Here is a translation of the first statement issued by the new Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. He comments on the swirling controversy in the Islamic world about a passage of the Holy Father's lecture at the University of Regensburg and conveys the Holy Father's reaction to the unwarranted controversy .
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DECLARATION OF HIS EMINENCE,
CARDINAL TARCISIO BERTONE,
SECRETARY OF STATE
September 16, 2006

In the face of the reactions from Muslims about some passages in the address of the Holy Father Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg, I wish to add the following to the clarifications and precisions already made by the Director of the Vatican Press Office:

- The Pope's position on Islam is unequivocally that expressed in the conciliar document Nostro aetate:

"The Church regards Moslems with esteem. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,(5) who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God.

"Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting. (n. 3)

- The Pope's choice in favor of inter-religious and inter-cultural dialog is likewise unequivocal. In his meeting with representatives of some Muslim communites in Cologne, on August 20, 2005, he said that the dialog between Muslims and Christians "cannot be reduced to a seasonal choice," adding:
"The very lessons of the past should serve us to avoid repeating the same errors. We wish to seek the paths of reconciliation and to live respectful of each other's identity."

- As to the judgment expressed by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus cited by him in the lecture at Regensburg, the Holy Father absolutely did not mean to make it his own, but used it as a point of departure to develop, in an academic context, and as is evident from a complete and careful reading of the text, some reflections on the relationship between religion and violence in general, from whatever side it may
come.

It is worth calling to attention what Benedict XVI himself recently said in a message commemorating the 2oth anniverary of the inter-religious encounter to pray for peace, called by his beloed predecessor John Paul II in Assisi in October 1986:
"...the manifestations of violence cannot be attributed to religion as such but to the cultural limits within which it is is lived and in which it develops over time....In fact, evidences of the intimate linkbetween the relationship with God and the ethic of love are found in all the great religious traditions."

- The Holy Father therefore profoundly regrets that some passages of his lecture could have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers and could have been interpreted in a way that does not correspond at all to his intentions.

At the same time, in the face of the fervent religiousness of Muslim believers, he has called on the secularized culture of the West to avoid "the contempt of God and the cynicism which considers mockery of the sacred as a civil right."

- In reaffirming his respect for those who profess Islam, he hopes that they may be helped to understand his words in their true sense so that, having overcome this uneasy time, we may reinforce our mutual testimony of "the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men" and our working to "defend and promote together, for all men, social justice, moral values, peace and liverty." (Nostra Aetate, n. 31).
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[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/09/2006 14.06]

John Allen, in his ALL THINGS CATHOLIC for 9/15/06, explains why he was not in Bavaria -
"I was forced to miss this week's trip by Benedict XVI to Bavaria due to lectures I had agreed months ago to give in Irvine, California, and Cleveland....(but) Even at a distance, it's possible to offer some general observations about the Sept. 9-14 homecoming of Benedict XVI."
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I have written before that Benedict XVI is not a PC pope. By that, I don't mean that he sets out to give offense; on the contrary, he's one of the most gracious figures ever to step on the world stage. Instead, he simply does not allow his thinking to be channeled by the taboos and fashions of ordinary public discourse.

For example, any PR consultant would have told the pope that if he wanted to make a point about the relationship between faith and reason, he shouldn't open up with a comparison between Islam and Christianity that would be widely understood as a criticism of Islam, suggesting that it's irrational and prone to violence.

Yet that is precisely what Benedict did in his address to 1,500 students and faculty at the University of Regensburg on Wednesday, citing a 14th century dialogue between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a learned Persian.

News headlines immediately focused upon the pope's use of the term jihad and its implied swipe at Muslim-influenced terrorism, shaping up as something of a replay of the Danish cartoon controversy.

Yet he brought up the dialogue between Paleologus and the Persian to make a different point. Under the influence of its Greek heritage, he said, Christianity represents a decisive choice in favor of the rationality of God. While Muslims may stress God's majesty and absolute transcendence, Christians believe it would contradict God's nature to act irrationally.

He argued that the Gospel of John spoke the last word on the biblical concept of God: In the beginning was the logos, usually translated as word, but it is also the Greek term for reason.

The lecture, titled "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections," ran to almost 4,000 words (more than a half-hour of speaking time), and its main concern was with what Benedict sees as an artificial truncation of human reason in the West. Since the Reformation, he argued, Western thinkers have come to regard theology and metaphysics as unscientific.

That is problematic, Benedict said, on two counts.

First, it leaves reason mute before the great questions of life and death, questions about why we are here and how we should act.

"This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity," the pope said, "as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate."

Second, it is logically self-defeating for science itself, which depends upon the assumption of order and reason in the universe, but can't explain why things should work that way in the first place.

"The question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought to philosophy and theology," the pope said.

"For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding."

Ultimately, Benedict argued, a form of reason which rejects religious and philosophical thinking cannot promote dialogue with other cultures.

"In the Western world, it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid," he said. "Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."

Whatever the merits of Benedict's argument, it is a subtle and carefully modulated analysis of Western intellectual history head and shoulders above the standard fare most leaders offer on the stump. Of course, that's not what the world is talking about right now, raising the question of whether Benedict could do with a dash more sensitivity to how wires in today's hair-trigger world are tripped.

The Vatican on Thursday issued a statement insisting that Benedict had no intention of giving offense, and that part of his argument at Regensburg was precisely in favor of respect of the religious convictions of humanity.

Aside from the fracas over Islam, Benedict has actually once again shown himself to be a figure singularly uninterested in grabbing headlines. In face of a rebellious Catholic community in Germany, Benedict might have used the occasion to issue a stern call to order, but he did nothing of the sort.

Neither did he engage in much public breast-beating over general European declines in faith and practice. Nor did Benedict follow the model of John Paul II by going personal, using the details of his own biography to underscore points or openly letting his emotions flow.

Instead, in his public messages Benedict focused largely on the pastoral basics. Consider these words, addressed to German parents:

"Please, go with your children to church and take part in the Sunday Eucharistic celebration! … Sunday becomes more beautiful, the whole week becomes more beautiful, when you go to Sunday Mass together. And please, pray together at home too: at meals and before going to bed. Prayer does not only bring us nearer to God but also nearer to one another."

As we have seen during his other public voyages, this is Benedict the pastor at work. For the most part, he avoids theological speculation or hard-hitting political commentary, striving instead to speak to the immediate spiritual needs of ordinary people.

I wrote in Poland that when Benedict travels he has an intended audience in mind, and it certainly isn't the press corps. The Italian daily Corriere della Sera tried to profile it statistically on Tuesday, using the results of a recent poll on religious practice in Italy . (In general terms, the findings have parallels pretty much everywhere in the West).

The survey found that more than 90 percent of Italians describe themselves as Catholic, while just 25 percent go to Mass on a weekly basis. Twenty percent never go at all, and the remainder are clumped somewhere in the middle.

These in-betweeners still think of themselves as Catholic, still recognize the church as a moral and spiritual point of reference, but to varying degrees have drifted away from regular practice of the faith. They have a Catholic background, according to the poll, but are moving in the direction of progressive secularization.

That broad middle people not instinctively hostile to the church, but not wild about it either represents, according to Corriere, Benedict's potential market.

His strategy seems to be to speak in positive tones about the Christian message, avoiding giving headline writers occasions to fashion banners along the lines of, "Pope condemns x".

He's also offering a back to basics message, focusing on scripture, the church fathers, the devotional life and the sacraments, proposing that they offer the best way to satisfy post-modernity's need for meaning.

His gambit seems to be that by not feeding "the beast" -- to use the language of Washington about giving the media juicy sound-bites -- he can do an end-run around the normal filters of the secular press, allowing the natural categories of the Christian faith to fashion the discussion.

The question, of course, is whether anyone outside the 25 percent of Catholics who are basically already with the pope, and who probably constitute the bulk of the crowds who have turned out in Bavaria to see him, will actually hear it.

On that front, only time will tell.

One other point from the Regensburg lecture.

Benedict documented three stages in what he called the attempt at "dehellenization" of Christianity, meaning the effort to strip it of its Greco-Roman heritage and return it to a state of "pure faith," which could be re-expressed in different cultural forms in other parts of the world. The stages are the Reformation, the liberal theology of the 19th and 20th century, and the current push for "cultural pluralism."

The pope referred to the argument for "dehellenization" as "not only false," but "coarse and lacking in precision."

"True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures," he said. "Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself."

This is a point with potential importance for the issue of "inculturation," or calls for Christianity to be shaped by the local cultures in which it finds itself. The debate is usually most intense in the developing world, where some theologians suggest that Christianity's European modes of expressions should be set aside to allow a genuinely African, or Asian, or Latin American form of the faith to emerge.

In the past, Benedict has argued that the term "inculturation" is imprecise, because it suggests that a pure faith comes into contact with a historically conditioned culture. The better term, he has suggested, is "inter-culturation," because Christianity itself is a culture. Some aspects of its Greco-Roman and European inheritance, Benedict has said, cannot simply be cast aside.

The choice in favor of reason would, judging from the Regensburg address, be one example of what the pope has in mind.

What all this suggests is that Benedict will judge calls for liturgical adaptation, for example, or "African theology" with caution.

In another part of his 9/15/06 ALL THINGS CATHOLIC, John Alen goes back to his continuing evaluation of Benedict XVI, this time via G.K. Chesterton. He quotes from one of his recent lectures about the Benedictine Papacy thus far:

Though I realize this may seem a quirky way to begin -- even, dare I say it, "unorthodox" -- I'm going to open this "insider's view of the Vatican" by invoking two men who were anything but Vatican insiders: George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton.

