By VICTOR L. SIMPSON,
Associated Press Writer
Tue Sep 19, 2006

VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI's remarks on Islam and holy war that have angered much of the Muslim world are in line with his efforts to spare religion from violence and extremism.

During his 17-month papacy, Benedict has lectured Muslims on the need to teach their young to shun violence, suggested that violent as well as peaceful strains are part of Islam and pressed for religious freedom — part of efforts to extend rights to Christians in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East.

While Benedict's comments on Islam and holy war may not have been "politically correct," said former Vatican diplomat John-Peter Pham, "today much of our dialogue is fruitless because we feel constrained from saying what we really think."

The source of the Islamic anger was a speech last week in which the pontiff cited a Medieval text that characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as "evil and inhuman," particularly "his command to spread by the sword the faith."

While the pope later said he was "deeply sorry" over the reactions to his remarks and that they did not reflect his own opinions, top churchmen rushed to his defense.

"The violent reactions in many parts of the Islamic world justified one of Pope Benedict's main fears," said Australian Cardinal George Pell.

"They showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence," Pell said Monday.

In the Vatican's first response to the Muslim criticism, papal spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said it was clear that Benedict sought to "cultivate an attitude of respect toward other religions and cultures, including of course Islam."

But he also said it was important to the pope that there be a "clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation of violence."

Some Vatican analysts say Benedict is taking a harder line toward Islam then his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, whose efforts for closer relations included a visit to a mosque in Syria — the first by a pope to a Muslim house of worship.

They point to Benedict's decision in March to merge the Vatican's office for dialogue with Muslims with its culture office, and to send the English prelate who headed it, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, — considered a top Islamic expert — to Egypt as papal envoy.

Commenting on the move, the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit authority on the Vatican, called Fitzgerald, "the smartest guy in the Vatican on relations with Muslims. You don't exile someone like that, you listen to them."

"If the Vatican says something dumb about Muslims, people will die in parts of Africa and churches will be burned in Indonesia, let alone what happens in the Middle East," Reese said in April.

Benedict, aides said, wrote the speech himself that he delivered last week to an audience of professors at the University of Regensburg, where he previously taught theology.

It is not known whether any aide was alarmed at the possibility for trouble, although journalists who received advance copies of the text asked the Vatican spokesman for explanations hours before Benedict delivered the address. When reading the lines about Islam, Benedict did add "I quote" twice.

It is not unusual for popes to make last-minute changes or to drop material for reasons that are often never explained.

For example, when Benedict visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in May, then spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told reporters that the word "Shoah" — Hebrew for the Holocaust — would appear in the final version the pope delivered. Its omission would certainly have generated protests.

Rome bureau chief Victor Simpson has covered the Vatican for more than 25 years.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/10/2006 19.15]

All right, they were asked to comment. It wasn't as if they came out on their own right away a few days ago - I don't think any 'important' American figure did. And, of course they both have their eyes on the White House in 2008. Gingrich even came to the heart of the matter.


WASHINGTON, Swept. 19, 2006 (AP) - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, longtime foes in American politics, forcefully defended Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday against a wave of Muslim criticism over a speech last week.

When asked about the controversy prior to her speech at an American Cancer Society event, Clinton, D-N.Y., said the pope's follow-up statement should have been enough to settle the matter.

"It's just outrageous and offensive that people would be threatening violence against him based on what he said, especially when there is so much they should be working on together," Clinton said.

The former first lady has a huge lead in her Senate re-election bid this year. Her opponent, Republican John Spencer, had criticized her Tuesday for not speaking out in the pope's defense.

After appearing onstage with Clinton at the cancer event, Gingrich was even more outspoken about the religious tension.

"I think what he said in his entire speech ... is that Islam has to come to grips with having a genuine dialogue of mutual respect," said Gingrich, a Georgia Republican when he was in the House. "Everything you've seen of the viciousness and the evil that has been said since then by fanatics reinforces the pope's speech."

Both Clinton and Gingrich, who as House speaker sparred for years with President Clinton, are considered potential presidential candidates in 2008.

Benedict angered much of the Muslim world with a speech that cited a Medieval text that characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as "evil and inhuman," particularly "his command to spread by the sword the faith." He later said he was "deeply sorry" if Muslims were offended, but some Muslims demanded a more forceful apology.

The comments led to mass protests in several Muslim countries. In Somalia, a Catholic nun was slain, a shooting that may have been motivated by anger at the pope's remarks.

"I think it's amazing that a 65-year-old nun who's serving as a nurse in Somalia can be killed over words, and people aren't outraged by the vicious barbarians that killed her," Gingrich said.

From the Wall street Journal's Opinion Journal online today - Too bad they did not say who wrote it!

Benedict the Brave:
The pope said things
Muslims need to hear
about faith and reason
Tuesday, September 19, 2006

It's a familiar spectacle: furious demands for an apology, threats, riots, violence. Anything can trigger so-called Muslim fury: a novel by a British-Indian writer, newspaper cartoons in a small Nordic country or, this past week, a talk on theology by the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

In a lecture on "Faith and Reason" at the University of Regensburg in Germany, Benedict XVI cited one of the last emperors of Byzantium, Manuel II Paleologus.

Stressing the 14th-century emperor's "startling brusqueness," the pope quoted him as 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."

Taken alone, these are strong words. However, the pope didn't endorse the comment that he twice emphasized was not his own. No matter.

