"Lay Pope, Icon, Secular Saint"

This nut has a best selling book in Catholic Italy or should I say post-Catholic Italy. Some members of the hierarchy are rightly concerned. From this article by the Times ONline which can be found here in its entirety.

A spiritual book by a former journalist turned Asian mystic is having a far from peaceful impact in Italy. A book offering Asian mysticism and spirituality as the keys to life has become this summer’s bestseller in Roman Catholic Italy, provoking growing alarm at the Vatican.

La Fine è Il Mio Inizio (The End is My Beginning), by Tiziano Terzani, a former war correspondent, has sold 400,000 copies and gone into four editions since it was published posthumously in March — an astonishing figure in a country where bestseller normally means 100,000 copies.

Terzani, an expert on China and Japan who covered wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan before adopting a long white beard and robe and living in an Indian ashram, argues that people have an “innate moral sense” and do not need institutionalised religion to teach them right and wrong.

The former Communist, whose mother was a devout Catholic, outlines a philosophy of Indian spirituality, communion with nature and “the harmony of opposites” that he said helped him in his fight against cancer. He deplores the impact of Western materialism on Asia and describes how his growing pacifism made him a bitter opponent of war, and especially of the Bush Administration’s War on Terror.

This week Avvenire, Italy’s leading Catholic daily, accused Terzani of “leading people astray”. He had “completely lost sight of the incarnate and historical dimension of religious experience”. Alessandro Gnocchi, a Catholic author and television presenter, accused Terzani in the conservative newspaper Libero of peddling “a confused mixture of Oriental philosophy, Marxism and Christianity” that muddled “St Francis with Zen Buddhism”.

Vatican sources said that this was anathema to Pope Benedict XVI, who, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, warned of the dangers of trying to reconcile Oriental and New Age spirituality with Catholicism.

Terzani’s website has been indundated with admiring e-mails. The book was “a beautiful journey towards the authentic meaning of life,” reads one from Carlo. “I was knocked out,” writes Luisa.

“Terzani has become the lay Pope,” said Panorama magazine. La Stampa said that a “cult” had grown up around the former journalist, making him “an icon, a secular saint”.

Do you think it could have anything to do with this?



Scenes from the Interfaith Service at the Fatima Shrine where a Hindi "priest" offered a prayer to Vishnu and flowers to Devi at a Catholic altar. The "priest" came to the Shrine to take advantage of the "spiritual vibrations". Source- this article.