While Chesterton was a zealous convert to Catholicism, he swam the Tiber only in a metaphorical sense; so far as we know, he never set foot in any office of the Roman Curia. Shaw was a socialist and free-thinker who saw God merely as an élan vital within the natural world.

He had little use for institutional Christianity, and precious little for the Vatican. Yet the friendship between Chesterton and Shaw nevertheless offers a fruitful means of putting ourselves "inside the Vatican" in the pontificate of Benedict XVI.

....

How was Chesterton able to keep friendships green with figures who had such diverse worldviews? In part, because Chesterton embodied a spirit of self-confidence that animated Catholic intellectual life in the early 20th century. There was a sense of having survived the worst blows secularity had to offer: the French Revolution, Darwin, historical-critical study of the Bible, and the collapse of the Papal States.

All were supposed to have doomed Catholicism, yet here orthodoxy stood, generating giants such as Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Paul Claudel, and a host of others. Chesterton and his generation did not fear "contamination" with alien ideas; on the contrary, they were convinced the false promises of secularity had far more to fear from the Christian gospel.

To be sure, Chesterton despised heresy with the best of them, but his delight came not in burning heretics, but in refuting them.

It's striking that in his day, Chesterton's friendships with radicals and atheists never generated controversy. (He was also close friends with H.G. Wells; he, Shaw and Wells actually once made a short farcical film together).

Today we live in a different age, in which Catholic identity concerns and ideological polarization have made it far more problematic for the lion to lay down with the lamb. Imagine the reaction today if it emerged, for example, that George Weigel borrows money from John Kerry, or that Mother Angelica admires the writings of Joan Chittister.

Imagine, for that matter, what people might think if Pope Benedict XVI were friends with Hans Küng.

And therein lies the rub, because of course Pope Benedict XVI is friends with Hans Küng, who for three decades has been the enfant terrible of Catholic theology. The two men's warm reunion one year ago makes the point.

My thesis is this: After 18 months of Benedict's papacy, one defining characteristic is what we might call his "Chestertonian assurance," a tranquility in the face of diverse currents of thought, as well as the respect that one deeply cultured soul naturally feels for another.

By the way, I am not comparing Benedict and Chesterton on a personal level. Chesterton was irascible and curmudgeonly; Benedict, on the other hand, is unfailingly gracious, polite, and kind. As a personality type, he's closer to Emily Post.

Yet Benedict breathes the same air of Christian enlightenment as Chesterton. His approach to modernity is neither the craven assimilation that Jacques Maritain described as "kneeling before the world," nor the defensiveness of a "Taliban Catholicism" that knows only how to excoriate and condemn.

Facing disagreement and differing cultural visions, Benedict is not afraid -- and because he's not afraid, he's not defensive, and he's not in a hurry.

Such a spirit is largely alien to our fractured and hair-trigger era, and so Benedict has been something of a paradox - this avatar of Catholic traditionalism espousing a positive message, willing to engage in reasoned reflection with people who don't think like him.

For 18 months, people have been speculating about when the "real pope" will emerge from beneath this serene, gracious façade. Ladies and gentleman, I suggest to you tonight that the façade is the real pope.

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Yet another sign that as a biographer of Benedict XVI, John Allen is starting out with the positive premises about the man he learned after his first go as biographer of Cardinal Ratzinger. Thank you, Mr. Allen.

In this excerpt from Allen's column, I omitted his very interesting contrasts of Chesterton and Shaw, so as not to delay getting to his point about Benedict.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/09/2006 15.21]

Here is the translation of Cardinal Bertone's statement provided by the Vatican Press Office :
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DECLARATION OF HIS EMINENCE,
CARDINAL TARCISIO BERTONE,
SECRETARY OF STATE
September 16, 2006

Given the reaction in Muslim quarters to certain passages of the Holy Father's address at the University of Regensburg, and the clarifications and explanations already presented through the Director of the Holy See Press Office, I would like to add the following:

- The position of the Pope concerning Islam is unequivocally that expressed by the conciliar document Nostra Aetate:

"The Church regards with esteem also the Muslims. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, Who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God.

"Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting" (no. 3).

- The Pope's option in favor of inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue is equally unequivocal. In his meeting with representatives of Muslim communities in Cologne, Germany, on 20 August 2005, he said that such dialogue between Christians and Muslims "cannot be reduced to an optional extra," adding: "The lessons of the past must help us to avoid repeating the same mistakes. We must seek paths of reconciliation and learn to live with respect for each other's identity".

- As for the opinion of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus which he quoted during his Regensburg talk, the Holy Father did not mean, nor does he mean, to make that opinion his own in any way.

He simply used it as a means to undertake - in an academic context, and as is evident from a complete and attentive reading of the text - certain reflections on the theme of the relationship between religion and violence in general, and to conclude with a clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation for violence, from whatever side it may come.

On this point, it is worth recalling what Benedict XVI himself recently affirmed in his commemorative Message for the 20th anniversary of the Inter-religious Meeting of Prayer for Peace, initiated by his predecessor John Paul II at Assisi in October 1986: " ... demonstrations of violence cannot be attributed to religion as such but to the cultural limitations with which it is lived and develops in time. ... In fact, attestations of the close bond that exists between the relationship with God and the ethics of love are recorded in all great religious traditions".

- The Holy Father thus sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful, and should have been interpreted in a manner that in no way corresponds to his intentions.

Indeed it was he who, before the religious fervor of Muslim believers, warned secularized Western culture to guard against "the contempt for God and the cynicism that considers mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom".

- In reiterating his respect and esteem for those who profess Islam, he hopes they will be helped to understand the correct meaning of his words so that, quickly surmounting this present uneasy moment, witness to the "Creator of heaven and earth, Who has spoken to men" may be reinforced, and collaboration may intensify "to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom" (Nostra Aetate no. 3).

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The news stories I have seen so far about Cardinal Bertone's statement lead off by saying it 'stops short of the apology demanded by Muslim leaders.' And of course, those who are stirring up the anti-Pope sentiments in the Muslim world will be even more disdainful. Even if the word used had been 'apologize', they would still find it short, as nothing less than his head on a platter will placate their misplaced outrage.

"The Holy Father thus sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful, and should have been interpreted in a manner that in no way corresponds to his intentions."

The dictionary defines an apology as "an expression of regret for wrongdoing". The Pope has expressed his 'sincere regrets' that his words could have sounded offensive...' He cannot be 'sincerely regretful' for something he did wrong, if that is what they expect to hear, because he did no wrong - he was misinterpreted and misconstrued deliberately!

[ A little note on translation: I chose to use the dictionary meaning 'profoundly' for the Italian adverb 'vivamente' in the original for my translation, because 'profoundly regrets' is, I think, a better phrase than 'sincerely regrets' - simply because one should assume regrets are sincere, especially coming from the Pope.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/09/2006 17.32]

In contrast - and almost like a direct answer - to the outrageously craven editorial by the New York Times today joining the Muslim world's demand for an apology from the Pope, I have translated the editorial in today's issue of Il Foglio, the newspaper edited by ex-Communist, non-Catholic Giuliano Ferrara, ex-cabinet minister of Italy and member of the European Parliament:
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There are many ways to attack a Pope who reasons as a free man on the biggest issue of our time - political Islam and jihadism.

One is the banal habit of Vatican commentators who talk about a slip taken by the Pope, or worse, a tumble, or discourse from some presumed high ground of political wisdom on the unbreachable diffrence between a universal pastor and a rigid professor of theology.

Unfortunately, the tactic of abridging, reducing and enucleating ideas, often succeeds in muddling the issue.

And while some in the West have tried to claim this was all, at worst, a diplomatic miscue by the Pope that was really inconsequential, the jihadists and their theological advocates, extremist as well as moderate, have chosen to reopen the files of the past.

Let us leave for now the religious official in Turkey who said that the Pope is persona non grata in his country - where Catholic priests have been stabbed to death or otherwise physically attacked to put an end to their missions, which are already humiliated daily through ostracism and hate.

Let us ignore for now the appeals for anti-Christian mobilization by Arab broadcasting agencies - who terrorize the
sparse Christian communities surviving in their lands as dhimmi, or second-class citizens in the eyes of Muslim authorities.

And let us even discount for now the summons to the Apostolic Nuncio in Pakistan - a country where pro-Western elements are struggling with the Taliban-like theocratic party.

Or the diplomatic - and non-diplomatic - threats made by despotic Arab-Islam potentates; by a Muslim Brotherhood linked to an obvious plan to uproot Western civilization; by Koranic scholars in the principal universities of the caliphate; and yesterday, by the 'moderate' Palestinian Prime Minister Haniye of Hamas, who is mobilizing his people to protest theological arguments against jihad by the Pope - which are deemed offensive by those who have been killing helpless Jewish civilians in pizzerias and wedding feasts in Jerusalem and Haifa.

If there was a need to show that, unfortunately, the Islamic umma (community) is massively permeated with the Islamist phenomenon, here it is: It is not possible to use theological reason, it is not possible to discuss the roots of violence and terrorist preaching, speaking as a free man. It is not possible for the Muslim faithful, much less so for infidels and the Catholic Pope.

In the face of such formidable and fearsome aggression, what is needed is calm, dignity and firmness.

A Pope's thinking is not dogma for everyone, but it is not a cartoon. (In this case,) it is about our history and culture, of our identity.

To allow it to be enucleated, defiled, annulled by violence and fanaticism means to serve falsehood, rather than truth.

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Here is a translation of a brief report from APCOM, an Italian news agency:

(Apcom) - Benedict XVI gave an audience today to participants of an international congress on "Stem cells: future use for therapy" at the Swiss Hall of the apostolic residence in Castel Gandolfo.

