comments Fri, 01 Sep 2006 14:15:50 +0000 ufficiostampa http://english.angeloscola.it/?p=190 1. The “Gods Are Back”
With the end of the age of utopias, the end to what Lyotard refers to as the age of the “Grand Narratives” , the growing influence of religions and sects around the world, especially of Islam, is at odds with the view that prevailed after 1945, namely that religion’s social and political relevance in the modern world would wither away. Then there were expectations that the process of secularisation would usher in the so-called mundane world. Instead, we are witnessing the Sacred making an almost furious comeback . All the tragic conflicts that have inflamed every corner of the globe after the fall of the Berlin Wall are proof enough of the naiveté behind the idea that in the 21st century the Western Way of Life would spread globally under the sign of “an awkwardly-labelled Humanity with a capital H” .
In order that this overly brief remark about the socio-political importance of religion not be seen as uncritically biased, it is necessary to take into account the objectively dialectical nature of the relationship between religion and modernity. If we want to respect the history of Europe, whose mind has tended to think globally, we must explicitly look at the dialectical between Christianity and Modernity?
What is it?
Let us begin at one extreme of this dialectical relationship. Today we can dispassionately say that modernity led Christianity to rigorously explain the consequences caused by the necessary and sound process of differentiation of religion from politics, a distinction that was already announced in the Gospels when Jesus said: “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God” (Mt: 22, 21). Modernity, especially with the advent of the Enlightenment, held in check a certain ideological drift in the Christian experience itself, a drift due to a doctrinaire point of view that reduced revealed truth to just a “system of conceptual propositions from which one could deduce individual aspects of reality”. This reductionism denied reality’s historical, unpredictable and perplexing nature and underestimated the importance of the relationship of truth to freedom. Quite a few occurrences connected to the inculturation of Christianity in Europe-and there are no reasons to disagree with this-are proof of this ideological failure.
From early modernity, the one-way vision that governed the relationship between truth and freedom found itself progressively in crisis. This vision correctly claimed that freedom had to provide space for all the truth, but it did not clearly show how to integrate the truth of freedom into the meaning of freedom for the truth, which implies the objective recognition of freedom of conscience, when the latter is correctly understood.
Nonetheless, and this is the other extreme of the dialectical relationship between Christianity and modernity, we must stress that if European modernity was, in a certain sense, able to force Christians to accept this greater authenticity, it was able to do so thanks to the essential and permanently vital core of the Christian faith itself. This core was passed on, from Jerusalem to Rome, by way of the unbroken Christian traditio, and continues to this day to be a key resource for contemporary Europe but also other parts of the world.
I am referring here to the principle of difference in unity which lives in the mystery of the Trinity and passed into History because of the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and became, by analogy, the principle of understanding and positively valuing all differences. At both individual and collective levels, this difference is not only tolerated but it is actually extolled because it is held in unity by that Truth-which is an event before it is ever a doctrine and ethics (cf. Deus caritas est n. 1)-that reaches into the farthest point (sort of a Ultima Thule) of the human experience, so that even the most radical difference is not allowed to degenerate into something that would more or less violently dissolve society.
In this context, the practice and theories of democracy evolved in the West in such a fashion that democracy came to be understood as an ensemble of citizens, intermediary organisations and peoples living together, freely and in an orderly fashion. In so doing, the latter gave rise to a civil society adequately served by the state.

2. Religion removed from the public sphere
And yet we cannot forget one important fact that, historically, came out of this dialectical relationship between modernity and Christianity in Europe. The precious outcome of this relationship, i.e. the truth of freedom of conscience and thus a satisfactory distinction between religious faith and political action, came with a hefty price, namely the removal of religion from the public sphere of civil society. A perceptive historian wrote that with modernity “religion starts to be viewed from the outside. It is categorised as a custom or something that is historically contingent. As such it is seen as opposed to reason or nature. ” Starting in the 16th century, various alternatives to the former relationship between religion and politics appear. There are attempts to reduce all confessions to one (integralism/fundamentalism); to find a supposedly universal natural religion that predates historically-contingent religions (naturalism of the Enlightenment); to attribute to “politics” the same function as a catalyst for citizens, intermediary organisations, civil society and nations once performed by religion (totalitarianism); and finally to subscribe to the notion of “provisional morality”, i.e. to scepticism (agnostic liberalism).
This fundamental process had a two-edged historical outcome. On the hand, religion came to be politically used in either an authoritarian way (as state religion) or liberal way (as a socially valuable tool) . On the other, religion was restricted to the private sphere, irrelevant and inappropriate for the public sphere. What modernity failed to do was to consider religion’s public relevance in and of itself.

