{"id":5207,"date":"2005-04-20T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-20T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2005\/04\/20\/2005-04-20-hindu-organization-reacts-to-new-pope\/"},"modified":"2005-04-20T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2005-04-20T12:00:00","slug":"2005-04-20-hindu-organization-reacts-to-new-pope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2005\/04\/20\/2005-04-20-hindu-organization-reacts-to-new-pope\/","title":{"rendered":"Hindu Organization Reacts to New Pope"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a HREF=\"http:\/\/www.shastras.org\/PressRelease11.html\">Source<\/a><\/P><P>TROY MICHIGAN, April 19, 2005: Navya Shastra, a global Hindu organization of scholars, practitioners and priests with members in over ten countries, has congratulated the Catholic Church for selecting Joseph Ratzinger&#8211;now Benedict XVI&#8211;as its new Pope. However, the organization expressed concern over Ratzinger&#8217;s stance towards Hinduism. &#8220;Ratzinger has described Hindu meditative practices as &#8216;auto-erotic&#8217; and has stated that the Hindu doctrine of karma is &#8220;morally cruel,&#8221; said Vikram Masson, Navya Shastra Co-Chairman, &#8220;clearly he is misinformed about the central practices and tenets which bind the world&#8217;s 800 million Hindus,&#8221; he added. At a time when religions must work together to spiritually regenerate an increasingly secular planet, such doctrinal narrowness and lack of understanding of other traditions will only serve a divisive function. &#8220;What is needed now is ecumenism and mutual trust,&#8221; said Dr. Jaishree Gopal, Navya Shastra Co-Chairman, &#8220;we hope that the new Pope comes to understand this because religious difference and competition is causing mounting global conflict,&#8221; she added. <BR><br \/>\n<\/P> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SourceTROY MICHIGAN, April 19, 2005: Navya Shastra, a global Hindu organization of scholars, practitioners and priests with members in over,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}