He praised the "efforts invested in research" and the "expected benefits for those afflicted " with certain illnesses.

Then he specified that "Research on somatic stem cells (from adults) deserves approval and encouragement when it brings fortuitously together scientific knowledge, the most advanced biotechnology, and the ethic that postulates respect for the human being in every stage of his existence."

"Despite the frequent and unjust accusations that the Church is not sensitive to these matters," he said, "during its 2,000-year history, it has constantly supported research addressed to curing ilnesses and for the good of mankind."

"If there has been resistance - and there still is - it has been to protest research methods that involve the planned suppression of existing human beings even if they have not yet been born."

"Good intentions can never justify means which are intrinsically wrong," he added.

Thanks to Eugenia in the main forum for promptly posting this bulletin from the news agency ADNkronos, translated here:
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Ankara, Sept. 16 (Adnkronos/Dpa) - The Pope's recent statements on Islam will not affect his visit in Turkey scheduled for November.

The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet cited sources from the Turkish foreign ministry, who reportedly said Turkey is a lay state and its politics is not dictated by religion.

They also said the ministry has requested the Apostolic Nuncio in Ankara for the complete text of the Pope's lecture in Regensburg and an explanation if needed.

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Meanwhile, Eugenia has also posted a eulogy of sorts in Corriere della Sera today written by its deputy editor and resident Islamic expert Magdi Allam on the death of Oriana Fallacci, who, he says, died just as events tend to show that her harsh judgments on Islam had some justification. I will post a translation in REFLECTIONS ON ISLAM when I can.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/09/2006 19.57]

Today we have seen clearly how the journalists have picked up the story about Papa and Islam and really enjoyed themselves. The silly tabloids in Britain have written stupidities, which, unfortunately the type of people who read such rags, actually believe! This is a bit like the Charlotte Church business - only worse.
Here the Sun [one of the lowest rags] had the headline "Pope On The Ropes".
We see above the difference between the New York Times report and the Vatican statement, plus what our Papa actually wrote and said.
But, indeed, with tempers inflamed, our Holy Father's effigy has been burned by fanatics. I don't want him to go to Turkey!
Love from an angry and worried, Mary

Thank you, Teresa, for the translations and reports.

Although I posted my translation of Magdi Allam's obituary essay on Oriana Fallacci in REFLECTIONS ON ISLAM, some statements from that essay deserve to be looked at in this thread because they concern the Holy Father as the current 'enemy du jour' in Islam's ongoing 'holy war' against the West and offer some blunt conclusions about the reality of Islam today. And in this case, it really is relevant to 'consider the source.'

Magdi Allam, as previously mentioned in this forum, is Arab by birth and deputy editor of Corriere della Sera - Italy's leading newspaper, which is often anti-Catholic. Perhaps ecause he has Arabic origin, he is more daring in his statements, and in this essay, he speaks like an assimilated European apparently more interested in saving Europe from itself than European leaders themselves seem to be!
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In one of those apparently fortuitous coincidences, but which contain perhaps a sign of destiny, the death of Oriana Fallacci has coincided with the eruption of the new Islamic 'holy war,' this time unleashed against the Pope.

Almost like a tragic testimony to the veracity of her denunciation - bold and unappealable - of the incompatibility between Islam today and Muslims today with the civilization of the West...

And which on the day of her death is confirmed as a fact which all of us, whether we like it or not, must take into account...

Because today more than ever, we can touch with our hands the reality of Eurabia against which Oriana labored so long - that is, a Europe so infiltrated and subjugated by the interests and progress made by Islamist extremists that it is no longer able to rise, to react, to affirm its own values and collective identity.

Because today more than ever we see with great evidence the fragility of the myth of 'moderate' Islam and 'moderate' Moslems. It is a myth that evaporates and dissolves every time the "hard and pure" [duri e puri - the extremists or fundamentalists] sound the call to arms to combat Islam's enemy of the moment - which right now is Benedict XVI.

Thus Islam consolidates into a front which in its apparent monolithism, does not leave space at all for any distinctions between the positions of one or the other, extremist or moderate - thus legitimizing an indiscriminate condemnation of all Islam and all Muslims....

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Because he puts the burden of responding to the Islamic challenge on Europe itself, on the West, Mr. Allam is perhaps blunting the edges of his 'call-a-spade-a-spade' description of Islam here. But if Mr. Allam is a Muslim, it is good to know he's not imbedded in the monolith he describes.

His real point in his essay is what needs to be done about the reality he describes. He does not say what but ends his essay with this sentence:

"History will probably concede Oriana the merit of being right in her denunciation of the roots of evil in our century, but we all know that our survival can be guaranteed only if we succeed in sharing the founding values of our humanity with respect to religious diversity."

Is that a statement directed to Islam which does not respect nor believe in religious diversity at all, judging from its adherents' conviction that anyone who is not Muslim ought to be converted or otherwise held beneath contempt and not to be treated as a full citizen ?

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/09/2006 21.59]

I have expressed my heated feelings on the state of affairs regarding Islam and the West on many previous occasions. I will not repeat it. Just this, I was very sad to hear of Oriana Falacci's death. Although she sometimes went over the top, her basic assessment of Islam-matters were spot on.

About Papa: let us keep him in our prayers constantly (I know we do it already, but I have the need to type the request. The Pope needs our prayers now more than ever.

Danich in the main forum posted this bylined article but she failed to give the source. Nevertheless, it calls attention to the megaton gorilla in Europe's living rooms which everyone is busy ignoring. Here is a translation:
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The Vatican stands alone
against Islamist ire
By ANDREA MORIGI


ROMe - The Vatican stands at the center of the clash of cultures, even if the protests staged by Muslim fundamentalists is taking place in India, Pakistan, Kuwait, Turkey, Egypt. {And let us not forget Palestine, where at least 5 West Bank churches have been attacked at last count.]

The script is something already familliar to us after the long to-do over the Mohammed cartoons. What has changed is the catalyst for all the hate. Now instead of the Danish flag with a cross, it is Benedict XVI being burned in effigy, insulted in posters and streamers raised by enraged men who are calling for a 'holy war' against the enemy 'Crusaders.'

They have never expressed regret, much less apologized, when Christians die like flies under Muslim machinegun fire. But they work themselves up and declare themselves outraged because the Pope called on everyone to abandon violence.

And they have mobilized their state institutions. In Pakistan, all parties in Parliament voted unanimously yesterday to condemn Benedict XVI for having made comments "derogatory to Islam" and to demand an official apology from the Pope. And the Pakistani ministry of foreign affairs summoned the Apostolic Nuncio in Islamabad [for a dressing down, presumably - something to humiliate with, at any rate].

They are competing to turn this into a diplomatic incident. The words of ths Pope have "deeply disturbed Muslims all over the world and caused much suffering and anguish," said the Foreign Ministry note to Mons. Adolfo Yllana.

He in turn, the papal representative in Pakistan, expressed his "regret for any pain caused to Muslims," but underlined that "the media have reported in a totally false manner certain theological and historical passages cited by the Holy Fahter during a lecture."

The Turks are having their say, of course. Though they claim this has no effect on the planned Papal trip to Turkey at the end of November, they left it to the number-2 man of the ruling party to fling himself headlong into an attack on the Pope, putting him in a class with Hitler and Mussolini:

"Benedict, the author of statements that are as insolent as they are inopportune, will go down in history in the same category as leaders Hitler and Mussolini," he thundered.

And all the Arab nations in the Middle East, through the Cooperative Council of the Arabian Gulf, have demanded an apology from the Pope.

And in Palestine, they have gone from words to action. Yesterday, they targeted a Greek Orthodox Church three times, twice with artillery and then with a concussion grenade. More appalling even, because the church is not even Roman Catholic.
But this is not the first time.

Through an act of jihad which was by no means defensive, Saracens attacked the Vatican in 846 and sacked St. Peter's Basilica. The Leonine walls now surrounding the Vatican are testimony to that.

But these days, the walls will not suffice to defend the center of Christianity, which is finding itself isolated - abandoned by the rest of the Western world fearful of allying itself to the Pope.

Pontius Pilate reigns in Brussels [seat of the European Union]. A spokesman of the European Commission, Jonathan Todd,
washed his hands off the controversy. In truth, he was distancing himself from the Vatican by appealing for religious tolerance, as though the crisis was due to religious intolerance by the Pope, of all people.

It is the same line propagated by Al Jazaarah, by the imams, muftis and mullahs, by Al Fatah and Hamas, who are competing as to who can stir up the most hate which they themselves are provoking.

Among the ehads of government, only the German Chancellor Angela Merkel promptly came to the Pope's defense, saying that "those who criticize the Pope have wrongly interpreted the message of his lecture."

Indeed, says the leader of the Germany's Christian Democratic Union, The Pope's Regensburg lecture was a decisive and clear renunciation of every form of violence done in the name of religion" and "an invitation to a dialog among religions, which the Pope specifically called for, and which is something I, too, consider very urgent."

And still under drunken illusions of inter-religious dialog, much of the organized Catholic world has been silent, with the exception of Communion and Liberation, whose president Julian Carron, immediately sent out the word, "We stand with the Pope."

And not out of blind loyalty, but for three basic reasons: "1) The Pope did not intend to offend Muslim believers - he was calling on everyone to use reason even in matters of religion; 2) The Pope is clearly aware of some extreme examples in Islamic history which are historical fact known to all; and 3) There is an intolerance for peaceful criticism today which is itself intolerable, whether one criticizes Muslim adherents with preconceived positions or the indifference and superficiality of many commentators in the West."