3. Etsi Deus non daretur?
Quickly moving to the present, we can see that the rapid development of today’s civilisation of networks has transformed the nature of political participation and humbled intermediary organisations. In Europe, for more and more people a proper relationship between an individual’s fundamental rights and the state can only exist if other points of reference and mediation are excluded-only this way is a society deemed democratic and pluralistic. In this context, religion is seen as an “unwelcome third party” to be tolerated in so far is it is confined to a person’s private life. This view corresponds to the current phase of globalisation which focuses on cultural neutrality whereby in modern Western democracies all religions are “equal” (in-difference). The public sphere is said to be neutral as far as religions are concerned (…). All religions are asked to see their own universalism as a private affair, [at best] limited to their own sphere of influence. ”
This outlook is best exemplified by Kelsen’s well-known assertion that the “appreciation of rational science and the tendency to keep it free from any metaphysical or religious intrusion are traits of modern democracy “.
In very different ways countries like France, Italy and Spain have been the scene of heated discussions with regard to secularism. In each the prevailing view has been that the modern state ought to be secular and neutral. But we must really understand what this formula means. In the more passionate interpretations, the term “secular” does not only mean “a-religious” but sometimes even rhymes with “antireligious”.
Scholars do point out that in the United States, expressing one’s religiosity in public life is an accepted practice, albeit not a predominant one. The Founding Fathers somewhat tried to build “a secular state without a secular civil religion” . In this country, the political sphere is clearly separate from that of religion, but it is open to the latter because it is aware that government alone cannot fashion ethical citizens. On the contrary, ethical citizens are often inspired by religion to favour democracy. American Evangelicals, whether Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, whose appeal is currently reaching into places like Latin America (Brazil), Asia, Africa, and even in predominantly Muslim regions, are able to go quite far in integrating their faith and the American culture. Whatever we may think of these faith-based movements, and we should not underestimate their appeal, they do seem to confirm that “an important lesson in the American experience of religious diversity within a democratic political and social structure is that its religious foundation of culture is broad enough to accommodate those attempting to live according to one of the three great Abrahamic faith traditions while preserving individual freedom of belief and practice [as well as the freedom not to believe or practice].”
Kelsen’s thesis is thus coming under closer critical scrutiny today not only by people like David Novak, an American Jew who argues that “religious people are capable of building a secular order based on their own revelation-based traditions” , but also by those in Europe who are calling for a fresh approach to pluralistic democracy. Thinkers like Böckenförde and Habermas for instance, who, each in his own way, argue that whilst the modern state can only be based on a consensus over procedures, this does do not exclude that “the liberal secular state can also be sustained by normative premises that it alone cannot generate” .
Isn’t forcing believers to act etsi Deus non daretur, by not mentioning the relationship between rationality and the ultimate divine origin of a given rule (norm), ultimately a price to high to pay in order to live in society ? Are we actually sure that this omission isn’t depriving society of something good?
Ultimately, it is not possible to exclude, at least in principle, the notion that religion, too, can play a role in the public sphere.

4. Religions, social capital and “cultural métissage”
In particular we must ask ourselves: Can the principle of difference in unity, whose roots are Christian, ensure that democracy is real, now and in the future, in Europe as well as elsewhere? A democracy that not only can face rapid intercultural and inter-religious transformations, but can even turn the world’s new traits into cultural resources ? I think so. And I am certain that there is nothing nostalgic about it; it does not in any way, shape or form imply returning to bygone models of Christianity.
With regard to this I would like to say a few things.
First, I believe that recognising the religious dimension in civil society can fill the gaps left, among other things, by the liberal view of religion as a private matter.
Above all democracy needs trust and shared ideals without which it turns into a set of purely procedural conflict-resolution mechanisms between opposing interests. Von Kutschera realised this when he said that even ethics, whose main task is to “mediate between interests and moral needs, cannot motivate men’s desires and interests. Ethics need to be more grounded in anthropology, the more so since markets and economies are increasingly globalised. The fact that today there is no other form of democracy than the procedural model not only does not rule out Böckenförde’ thesis but rather proves it. In other words, democracy needs a certain societal background.
Secondly, it is by now obvious that marginalising religion from the social sphere is unacceptable to those non European cultures for which religion is essentially a public matter . In this sense, modern solutions to the relationship between religion and politics become obsolete as a result of the sometimes violent historical evolution of the process-I stress process-of civilisational and cultural métissage. This expression, which tentatively appeared some 20 years ago in anthropology departments and is by many still perceived apprehensively and with suspicion, has a broader application, in my opinion, than terms like identity and integration .

