750 anos de Dante Alighieri e Raimundo Lúlio com Cardeal Burke.

Um colocou Maomé no inferno (oitavo círculo) como herege, eu já falei disso aqui no blog. O outro recebeu visões de Cristo mandando ele pregar o cristianismo para os muçulmanos, e acabou sendo morto por eles.

Hoje, Dante Alligheri não conseguiria publicar nada, pois seria muito ofensivo e o Beato Ramon Llull (Raimundo Lúlio) seria expulso da Igreja, como perturbado moralmente.

Este ano comemora-se 750 anos de nascimento de Dante e também 750 anos que Ramon Llull decidiu aprender árabe para pregar para os muçulmanos e seguir o que Cristo pedia.

Outro dia, nosso colega comentarista do blog Nik recomendou o livro acima. Já comprei. No Brasil, fiquei sabendo agora, existe o Instituto de Filosofia e Ciência Raimundo Lúlio.

Também vi que Raimundo Lúlio estará junto das comemorações dos 750 anos de nascimento de Dante.

Ocorrerá uma Conferência em Roma nos dias 28 e 29 de Maio para celebrar Dante e Lúlio. Junto desta conferência ocorrerá uma peregrinação para locais sagrados da Itália, pedindo a conversão dos muçulmanos e judeus. Acho que o Papa Francisco, politicamente correto como é, jamais pediria a conversão dos muçulmanos e judeus.

A Conferência contará com a presença do Cardeal Raymond Burke.

Vejam o professor Edmund Mazza explicando a Conferência e falando especialmente de Raimundo Lúlio no site Aleteia.

Edmund Mazza is a professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Azusa Pacific University. Mazza's principal fields are Medieval Europe, Ancient History, Church History and Russian History. His most recent article, "Not Everybody Loves Raymond (or Regensberg)," was published in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly. His travel and research has taken him to such varied places as New York, Paris, Lourdes, Rome, Venice, Padua, Florence, Barcelona, Kuala Lumpur, and Mexico City.

Mazza spoke with Aleteia about the pilgrimage, planned for May.

This year marks the 750th anniversary of the birth of Dante. I understand you are planning to celebrate that in a special way.

We have organized a conference in Rome, May 28-29, and we plan to have Cardinal Raymond Burke and other speakers about Dante from the US and abroad, who will commemorate him. Dante is the founder, in a sense of the Italian language, at least in terms of literature. He took his dialect and used that … when it was customary to use Latin. He created what came to be one of the greatest poems of all time, an epic poem that came to be called The Divine Comedy. Dante as a character in the poem traveled through hell, purgatory and heaven. As Dante is a pilgrim in that sense we are making a pilgrimage in addition to the conference. It will be from May 21-30.

What's the pilgrimage route. You’re not planning to lead people through hell, are you?

We’re going to Turin for the special exposition of the Holy Shroud, which Christians believe to be the actual shroud in which the body of Christ was wrapped. There’s a whole host of scientific data verifying that it is the actual burial shroud. The shroud is displayed only on rare occasions, and this year is going to be one of those times.

Also, it’s a very pilgrim, penitential thing to do, to turn to our Lord.

In addition to honoring Dante, the conference is also honoring a lesser-known figure, Blessed Ramon Llull, who also 750 years ago this year, was called to preach to Muslims and Jews, and he did that in a very special way. Originally, he was a troubadour and a knight in arms. Dante also had military experience and wrote love poetry, usually of a courtly nature. Courtly love deals with the kind of love as, for example, between Lancelot and Guinevere. It ordinarily has certain adulterous connotations to it. In the case of Ramon Lllull, he had a series of visions of Christ crucified, and based on those visions he decided to give his live over to writing love verses of a different sort. To bring Muslims and Jews to fullness of the light, which is Christ. He’d go on to write hundreds of different works along those lines. He started out by making a pilgrimage through the shrines of Spain.

So to honor both Dante and Lllull we are inviting people to become pilgrims and start out with a vision of Christ crucified, namely, the Shroud of Turin, which may be an exact image of the crucifixion. We invite them to offer their sufferings up for the conversion of Muslims and Jews because, as much as the relations between Muslims and Jews and Christians is in the news these days it’s not often that one hears about offering penance for the conversion of others. We hear things more of a political nature, but of course we know that the spiritual is superior to the political


It’s an interesting yoking of the two figures. How did you discover Llull?

I wrote my dissertation on another Ramon—Raymond of Penafort, who was a Dominican, and therefore a preacher, but in an unprecedented way, in the history of the Church, set out trying to convert the Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain. He asked Thomas Aquinas to write the Summa Contra Gentiles, which would offer philosophical support for believing in the Gospel and rejecting things that fall short of the Gospel. So he established schools for friars to learn Arabic and Hebrew so they might use the books that Muslims and Jews consider holy, to point to the fact that Jesus is the Messiah. It was a bit of a polemical approach to interreligious dialogue. For example, in 1263 there was a famous debate between a Dominican friar who was a convert from Judaism, and an eminent rabbi of the day, Moses Maimonides, and in 1263 in Barcelona, the king orchestrated the debate between the Jew and the friar as to whether or not Christ was the messiah. The Dominican used the Talmud to prove that he is. It was around this time that Lllull experienced his conversion, and it was probably about 750 years ago this year that he met with Raymond of Penafort because Llull had done his penance and was about to embark on his journey to convert the infidel, and he wanted to take the traditional route, which would have been to go to the University of Paris and study theology and be able to write scholarly works and address scholarly minds.

Penafort urged Llull to stay in his home of Mallorca, the island off the coast of Spain… So he acquired a Muslim slave to teach him Arabic...and he made a couple of trips to North Africa, where he tried to preach to crowds about Christ. The second time, in 1315, he found himself in front of an angry mob, almost to the point of beating to death and he died, according to tradition, on his way home to Europe. He was beatified in 1847. The Church considers him a martyr, both as a red martyr and a white martyr, devoting his life for the sake of others.

What will Cardinal Burke’s role be in this pilgrimage?

In addition to the fact that his name is Raymond—and Raymond Lllull is his namesake—Cardinal Burke is now cardinal-patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. The title of our conference is Conversion and Coexistence. When we look at Lllull and Dante we’re looking at personal conversions. We’re looking at the conversions of others. And there’s the issue of "How does one get along with one another?" This year happens to be the 450th anniversary of the great siege of the Island of Malta by the Turks. During the Renaissance the Ottoman Turks were a tremendous threat to the survival of Christian Europe. And one of occasion was the great siege of Malta in 1565. The island was controlled by the Knights of Malta, whose name at the time was the Knights Hospitallers, or the Knights of St. John of the Hospital. They started out as what we would call a military-monastic order, that is, knights who fought in crusade to protect pilgrims traveling to the holy Land, or to try to take back the Holy Land from the Muslims who were controlling it politically. So these were men trained in military tactics, but they led a monastic life. they were celibate, they were supposed to be poor, they followed the head of the order in obedience, they engaged in various pious practices, fasting and personal devotions.


(Agradeço a entrevista de Mazza ao site Big Pulpit)