C&L, at least, was listening to the Pope well.

At least there's one Muslim group that has been receptive to the statement from the Vatican today, even if it calls it an apology. And for a change, I do not have to translate. As reported by BBC News: -
----------------------------------------------------------------


Pope praised for making apology

Muslim groups in the UK have praised Pope Benedict XVI for apologising after Muslims were offended by his speech.

The Vatican said the Pope was sorry he had offended Muslims by using a quote stating Muhammad had brought only "evil and inhuman" things to the world.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said the Pope made "a good first step" in "recognising the hurt he caused".

Ajmal Masroor of the Islamic Society of Britain said it was "greatly noble" of him to accept "his mistake".

Labour peer Baroness Uddin had earlier called the Pope's words a "throwaway irrelevant analysis of religion".

The criticism of the Prophet Muhammad quoted by the Pope was made by 14th century Emperor Manuel II Paleologos of the Byzantine Empire - the Orthodox Christian empire which had its capital in what is now the Turkish city of Istanbul.

Reacting to the Pope's statement of regret, the MCB continued: "But [we are] not sure whether this is enough of an apology.

"It would've been better if he'd said the views of the emperor no way accorded with his. There is still a concern that he has not repudiated the views of the emperor."

[Come on, guys, read Cardinal Bertone's statement where it says:
"As for the opinion of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus which he quoted during his Regensburg talk, the Holy Father did not mean, nor does he mean, to make that opinion his own in any way."]

The MCB had earlier said it would write an official letter asking the Pope to clarify his comments.

And one of the UK's highest-ranking Muslim police officers, Chief Superintendent Ali Dizaei, had called for calm.

Protests were unnecessary and played into the hands of those who claimed that Islam stifled free speech, he said.

In his speech at Regensburg University, the German-born Pope explored the historical and philosophical differences between Islam and Christianity, and the relationship between violence and faith.

Stressing that the words were the emperor's and not his own, he said: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

In REFLECTIONS ON ISLAM, Willow has posted her thoughtful translation of a German article in Der Spiegel on line today by a writer named Christian Malzahn, who reviews the main incidents in recent years that have provoked Muslim outrage disproportionately.

His point is that to acquiesce, to keep silent and not to take sides in this current controversy involving the Pope is to agree tacitly to the premise that any dialog between Christianity and Islam can only take place under rules prescribed by Islam.

He is one of the few journalists who have been able to cut to the quick, but I doubt that any Western leader other than Angela Merkel so far [daughter of a Protestant minister and the Pope's fellow German] will have the political courage to speak up.

Here are pertinent excerpts that I thought should be posted on this thread:
---------------------------------------------------------------

The Pope regrets the misunderstanding - Rome attempts to ease tensions. But the person who wants to exercise his right to freedom of thought and opinion in the political and philosophical exchange with Islam lives dangerously.

..... [Here he reviews the 'provocative' incidents such as a Dutch comedian making a joke about Khomeini, Salman Rushdies book 'The Satanic Verses', Theo van Gogh's film about an Muslim woman's experiences for which he was murdered, the DAnish cartoons]

One thing, however, is clear: The often violent protests in Arab countries were purposely stoked from certain Islamist quarters - as is the case with the accusations against the Pope today.

The attacks against the Roman Pontifex are especially grotesque. The harsh criticism, which often is accompanied by threats of violence, of Benedict’s speech in Regensburg is not only an attack on the head of the Catholic Church.

The malicious misinterpretation of his words and the absurd suppositions of Islamic representatives are a head-on attack on free religious discourse.

That more and more people in the Islamic world can be induced to follow these protests shows how much influence Islamic groups have gained there. The political intention is clear: A discussion between Christianity and Islam should only take place within the framework determined by political Islamism.

We can do without this. Whoever agrees to this kind of “dialogue” relinquishes his right to free opinion.

What’s next? Perhaps the statement that Allah could be insulted by the many women who in the summertime walk around in bikinis in Europe? Or a pork sandwich.

The militant Islamists will always find a reason for a fight between the cultures. And they will be happy when newspapers as the “TAZ” are dumb enough to have the pope on a crusade. They totally miss the point.

At stake is nothing less than the principle of free speech and discourse. Each attempt to make the imaginary will of God to be the highest guiding principle of political action has to be deterred if freedom and democracy are to flourish in Europe.

There are - few - serious tones in the increasingly loud choir of the critics of the pope. Should not have Pope Benedict XVI foreseen that his quote which he himself termed “harsh” would be misunderstood? Did the theologian Ratzinger run away with the pope? Even so.

It should be a wonderful message even to left-wing agnostics and atheists that we have a Pope who is able to give a demanding academic lecture. In his speech he certainly did not insult a single Muslim.....

---------------------------------------------------------------

Now, contrast that with what the sanctimonious New York Times said in their editorial today. I will cite a news service account of it since I do not have online access to them...

Remember, this is from a newspaper that has not hesitated to put the lives of American and coalition soldiers at stake, nor the interests of the United States in the war against terror, by blithely disclosing national security secrets, out of pure ideological revulsion to George W. Bush and anything he has to do with, expecially the war in Iraq.

And now, look what they are accusing the Pope of - the Pope, of course, representing another favorite bogeyman and scapegoat of the American 'liberal' wing. The same liberals who would kowtow to Islam in the name of 'religious brotherhood' - almost like they have a death wish to deliver the West to Islam now, without further ado ...

----------------------------------------------------------------

WASHINGTON. September 16, (AFP) - The New York Times published an editorial, in which it called Pope Benedict XVI's latest remarks about Islam "tragic and dangerous" and urged him to apologize.

Speaking in the German city of Regensburg Tuesday, the pontiff implicitly denounced links between Islam and violence particularly in regard to jihad, or "holy war."

Quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor on the Prophet Mohammed, founder of the Muslim faith, the head of the Roman Catholic Church said: "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'"

The Times recalled that this was "not the first time the pope has fomented discord between Christians and Muslims."

In 2004 when he was still the Vatican's top theologian, he spoke out against Turkeys joining the European Union, because Turkey, as a Muslim country was in permanent contrast to Europe, the paper recalled.

"A doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue," the editorial said.

"The world listens carefully to the words of any pope," The Times continued. "And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating that words can also heal."
---------------------------------------------------------------

Disguised in apparently good intentions in the name of religious tolerance, this is nothing but cravenness in the face of Muslim fanaticism, and a deliberately malicious distortion of Joseph Ratzinger as someone who 'foments discord between Christians and Muslims.'

And what do they call their relentless repetition of the same stories about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo over months now? That is not fomenting discord? It is pure and simple agitprop (but against their own country) that Heinrich Himmler would be envious of!

It is almost as if they were buttering up to the Muslim world now in the hope that in a Eurabia or a USarabia, they may find favor with their new masters!
---------------------------------------------------------------

And by the way, an Italian paper reminds us that tomorrow, when the Pope delivers his Angelus message, whether he addresses the controversy at all, directly or indirectly, the world press will scrutinize his every look and gesture, his body language and his words for signs they will interpret as they please.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/09/2006 1.31]

This headline was bound to come sooner or later from the Guardian. They reported the election of Benedict XVI with the headline "God's Rottweiler is new Pope.' And now, they have the chance to use it again!

I am posting this article not because I am masochistic but because towards the end, it does acknowledge a few key points about what this Pope has done and is doing. But forgive me for my parenthetical comments - can't help it when false or outrageous statements are made!
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After a quiet first year as pontiff,
God's Rottweiler shows his teeth
Pope believes his church
should take tougher line on Islam
By John Hooper in Rome
Saturday September 16, 2006
The Guardian


The anniversary of Pope Benedict's election in the spring focused a question that had been forming in the minds of Vatican-watchers throughout his first 12 months: "What happened to God's Rottweiler?"

As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - the Vatican ministry that once ran the Inquisition - Joseph Ratzinger had done a fine job for Pope John Paul of intimidating the thinkers of the Roman Catholic church into sullen conformity. [Note the negative editorializing. Name us the intimidated and the sullen conformers, please!]

But since he emerged on to the balcony of St Peter's basilica after his election in April 2005, the guard dog seemed to have become a pussycat - a benign old gent with a harmless taste for anachronistic headgear and a habit of boring his audiences with abstruse theological discourse.

[Has this reporter ever bothered to attend a general audience, an Angelus or a Mass celebrated by Benedict in Rome? Has he ver bothered to read the texts of his homilies and his extemporaneous exchange with children, youths, priests and parents? When was he abstruse? Even the Regensburg lecture was far from abstruse - if anything,it was a model of clarity and straight language compared to the usual academic texts! But I bet Hooper has not read it either.]

The German commentator Wolfgang Cooper had cautioned before Benedict's election that the new Pope was an academic who "prefers intellectual discussions".

And, indeed, by the time the papal jet touched down near Munich last Saturday, Karol Wojtyla's snappy soundbites were no more than a fond recollection in the collective memory of the Vatican press corps.

[Sure, 'snappy soundbites' are far easier to report than trying to synthesize a serious message, no matter in what simple form it is delivered. And did any of the Vatican reporters bother to read John Paul II's encyclicals and report them the way they deserved to be reported? Oh no, they only want something that can be served to them pre-digested that they can just quote without any effort on their part!]

On the day he uttered the phrases that have prompted such uproar in the Muslim world, Pope Benedict celebrated an open-air mass. How did he try to reach out to the crowd? Initially, by talking about the medieval theological compendiums known as summae - not exactly a topic of burning currency in pious, rural southern Germany. [As though pious and rural were synonymous with ignorant and uneducated!]

