He would talk to anyone about God. This obviously pleased the priests who were off serving small Catholic communities in the Muslim world, but permission to talk about God with imams was not exactly the “fresh air” that liberal lay Catholics had expected from the first ecumenical council in a century. However, even after 100 years of Islamic rule, numerous Greek-speaking Christian communities prospered, especially in north-eastern Sicily, as dhimmis. He suspended the Jesuits’ constitution for two years. It takes two years to grow, starting with its roots, stems and leaves, then flowering sometime in its second year. That certainty, drawn from his reading of John’s Gospel, of the inextricability of Theos and Logos-“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”-was the heart of his speech in Regensburg nearly forty years later. Giovanni Montini, the cardinal who became Pope Paul VI a few weeks after John’s death, signed off on Nostra Aetate in 1965. Ten years later, he withdrew the Church’s long-standing objection to the construction of a Grand Mosque for Rome. But it held out the possibility of a revolution in relations between two religions that (as John Paul II remarked twenty years later, on a trip to Morocco) had spent more time offending each other than embracing.

A case in point is the two big prayer gatherings for peace that took place in Assisi during John Paul’s papacy, the first in 1986 and the second in 2002, two and a half years before the Pope died. Nostra Aetate also acknowledged, for the first time in Church history, if not what theologians call “the salvation status” of Islam-put simply, do Muslims go to Heaven? The Church that Karol Wojtyla and, after him, Joseph Ratzinger inherited is in some ways as old and as new as that. Ratzinger and Wojtyla shared this: an exceptionally narrow view of what constitutes a morally acceptable Christian life. Study for “Romans Parisiens”: The books in this still life seem to exude individual personalities. Everything is ‘order.’ When he says that homosexuality is a disorder, that divorce and remarriage is a disorder-he can’t find any exceptions to ‘order.’ ” (Catholics still argue about the role he played, as Archbishop of Munich and Freising in the late seventies, in the Vatican’s decision to strip Hans Küng of the right to teach Catholic theology, on the ground of what could be called Küng’s “doctrinal disorder.”) He made an exceptionally effective Grand Inquisitor at the Holy Office, censuring outspoken priests and literally silencing the liberation theologians who were reviving the Church in South America.

He deals in truth-in “the Catholic ‘om,’ ” as Robert Mickens, the Vatican correspondent for The Tablet, calls it-and has little tolerance for a church of broad, grand gestures. Thomas Michel, the Secretary for Interreligious Affairs at the Jesuit Curia, calls Vatican II “the 1968 of the Catholic Church”-a magical liberating moment that, like ’68, frightened as many people as it freed. Although we might like to ignore the strained leap from the laboratory bench to the Ark of the Covenant, a cover story in Time (25 October 2004) has brought the discussion to the general public. Greek monotheism holds that the world has always existed and does not believe in creationism or divine providence, while Semitic monotheism believes the world was created by a God at a particular point in time and that this God acts in the world. This section turns to multiple models of three ultimates extant in living world traditions: Brahman in the Hindu traditions indigenous in India, God in the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) indigenous in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula, and the Dao in the Daoist and Ru (Confucian) traditions indigenous in China.

The New River meets up with the Gauley River to form the Kanawha; it’s one of the most unique confluences in the world. However, by the early 1600, almost all land had been divided into estates (arpalik) granted to senior Ottoman dignitaries as a form of tax farming, which created conditions for severe exploitation of taxpayers by unscrupulous land holders. It is, therefore, the obligation of all Muslims to fight in order to retrieve the lost land. The Byzantine emperor lost his son, while in the Kingdom of France, Bonne of Luxembourg, the wife of the future John II of France, died of the plague. John Paul was not popular with the Church hierarchy. Despite the mythology that surrounds it, Vatican II was meant to open the Church to the world, not to liberalize its doctrine, and its most enduring legacy may have been not Nostra Aetate but the conservative backlash that Nostra Aetate inspired. Benedict XVI, like John Paul II, had been one of the young theological advisers at Vatican II. Tübingen’s Catholic theologians were famously progressive, closer, in some ways, to Protestant theologians like Karl Barth, in Switzerland, than to their own bishops.