5. A public sphere religiously qualified
What new role can religions play at this point in history, at least in the West? First of all, I think we ought to recognise the need for a religiously qualified public sphere that is well separate from that of the state and quite distinctive within civil society itself .
This means that in its attitude towards religion, the state must shift from one of passive tolerance to one of “active openness”, in which religion’s public relevance is not reduced to whatever public space religions have negotiated with the state. For their part, religions must abandon their self-centred or fundamentalist attitude and engage in direct exchange with other religions and cultures so as to create an arena of dialogue in which religions can express their views and be heard in public debates over cultural values.
In other words, “a religiously qualified public sphere exists within a civil society defined as the meeting place where people engage in social exchanges (market-oriented or socially integrative), not deprived of their religious self but defined by it, and who, through their mutual interaction, give value to their respective selves as part of a democratic political system that regulates the presence of different religions in the aforementioned spheres of exchange. [A religiously qualified public sphere] is the place in which religions themselves elaborate social relations by acting outside of their own immediate realm through the influence they exert on social actors.”
Such a proposal recognises the fact that, “increasingly, freedom is viewed as a relational phenomenon” in tune with a one-to-one relationship between truth and freedom that is still being explored, since early modernity, in various modern cultures.

6. Religions and the Good Life
We must therefore imagine in more rigorous terms the type of state that can create an adequate space for a civil society that is truly plural, a state that is not afraid of the inevitable conflicts that will occur in such a society, but one that is able to positively regulate them. The type of state that I have in mind is not “detached” (i.e., falsely neutral); it is a state that is openly in the service of its citizens and their needs (like freedom, happiness, fulfillment) but without a specific worldview (Weltanschauung). And whilst fully respecting democratic procedures, it assimilates the values that underlie democratic life itself (civil and political liberties) to which intermediary groups give rise. I am neither ignoring nor am I worried by the fact that history teaches us that values are rooted in specific traditions which institutions certainly shape but which are in turn shaped by them. What I mean is the notion of “dominant traditions” similar to what Habermas had in mind when he spoke of “better opinion” . In the same way that someone arguing for an authentically formal and procedural democracy is not necessarily taking a “relativist” position, so anyone who thinks that the same procedural focus endowed with its own validity must be understood in axiological terms is not automatically a “fundamentalist”. I speak on purpose about the “axiology” and not the “foundations” of a procedural democracy, because this way we can refer to a “pre-political” level, one that is also religious in nature, and something that is quite useful for implementing human rights legislation and make democracies work. On another occasion I dealt with the same issues, when I spoke of “new secularism” in relation to the Italian situation .
Fundamental rights-if viewed in terms of the needs that constitute everyone’s basic experience and in terms of the values of living together in a democracy which are rooted in the particular history of a given people-represent the positive features of a truly secular society. In such a society, the state organises (and supports) the ways different identities and religions live side by side. The state I have in mind is not a state conceived as an empty and unremarkable container that one fills as one pleases (this is a weak and for all intents and purposes an unworkable proposition), certainly not one that is confessional, but rather one where everyone can make his or her own contribution to the common good. And this can only occur as part of an inevitable and respectful mutual process of give and take and recognition that preserves the real nature of power, which is and ought to be service to the people, even when the state must resort, as Kant put it, “to the use of force to uphold the law”.
It is no accident if it is the only proposition that, by avoiding the opposite dangers of unrestrained individualism and oppressive collectivism, can adequately take into account the “relational” nature of power . None of us can conceive ourselves outside of a relationship. The “individual” does not exist as a separate atom, self-sufficient and thus unrelated to others. We always exist in relation to a “different other” . Each one of us is both “oneself” (identity) and the “other” for “someone else” (difference). In actual terms, as Ricoeur pointed out, this relationship expresses itself in a process of dialogic confrontation and recognition (whose flip side is non recognition) which are the bases for sensible co-existence and legitimate rule .
As mutual confrontation and recognition evolve, the tie between identity and difference, in addition to being important for democracy, appears as something indissoluble. From this perspective the relationship between religion and politics only requires respect for religions’ nature as concrete universals. This nature is no less important than the universality of fundamental rights, which are often too abstract when they are reduced to a simple list of poorly understood and historically contextualised rules.
A civil religion alone is not enough for a sound democracy, nor can democracy rely on religions that are simply privatised. What democracy needs to do is to fully recognise that personal faith is inseparable from group ties (religions), which operate as independent actors in the public sphere and offer everyone without distinctions their own proposals for the good life to individuals and society in a process of exchange of ideas that is open, democratic, secular, public and plural.