It is tempting to see the Pope's controversial reference to a 14th century Byzantine emperor in the same light - as the gaffe of an other-wordly intellectual who does not stop to think that his words are going to be seized on by journalists.

However, he more or less apologised in advance for the "startling brusqueness" of the emperor's remark that Muhammad brought "only evil and inhuman" things. That suggests he was fully aware of the impact it could make.

What is more, it is clear from the passage that followed that the Pope fully supports, if not the emperor's language, then certainly his underlying contention - that holy war is at odds with reason.

[And it is not true that 'holy war is at odds with reason'? - That was one of the points of the lecture. Moreover, the Vatican statement this morning already said clearly he did not intend to make the emperor's words his own!]

There are two further motives for thinking Benedict is ready to upset the believers in other faiths rather than shrink from what he believes needs to be said (or not said).

First, he has done it before.[Oh, a recidivist!] At Auschwitz, in May, he appalled many Jews by passing up what they saw as a historic opportunity for a German pope to apologise for the Roman Catholic church's conduct in the second world war.

[Apologize for what? For a false perception carefully nursed by Communist propaganda in the 60s and promtply swallowed hook, line and sinker by a liberal secular world press ready to pin anything bad on the Catholic Church? But this has been played before!?]

The second factor is that Pope Benedict has signalled clearly that he favours a tougher line in his church's dealings with Islam.

The key word in the Vatican now is "reciprocity". The leadership of the Roman Catholic church is increasingly of the opinion that a meaningful dialogue with the Muslim world is not possible while Christians are denied religious freedom in Muslim states.

One of the Pope's earliest personnel moves was to send Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, the Vatican's leading expert on Islam, to Cairo as the Holy See's envoy to the Arab League. The department he left behind, the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, has been absorbed into the Vatican's "culture ministry".

That reshuffle is one of several major changes effected by Pope Benedict. With what, for the Vatican, is uncharacteristic haste*, he has put new men in several top jobs including the secretariat of state.

*[And when was it that they were saying the Pope was moving too slowly about making changes in the Curia? And he is being faulted for putting in his own men in Vatican "top jobs including secretary of state! What, he should just govern with Wojtyla's men? What is he, a non-entity who cannot put in his own men to help him run the Church?]

He has set a new agenda for the Vatican whose new concerns include not only relations with the Islamic world but also a redoubled attempt to heal the breach with Orthodox Christianity and a drive to assert the role of God in the processes of creation and evolution.

At the same time - and in contrast to the approach of his predecessor - Benedict has begun to deliver on his pledge to drive the "filth" from the church. In May, in a singularly public and humiliating manner, he disciplined one of the church's most influential priests, the head of the Legionnaires of Christ movement, who had been accused of sexual abuse.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/09/2006 2.25]

Cardinal Bertone's statement this morning appears to have unlocked the lips of Italian politicians and today, the heads or spokesmen of the major political parties, starting with Deputy Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, chimed in with public statements saying the Pope has been misunderstood, and that in fact, he was arguing for reason in religion, and dialog based on this, and in effect, for freedom of religion and expression.

But neither Prime Minister Romano Prodi nor President Giorgio Napolitano has yet spoken up.

One dissenting voice said he understood the Pope meant well but lectured him that in these days of tension, the Pope of all people should have known not to say what he said - 'adding fuel to the flames already raging' - and that it is now time for him to do as Jesus preached, and turn the other cheek, that he should answer for it directly and not leave it to a spokesman. [Does he really think the Pope will ignore this whole thing when he speaks at Angelus tomorrow? I have never awaited an Angelus more!]


OTHER GLEANINGS FROM THE CHAFF

Meanwhile, it is worth quoting from a writer, Alberto Giovanni Biuso, who claims he has often been at odds with some of the Pope's 'political' statements and written against them but....
----------------------------------------------------------------

Now that this Pope is the target of furibond attack for words that are actually permeated with reflection and wisdom, I feel the obligation, for what little I am worth, to defnd his person and his thinking.

What actually happened? In a university lecture given on September 12 at the Main Auditorium of the University of Regensburg, entitled 'Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections', Benedict XVI presented an analytical synthesis of the relationship between Greek philosophy and Cstholic theology, he illustrated and critiqued the concept of de-Hellenizing Christianity, he commented on the statement by a Byzantine emperor that "not to act with reason, not act with the Logos [which is God, the ultimate Reason], is contrary to the nature of God."

In the context of this presentation, the Pope, among other things, cited [and here he quotes the sentences that have caused all the furor]...

That was all! But it sufficed to unleash disproportionate, misplaced and violent reactions.

A Somali religious leader from the "Islamic Courts" has called on Muslims all over the world to 'hunt down the Pope', stating that "whoever offends the Prophet must be killed immediately." (Source: La Repubblica].

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed that Islam is "the most perfect, the most beautiful and the best religion for humanity, and is the only way to salvation." [Source: Radio Italia Iran].

However, the writer ends with a nihilistic bow to Nietszche and relativism!:

To Ahmadinejad and to believers of every type - Christian, Muslim, whatever - for whom their own faith is the only obligatory way to salvation; to whoever thinks that there is only one way to undertand and comprehend the world; to those, in fact, who are convinced that there are absolute truths to be imposed on the good as well as the bad, I would recall the wise irony of Nietszche: "This is my way. What is yours? - I say to those who want to know from me what is 'the way'. 'The way' does not exist!" [From Thus Spake Zarathustra]
---------------------------------------------------------------

And here's an atypical left-handed reaction quoted by the Guardian today, which nevertheless considers the Pope's words an 'insult', a 'misrepresentation' of Islam, 'such provocations' - and ends by calling the Pope 'more ill-informed than we thought':

Fareena Alam
Editor of Q-News, a Muslim magazine

The media are giving the supposed "anger of the Muslim nation" too much coverage. Such insults are as old as Islam itself. The Prophet dealt with them with dignity. We must stop over-reacting ...

A Muslim who truly lives according to the moral code of Islam - of justice, neighbourliness and compassion - will know that it is our greatest weapon against misrepresentation. Perhaps the Pope was 'merely quoting' the 14th-century emperor. Perhaps he did so because he actually shares this belief. If so, he is more ill-informed than we thought. I refuse to let such provocations shape the global faith agenda.

---------------------------------------------------------------
More worrying is what the Guardian's reporter in Istanbul says of what the Turkish man on the street thinks. But one must remember that only negative news about the Church is reported in Turkey, and that these are the opinions of uninformed and prejudiced people :


For many of the worshippers leaving lunchtime prayers at the small Muyyetzade mosque in central Istanbul yesterday, the issue was not whether the Pope had insulted their religion. That much was given.

"This man is not a man of religion, he's a man of hate," said Salih Komurcu, a retired metalworker. His neighbour, Cavit Karaman, added: "I took a disliking to him from the start. This just confirmed my opinion of him - he's ignorant and he's arrogant."
....
What job does someone who insults the Prophet have in a Muslim country?" asked Ismail Aksoy, who owns a small joiners' workshop near the mosque. "This is no longer an issue of tolerance. It is a question of making a mockery of people's beliefs."

The Pope is widely seen in Turkey as anti-Turkish after describing Ankara's attempt to join the EU as "a grave error ... against the tide of history" as a cardinal.

But Tugrul Karasin, a student, thinks that the Pope should be welcomed with open arms. "That's the only way we can persuade him to rethink his opinions about this country and about Muslims in general."
---------------------------------------------------------------

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/09/2006 3.52]

Here's another piece by John Hooper for the Sunday (9/17) issue of the Observer.

Ignore the first few paragraphs in which he sounds off again on his 'unfavorable' comparison of Benedict XVI with his predecessor, as we saw in his previous piece for the Guardian. What follows after is substantial and registers the consistency and firmness of the Pope's stand against radical Islam.
----------------------------------------------------------------

Pope Benedict's long mission
to confront radical Islam
This is not the first time the pontiff has spoken out
on the links between fundamentalism and terrorism
John Hooper in Rome
Sunday September 17, 2006
The Observer


Four days into his reign, Pope Benedict called the journalists who had been covering his election to what was billed as a press conference.

Addressing the assembled correspondents, photographers, camera operators, sound recordists and producers, he noted that the media were capable of reaching and influencing not only individuals, but whole masses of people - indeed, the whole of humanity.

He thanked us all for our hard work in putting that awesome power at the service of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican for a few days. Then he blessed us - and, just as the reporters present were preparing to stick up their hands to ask questions - he left.

It was an eloquent demonstration of the pontiff's view of the media - as a conduit for getting his church's image and message out to the 'masses' of whom he had spoken. The notion that the media had an intrinsic power of their own to question, reveal and, at times, cause trouble was certainly not apparent then, and has never been apparent since.

Benedict's predecessor, John Paul II, was an outgoing former actor with a natural talent for gauging the effect of his words. The new pope is a shy ex-professor. Yet he has not so far seen fit to equip himself with an adviser to guide him through the minefield of making public declarations on sensitive, complex issues in a media age.

A savvy confidant, like the previous papal spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who came from a national daily newspaper, Spain's ABC, might well have prevented the crisis that enveloped the Vatican this week.

He would have spotted immediately the danger in the pope quoting someone describing the teachings of Mohammad as 'evil and inhuman' and tried to persuade the pontiff to express his ideas in a rather more tactful fashion.

But tact is one thing; substance another. It is doubtless true, as the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, said yesterday that the Pope had no intention of offending Muslims.

However, both yesterday's statement and the Pope's own track record make it quite clear that Benedict XVI sees it as his duty to speak out about the way in which violence in the name of religion seems to be tolerated by some Muslim clerics and actively encouraged by others.

Bertone said the Pope, like the Catholic Church, 'esteems Muslims, who adore the only God'. But it is equally no coincidence that the Vatican yesterday chose to set in a bold type the passage of his statement in which he stressed that the Pope had called for a 'clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation for violence, from whatever side it may come'.

Benedict, as his friend and associate noted, is sincerely committed to dialogue between Christians and Muslims, but he also believes that the link between terrorist violence and its sponsorship by some Muslim clerics is a big obstacle to further progress.

His reaction to 11 September gave a first hint of his view. 'It is important not to attribute simplistically what happened to Islam. It would be a great error', he told Vatican Radio. But that did not prevent him from asserting immediately afterwards that 'the history of Islam also contains a tendency to violence'.

There were two strands, he added: the other being a 'real openness to the will of God'. 'It is thus important to help the positive line, which does exist in its history, to prevail and to have sufficient strength to win out over the other tendency.'

That is the sort of thing his predecessor would never have said. The overriding preoccupation of John Paul's papacy was communism. For the Vatican, as for the United States until the 1990s, Islam was a potentially valuable ally in the struggle with Marxism.

John Paul became the first pope to visit a mosque, and he made sure that an expert on Islam, Francis Arinze, was appointed to head what became the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, the Vatican's ministry for relations with other faiths.

Benedict, on the other hand, was elevated to the papacy against an international background in which the dominant confrontation was between aggressive Muslim fundamentalism and the West - secular in parts and Christian in others.

Because the Pope did not use words like 'evil' or 'inhuman', it did not get splashed across the world's headlines. But this is not the first time since he became pontiff that Benedict has spoken with concern about the links between Islam and terrorism.

In August last year, he went beyond anything his predecessor had dared to say at a meeting with Muslim leaders in Cologne, challenging them to condemn 'any connection between your faith and terrorism'.

Unabashedly lecturing* his listeners, he added: 'Words are highly influential in the education of the mind. You therefore have a great responsibility for the formation of the younger generation. There is no room for apathy and disengagement, and even less for partiality and sectarianism.'

Under Benedict, the key issue, in Vatican-speak, is not 'dialogue' but 'reciprocity'. Even before his election, there was a growing feeling among Catholic prelates that dialogue with Islam consisted largely of Catholic initiatives.

What is more, endless discussion did not seem to be solving the biggest outstanding problem between the two religions: that while Muslims were free to build mosques, worship and proselytise in the West, Christians were often denied religious freedom in Islamic countries.

Some of the smaller states on the Arabian peninsula have begun to allow Christians to practise their faith openly, but Saudi Arabia, for example, still bans all public expression of non-Muslim religions. In several other countries, Islamic law effectively deprived Christians of basic rights.

Benedict has made it clear that he sees freedom of worship as merely a start and that, for there to be full reciprocity, Catholic priests will need to be free to fish for souls in Muslim lands.

Last May, he told a Vatican conference on immigration to and from Islamic countries, that while Christians had to respect Muslims, they also had the right to offer them what he called 'the Christian proposal'.

The German pope unquestionably respects Islam. But he equally unambiguously intends to stand his ground.

The signs have been there ever since his inaugural mass. During the service, prayers were read out asking for God's intercession on behalf of oppressed Christians. Few noticed, but one was read in Arabic.
---------------------------------------------------------------

Hooper is almost John Allen-like in the research and positive interpretation he gives in the second part of this report. So I do not understand how he could have written the patently wrong statement in his earlier article that this Pope only speaks in 'abstruse theological discourse' even to the faithful when he lives right there in Rome and should know that is not so!

I placed an asterisk at the word 'lecturing' that Hooper used above because it is an editorializing word, making it sound as though the Pope was being condescending to the Muslim leaders he met in Cologne. In fact, I do not recall that anyone of those present publicly complained that he felt lectured to - from all accounts, there appeared to have been no negative reaction reported at all to that meeting in Cologne.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/09/2006 4.40]

Here is the first of the Sunday newspapers' lead stories on the controversy. I have omitted portions reporting things that have already been said in preceding posts, except the paragraph about British Muslims' generally positive reaction, which I kept in as it was intended to be a journalistic counterbalance.
---------------------------------------------------------------

Pope seeks to calm storm
over 'evil Islam' comment
Luke Harding, Berlin
John Hooper, Rome
and Jamie Doward
Sunday September 17, 2006
The Observer


The Vatican yesterday sought to quell the storm engulfing Pope Benedict XVI by claiming that the pontiff 'sincerely regrets' quoting remarks that Islam was 'evil and inhuman'.
....
Muslim leaders were divided yesterday on whether the Pope had gone far enough.

The deputy leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Habib, asked: 'Has he presented a personal apology for statements by which he clearly is convinced? No. We want a personal apology. We feel that he has committed a grave error.'

Last night Morocco recalled its ambassador to the Vatican in a sign of its disapproval.

British Muslims were more sympathetic. The Muslim Council of Britain said the Pope had made a 'good first step' in recognising the hurt he had caused. Ajmal Masroor of the Islamic Society of Britain added that it was 'greatly noble' of him to accept his 'mistake'.
....

But there was little sign yesterday that protests across the Middle East and Asia, which began last week, were about to fizzle out.

In the West Bank town of Nablus protesters firebombed an Anglican and an Orthdox church. A group called the Lions of Monotheism said it had carried out the attacks. No one was hurt.

In Pakistan's capital Islamabad, students burned effigies of the Pope and police broke up dozens of localized protests.

Pakistan's leader Pervez Musharraf said the Pope had confused Islam with violence. Speaking in Cuba, he said: 'Our strategy must clearly be to oppose the sinister tendencies to associate terrorism with Islam and discrimination against Muslims, which are giving rise to an ominous alienation between the west and the world of Islam.'

[Mr. Musharraf, who's discriminating whom? Christians aren't being discriminated against in all the Muslim countries? And how are Mulsims being discriminated against in the West when all the European countries are bending backwards not to displease, much less offend, their Muslim minorities?]

There are now grave doubts whether the Pope will be able to travel to Turkey in November as planned. The trip would be the Pope's first to a large Muslim state.

Benedict has already irritated Turks by expressing his scepticism over Turkey's application to join the EU. Turkey's Islamist prime minister Tayyip Erdogan yesterday dubbed the Pope's comments 'ugly' and 'unfortunate', telling Turkish TV: 'The Pope needs to take a step back to preserve inter-religious peace.'

Other Islamic leaders also waded into the debate. 'The Pope must not take lightly the spread of outrage that has been created,' Malaysia's prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said.

The Vatican, meanwhile, appears to have been caught off-guard by reaction to the Pope's speech made to his old university in the Bavarian town of Regensburg. Although the speech was made on Tuesday, it was 48 hours before anybody noticed its inflammatory content. [???? Didn't the press seize on those 'inflammatory' paragraphs immediately and launch the headlines that provoked all Islam?]

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A Guardian editorial entitled 'PAPAL FALLIBILITY' tries to be even-handed after it has dredged up Benedict's supposedly sorry record for 'offending' Islam:

The Pope has lived a cloistered life, rarely exposed to the unholy nuances of world politics. He needs advisers around him who are.

However, the Vatican has apologised. That should be enough for what was almost certainly nothing more than an ill-judged remark.

For there is a second strand to this argument. There cannot be dialogue without rigor and openness. The Muslim world should also take pains to be thoughtful in its response, and perhaps less quick to take offence.

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The tendency to extrapolate from statements that are absolutely clear in intent, content and context is another vicious form of misrepresentation and distortion. How about this one from an Anglican vicar, yet, and a philosophy professor at Oxford to boot?

At the end of a lengthy article written for the Guardian, entitled "The unmistakable whiff of Christian triumphalism" [a misleading title plugged into an article that says nothing about Chrsitian triumphalism] and subtitled: "This was no casual slip. Beneath his scholarly rhetoric, the Pope's logic seemed to be that Islam is dangerous and godless" ....
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Blog sites have been buzzing with the thought that the Pope may have the president of Iran in mind when he speaks of Manuel's Persian interlocutor. But we don't need to speculate upon a contemporary casting for this speech to recognise its dangers.

For in claiming that Islam may be beyond reason, and then to claim that to act without reason is to act contrary to the will of God, is pretty close to the assertion that this religion is godless.

And that's not how different faiths ought to speak to each other - especially when we all have each other's blood on our hands.

As it is written: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?"
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Wow! How's that for being holier-than-thou? Which is worse than being 'more Popish tnan the Pope'?

By the way, the reason I have been citing so many items from the Guardian of 9/16/06 is that for arcane reasons, they chose to run a special section on the Pope and the controversy!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/09/2006 5.48]

...at least in its editorial for Saturday, 9/16/06, this surprising editorial in the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that published "The Pope wears Prada" last year and thereby mythified this canard into an inevitable appendage to any 'resume' of Benedict in the popular press.
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The Pope's point was
the virtue of dialogue

It is ironic that a papal visit remarkable for its lack of controversy in Christian terms should have stirred up a hornets' nest in the Islamic world.

During his tour this week of his native Bavaria, Benedict XVI referred only obliquely to issues such as women's ordination, priestly celibacy and joint Communion for Catholics and Protestants.

But his quote from a late 14th-century dialogue on Christianity and Islam between a Byzantine emperor and a learned Persian has led to Pakistan's National Assembly unanimously demanding a retraction, and the chief cleric of India's biggest mosque calling on Muslims to "respond in a manner which forces the Pope to apologise".

Just as it was last year over cartoons of the Prophet in a Danish newspaper, the Islamic world, from Indonesia to Morocco, is in uproar.

Given the sensitiveness of the issue, and the potential for violence, it is essential to examine the text of the lecture which Benedict gave at Regensburg university last Tuesday.

In it, he describes Emperor Manuel II Paleologus as turning "somewhat brusquely" on his interlocutor and saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

Manuel goes on to detail why propagating the faith through violence is unreasonable, and to state that failure to act in accordance with reason is against God's nature.

The Pope cites the emperor to buttress his argument that we need to rediscover the synthesis between Greek philosophy and Biblical revelation, or between reason and the eternal Word, the logos of which St John writes at the beginning of his gospel. Only then will we be capable of "that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today".

It is understandable that Muslims have taken offence at the emperor's words wrenched out of context. But the Pope was quoting them both to support his thesis that there is an analogy between God's "Creator Spirit" and our created reason, and to condemn the use of violence for religious purposes.
[
The image of jihad in the Western world has been reduced to that of holy war against infidels (just as sharia law is seen as the amputation of hands for theft and stoning for adultery).

Jihad means much more than that, not least the personal struggle to seek the divine presence and promote God's word (and for most Muslims sharia prescribes patterns of worship and dietary practice rather than drastic punishment).

Terrorism falsely sanctioned by bigots is a scourge of both Islamic and Western societies. Rather than widening the gap between them, the Pope's lecture should be an incentive to deepen the dialogue.
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And here's a companion piece in the same issue that also bucks the herd mentality - in a positive way - even if her first sentences appear to be flippant.

The Pope's message
of greater dialogue
achieves the opposite
By Melanie McDonagh


There is, I am afraid, such a thing as being too clever by half. Pope Benedict is a case in point.

He is a former academic and this week he addressed a gathering of other academics at a university in Regensburg. In this congenial environment, he let himself go and delivered a nuanced address on the subject of faith and reason, snappily titled "Three Stages in the Programme of De-Hellenisation". [No, Melanie - that was the body of the lecture, not the tile. It was titled 'Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections"]

The gist, to spare you the trouble of looking it up, is that belief in God is entirely consistent with human reason and the Greek spirit of philosophical inquiry. By using the reason God gave us, we become, in a way, more like him. Fair enough, you might think. No harm in that.

But there was, of course. If the Pope had stuck to quoting Plato (which he did) to illustrate his point, he wouldn't now be in the position of, as the Muslim News put it, alienating a billion Muslims.

His mistake was to cite a series of dialogues between a learned Byzantine emperor and a scholarly Persian Muslim about the truth of their respective religions, which was probably written while Constantinople was being besieged by the Turks.

The emperor in question, Manuel II Paleologus, referred during the seventh dialogue to the Koran's teachings about spreading the faith by the sword. And this, said the emperor, could not come from God because violence was the opposite of reason, and God himself cannot act contrary to reason.

What interested the Pope was the emperor's insistence that God's nature meant that he cannot act irrationally.

Unfortunately, Benedict quoted verbatim from the emperor's words: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

And this remark, which the Pope described as "rather marginal to the dialogue itself", was what almost every prominent Muslim has seized on. It wasn't so much that the remarks got lost in translation from the German – it was the quotation marks.

The very fact that the Pope cited the adjectives "evil and inhuman" was taken as evidence that he agreed with them. As a British Muslim youth organisation, the Ramadhan Foundation, said crossly, "If the Pope wanted to attack Islam… he could have been brave enough to say it personally without quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor."

In fact, the Pope was out to attack something very different – the contemporary, secular idea that faith is simply a matter of personal opinion.

If he's having a go at anything, it's not Islam, it's the patronising notion that you get, say, in David Hare's play Galileo, playing to rave reviews at the National Theatre, that religion is incompatible with independent thought.

And indeed, with conspicuous exceptions, the reaction from the Islamic world hasn't been what you might call measured.

Admittedly, it was easy to take the Pope's remarks out of context, given that it takes a bit of effort to track down his address in full, or indeed to understand it. But not impossible – yet hardly anyone seems to have made the effort.

The row has yet to escalate to the level of the Danish cartoon controversy, but it's not looking good.

[And she summarizes developments in the Muslim world thus far which we have already reported]

In fact, the speech itself suggested that the Pope understood perfectly well that there are nuances to the Islamic idea of jihad. He cites an early verse in the Koran that "there is no compulsion in religion".

And in respect of the verses that exhort Muslims to take up arms for the faith – and no, we're not talking merely about a spiritual struggle, but the real thing – he notes that there are differences between Mohammed's treatment of Christians and Jews, and of pagans.

If you're looking for a real critique of Islam in the speech, there is one tucked away in the text, but hardly anyone noticed. [Oh yes, some Western commentators have - just that the Arab street has yet to be coached by their stage handlers on this aspect, perhaps because the stage-handlers do not yet know about it!]

The Pope suggests that the Islamic idea of God is so transcendent that he cannot be seen in terms of human reason. He cites one medieval Islamic scholar, Ibn Hazn, who says that God is entirely remote from our rational categories.

This may not sound like much to get worked up about, but Benedict plainly sees this approach as the opposite of the Christian way of looking at faith and reason.

And indeed, a Rome-based Muslim theologian, Adnane Mokrani, has pointed out that this is only one Islamic view of God's nature, and other schools of Muslim thought are very different. Now that's proper religious dialogue.

As for the Pope's notional Islamophobia, he's had rather a good record until now in terms of the issues that agitate Muslims. He was sympathetic to their reaction to the Danish cartoons, and he was strongly opposed to the conflict in Lebanon and the war in Iraq.

[That's balance, and she's the first journalist I have read so far to point this out. The others have just called attention to a supposedly 'sorry track record' based mostly on Cardinal Ratzinger's statement as to why Turkey should not be part of the European Union.]

The irony of this row is that it is the opposite of what the Pope was trying to achieve. Benedict ended his speech by hoping for a new dialogue between the sciences, religions and cultures "which is so urgently needed today".

It looks, from this miserable episode, as if you can only have a conversation that deals – however remotely – with Islam on Muslim terms. Not much of a dialogue, then
. [Brava! It's the same point made by the Spiegel writer we cited a few posts above!]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/09/2006 6.08]

And the Daily Telegraph gets full points for their third article in the same issue 'in defense of' the Holy Father. If they ran a negative article, I don't see it online....

Would that Catholic writers and journalists had come out to speak up for the Pope like this!

I am genuinely surprised to find that the Daily Telegraph, at least in this issue (of the newspaper) and in this instance, would go so far in 'defense' of the Pope. (I must go back and check whether their Habemus Papam headline on him was about being a dog or being a Nazi or was neutral)

In any case, this could it be their way of saying, "Let's stop giving a pass to all the British Muslims who are undermining our society and directly causing death and destruction in our land!"

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He bears no malice,
but he is a worried man
By Damian Thompson

It is ironic that Benedict XVI finds himself accused of crude anti-Islamic prejudice after quoting a medieval emperor's opinion that Mohammed's violent teachings were "evil and inhuman".

For no pope in history has made a deeper study of Islam.

Having explored every verse of the Koran, and engaged in long debates with Muslim scholars, he rejects the simplistic notion — held by fundamentalist Christians, and by the Roman Catholic Church until the middle of the 20th century — that Islam is evil. Yet he is convinced that some of its doctrines are morally indefensible.

In Benedict's view, a profound ambiguity about violence lies at the heart of Islam, arising from the Prophet's belief that faith can be spread by the sword. Mohammed, after all, was a general whose troops beheaded hundreds of enemy captives.

Asked recently whether he considered Islam to be a religion of peace, the Pope replied: "Islam contains elements that are in favour of peace, just as it contains other elements."

Christianity, by contrast, he sees as a religion of pure peace — which is why he adopts a near-pacifist approach to conflict in the Middle East.

Where the pontiff differs from his predecessor is in his impatience with what might be termed "Islamic political correctness".

John Paul II hoped that prayer could bring Christians and Muslims closer together, and famously prayed alongside Islamic leaders at Assisi in 1986. He also reassured Muslims that "we believe in the same God".

Benedict would emphasise that the Islamic understanding of God is radically different from that of Christians.

He has also refrained from issuing the apologies for historical misdeeds made by John Paul II, arguing that they are never reciprocated.

Last year, at a private seminar, the Pope implied that he agreed with conservative Muslim clerics that the teachings of the Koran cannot be modified in any way. Moreover, Islam, unlike Christianity, makes no distinction between sacred and secular.

"The Koran is a total religious law," he wrote in 1996, "which regulates the whole of political and social life." Therefore, a devout Muslim living in the West must aspire to live under sharia law. A multi-faith society "is not consistent with Islam's inner nature".

In other words, the Pope subscribes to a version of the "clash of civilisations" theory, which sees a fundamental incompatibility between Western and Islamic cultures. In his opinion, the primary aim of Christian-Muslim discussion is to avoid conflict.

For example, he supports the right of Muslim children to be taught their own religion in European schools — but on the strict understanding that their communities respect human rights.

Benedict's lecture at Regensburg University merely sought to elaborate his existing views. Beautifully written and constructed, it was intended for scholars interested in the relationship between God, rationality and coercion.

Although he described the Muslim approach to violence as defying God-given rationality, the Pope had no intention of offending ordinary Muslims or creating media headlines.

Yet the leader of the world's Roman Catholics has done both. How could a man who is so notoriously careful with words have committed what, in the eyes of liberal society, is a diplomatic blunder?

The answer may be that underlying Benedict's nuanced world view is a deep-seated fear of Islam, which crops up in the daily conversation of Italian Catholics and stretches as far north as his Bavarian homeland.

He does not believe that the Koran condones terrorism; he bears no animosity towards peace-loving Muslims; but he is worried that the aggressive ethos of authentic Islam may provoke a crisis in Western society.

And if the price of making that point is a "diplomatic blunder", then so be it.

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Forgive a bit of self-indulgence, but on 9/14/06, in my Post #4208, Page 7, in the ...VOYAGE TO BAVARIA thread, after the initial reports of negative reactions to the Pope's Regensburg lecture, I wrote the following:

We can be sure the Holy Father thought out clearly and long and repeatedly about what he said in the Regensburg lecture and its possible effects on a Muslim world where some insignificant cartoons raised a months-long firestorm that led to violence during the mass demonstrations that followed. And on his forthcoming trip to Turkey, an Islamic nation that has not been friendly to him and whom he antagonized earlier when he was Cardinal.

And he decided that some truths need to be spoken out loud, as politically incorrect and unwelcome as they must be. This is not the first time he has done so and it won't be the last.

He obviously wants to bring the inter-religious dialog - as well as the intra-Church one - to a level above hypocritical platitudes!

And he will have prepared himself for negative reactions, so let us leave it to him, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, to pacify passions and to open minds and hearts.

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In this spirit, I am looking forward to his Angelus message about 5 hours from now. He may surprise us all yet again, in the most unexpected way .

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/09/2006 7.01]

By the way, I would welcome some feedback, reactions, comments, etc. from the rest of the Forum. I feel like I have only been talking to myself the whole day. And if you think I should desist from what I am doing in whatever way you find objectionable or excessive, please let me know!

MaryJos and Crotchet - I truly appreciated hearing from you today.

As I said in some post a few days ago, I have been deliberately commenting on the articles I post in the hope of initiating some discussion among forum members. I don't want any page of the Forum to look like my personal bulletin board!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/09/2006 7.08]

Teresa, I can only speak for myself. Thank you for taking the time and effort of keeping us infomed. I have been reading the posts all day long as well as watching the news. It is difficult to respond to something like this. Like I suspect most of us I have been in a state somewhere between anger and pure fear. Anger aimed at the anti-Christian Arab news agencies for so clearly taking a statement out of context. Fear because Papa will be going to Turkey where some of the loudest protests are taking place. And all I can do is pray...

Theresa, thank you very much for all you did. I'm reading all agency's news as well. I'm simply angry (and I bet I am more angry that these idiots protesting ):

1. at newsmakers who are responsible for taking Papa's statements out of context.

2. at all muslim clerics who either can't read or don't want to understand, muslim politicians like tuskish politicians (his land wants to be member of European Union while they are saying pope is like Musolini or Hitler) and last but not least at other christian clerics like Constantinopol's patriarch and chief of coptic christians (who probably can't read too)..only former archbishop of canterbury was true when he said it is totally misinterpreted.

3. at all european politician except Angela Merkel, and maybe except czech president who said the reactions are inapropriate and pope had no intentions to humilitate muslims...........they simply think it is not about us, but today there is playing for future of Europe, we don't need hypocrits at the moment

Sorry to be so negative, I have been praying lot for Papa to find propriate words in Angelus, to calm the situation even he is the most innocent person in the causa.
Lord give him Your Holy Spirit, please...he's Your servant, have mercy for him.

[Modificato da Maklara 17/09/2006 9.03]

Nan, you‘re right. We all feel it. It's almost paralysing. Earlier this year we saw danish and norwegian flags being burned, now Papa is the target. What‘s next?
I think we can learn this from Papa; - Don’t be afraid to speak the truth! Don’t let ‘tolerance’ and what is ‘politically correct’ decide our opinion. Support Papa LOUD !!

Thanks a lot, dear friends, for speaking up. For a while there, I was really concerned...Well, three hours to Angelus...

I just read in the Sunday issue of DIE WELT that the Vatican is taking all security measures, even for the Angelus today, in the light of direct threats made on the Internet by an Iraqi group called Army of the Mujahaddin, saying they plan direct attacks on the Vatican -("We will destroy your Cross in Rome" )and the earlier call by a Somali leader on all Muslims world wide to 'hunt down the Pope" because 'anyone who insults the Prophet must be killed."

I'm not discounting they can do anything, but it's all part of the psychology of terror, and if we've learned anything from 9/11, it is that we must not cower before them.

And Papino, for all his seeming fragility and vulnerability - because his heart is pure, he has the strength of ten, or should I say, of the billion-plus Catholics around the world, the great 'communion of saints' that he always reminds us about, because of whom 'wer glaubt, ist nie allein".....


DIE WELT also reports that Ali Bardakoglu, Turkey's top religious affairs official who was the first ranking Muslim leader to denounce the Pope Friday, said today that he welcomed the explanation from the Vatican, particularly the part about the Pope respecting Islam and that he does not wish to offend Muslims. "I found this very civilized behavior," he told Spiegel online." ... This ,in connection with the Foreign Ministry announcement that the controversy does not in any way affect the planned papal trip to Turkey.

Well, gives us a lot to speculate about....like "Will you come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly...." [Will you come into our death trap....]

And in Iran, President Ahmadinejad ordered an 'analysis' of the Pope's words 'by Muslim theologians and Islam-scholars' ...

There's a very good essay by a WELT writer on the ironies besetting Benedict in his relations to Islam...

I will need two clones to help me keep up with translating the barrage of news and commentary, besides trying to do what I have to do in 'my other life'!

DIE WELT alone has about 7 articles this morning on the issue, and I haven't even checked Frankfuerter Allgemeine Zeitung and Sueddeutsche Zeitung. I had an 'easy' time Saturday because there was a lot of English stuff I could just plug in and 'enhance' presentation-wise, and managed to translate shorter Italian pieces in between.

The Socci article I had begun to translate dawn Friday before I fell asleep and almost forgot about, until I opened my holding document to find I had fallen asleep before I could translate the last few paragraphs.

Today was the equivalent for me of the 24-hour news coverage I had to do for TV back home during presidential elections or the Apollo moonshot, generating all the adrenaline....

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/09/2006 10.33]

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Scritto da: lutheranguest 17/09/2006 9.04
Nan, you‘re right. We all feel it. It's almost paralysing. Earlier this year we saw danish and norwegian flags being burned, now Papa is the target. What‘s next?
I think we can learn this from Papa; - Don’t be afraid to speak the truth! Don’t let ‘tolerance’ and what is ‘politically correct’ decide our opinion. Support Papa LOUD !!

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I am also waiting for the western world to protest against this. Absolutely nothing comes from Germany (expect Anela Merkel and the Bavarian CSU). The SPD and the Green Party want the Pope to apologize. I wonder: are they frightened or is it really their opinion. Both reasons would be very sad.

It can't be that we have to be frightened to tell the truth (although it was only a quote, I'm sure most moslems don't know what a quote is). Am I still living in a christian country? I doubt it. A lot of young men find the islam fascinating - the same as they find Arnold Schwarzenegger films fascinating, only that this is fiction.

We will only have peace if we all convert to the islam. That's what they want.

The Vatican made an exception today and published the translation of the opening part of the Holy Father's message at Angelus conCerning the Bavarian trip and the Regensburg lecture:
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Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The Pastoral Visit which I recently made to Bavaria was a deep spiritual experience, bringing together personal memories linked to places well known to me and pastoral initiatives towards an effective proclamation of the Gospel for today.

I thank God for the interior joy which he made possible, and I am also grateful to all those who worked hard for the success of this Pastoral Visit. As is the custom, I will speak more of this during next Wednesday’s General Audience.

At this time, I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought.

Yesterday, the Cardinal Secretary of State published a statement in this regard in which he explained the true meaning of my words. I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.
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THERE! THAT SAYS ALL THAT NEEDS TO BE SAID.

Just my luck, but my Internet CTV froze on the first frame with the crowd superimposed on the Pope's image and stayed that way all 20 minutes of the transmission, and to make it worse, I couldn't get an audio! Grrrr.... I'll try my luck with the delayed transmissions after I finish translating the rest of teh Angelus message.

MEANWHILE, THOSE OF YOU WHO SAW AND HEARD IT ALL, PLEASE NARRATE...

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/09/2006 15.13]

thank you Teresa (btw,i have PM for you)..

does that mean that Papa apologized?or that he's sorry some pepole misinterpreted his speech?

i pray that the Lord,his Saints and Angels,Mama Mary protect him and give him courage.

The Pope is apologizing only for the reaction of the Muslims. Of course, he does not identify himself with the remarks of Manuel II. He was using this vignette to introduce his examination of reason as an attribute of God. He also pointed out in his lecture that Duns Scotus as well as the "dehellenizers" of the Protestant tradition also introduced the same capricious God as the one of which Manuel II spoke. In Catholic Christianity, John's Gospel is critical since it identifies God and logos (reason).

I doubt it will pacify the Muslims, but it's all he's going to offer, since he didn't say anything wrong in the first place. He did not in any way repudiate what he said at Regensburg.

The first reaction posted in the main forum comes from Sybella who writes: "GRANDISSIMO! I have never seen him as decisive and as firm as he was today."

No, it was not an apology - it was a clear expression of regret that what he said was misinterpreted in a way that was 'offensive to the sensibility of Muslims.' As he did and said nothing wrong, there is nothing to apologize for, especially as he made clear again that the offending words were from a quotation 'which do not in any way express my personal thought."

So: Firm and decisive. And limiting himself to the essentials. In doing so, he shows himself a man - ein Mensch, as our Jewish brothers would say. A gentleman. And above all, a man of God. No grovelling, no cowering, if that is what his opponents expected him to do.