As with Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses," which millions of outraged Muslims didn't bother to read (including Ayatollah Khomeini, who put the bounty on the novelist's life), what Benedict XVI meant or even said isn't the issue.

Once again, many Muslim leaders are inciting their faithful against perceived slights and trying to proscribe how free societies discuss one of the world's major religions.

Several Iraqi terrorist groups called for attacks on the Vatican. A cleric linked to Somalia's ruling Islamist movement urged Muslims to "hunt down" and kill the pope. In an apparently linked attack Sunday in Mogadishu, a nun was gunned down in a children's hospital. Pakistan's parliament unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the pontiff and demanding an apology.

Under pressure and no doubt to stop any further violence, the pope on Sunday did so. "I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address . . . which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims," he told pilgrims at his Castelgandolfo summer residence.

The quote doesn't "in any way express my personal thought. I hope this serves to appease hearts."

It was a gracious gesture on the pope's part, especially because his original argument deserves to be heard, not least by Muslims. The offending quotation was a small part in a chain of argument that led to his main thesis about the close relationship between reason and belief.

Without the right balance between the two, the pontiff said, mankind is condemned to the "pathologies and life-threatening diseases associated with religion and reason"--in short, political and religious fanaticism.

In Christianity, God is inseparable from reason. "In the beginning was the Word," the pope quotes from the Gospel according to John. "God acts with logos. Logos means both reason and word," he explained.

"The inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of history of religions, but also from that of world history. . . . This convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe."

The question raised by the pope is whether this convergence has taken place in Islam as well. He quotes the Lebanese Catholic theologist Theodore Khoury, who said that "for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent, his will is not bound up with any of our categories."

If this is true, can there be dialogue at all between Islam and the West? For the pope, the precondition for any meaningful interfaith discussions is a religion tempered by reason: "It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures," he concluded.

This is not an invitation to the usual feel-good interfaith round-tables. It is a request for dialogue with one condition -that everyone at the table reject the irrationality of religiously motivated violence. The pope isn't condemning Islam; he is inviting it to join rather than reject the modern world.

By their reaction to the pope's speech, some Muslim leaders showed again that Islam has a problem with modernity that is going to have to be solved by a debate within Islam.
The day Muslims condemn Islamic terror with the same vehemence they condemn those who criticize Islam, an attempt at dialogue -and at improving relations between the Western and Islamic worlds - can begin.

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

Islam’s Unreasonable War
Against Benedict XVI
In Regensburg, the pope offered as terrain
for dialogue between Christians and Muslims
“acting according to reason.”
But the Islamic world has attacked him,
distorting his thought, confirming by this
that the rejection of reason brings intolerance
and violence along with it.

by Sandro Magister


ROMA, September 18, 2006 – As soon as he returned from his trip to Bavaria, Benedict XVI, as had been planned, installed cardinal Tarcisio Bertone as head of the secretariat of state and promoted archbishop Dominique Mamberti as the Holy See’s new foreign minister.

At the same time, he found himself facing a wave of unprecedented protest on the part of the Muslim world – on account of things he had said at the University of Regensburg on September 12.

The two facts are not disconnected from each other. Bertone is not a career diplomat, but a man of doctrine and a pastor of souls. More than secretary of state – he has said – he wants to be secretary “of Church.”

By installing him, the pope has confirmed that what is expected from the secretariat of state and the pontifical representatives is, above all, collaboration in the task that belongs to him as successor of Peter: “strengthening the brethren in the faith.”

This, and nothing else, is what Benedict XVI went to do in Bavaria, as he emphasized at the end of the trip:

“I came to Germany, to Bavaria, to re-propose the eternal truths of the Gospel as present-day truths and strength, and to strengthen believers in their adherence to Christ, the Son of God who became man for our salvation. I am convinced in the faith that in Him, in his word, is found the way not only to attain eternal happiness, but also to build already a future worthy of man upon this earth.”

Less diplomacy and more Gospel: this is the course that Joseph Ratzinger is setting for the Church’s central governance.

Even in the choice of archbishop Mamberti as foreign minister, what the pope kept in mind even more than his diplomatic competency was his direct familiarity with the Muslim world and with the related questions of faith and civilization.

[And that Jesuit, Fr. Michel, says this Pope now does not have anyone around him who knows Islam!]

Born in Marakesh, with French citizenship via Corsica, Mamberti was a pontifical representative in Chile and to the United Nations, but also in Algeria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and most recently in Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia.

And it was again this criterion – less diplomacy and more Gospel – that led the pope, in the course of his trip to Germany, to say such politically incorrect, and such potentially explosive, words.

Anyone who is an expert in the art of diplomacy and a proponent of “realism” in international relations would certainly have censured as inopportune and dangerous many passages of the homilies and speeches delivered by Benedict XVI in Germany.

But this is not a pope who submits himself to such censorship or self-censorship, which he sees as being inopportune and dangerous indeed when it concerns the pillars of his preaching.

His goal on his trip to Germany was to illuminate before modern man – whether Christian, agnostic, or of another faith; from Europe, Africa, or Asia – that simple and supreme truth that is the other side of the truth to which he dedicated the encyclical “Deus Caritas Est.”

God is love, but he is also reason, he is the “Logos.” And so when reason separates itself from God, it closes in upon itself. And likewise, faith in an “irrational” God, an absolute, unbridled will, can become the seed of violence.

Every religion, culture, and civilization is exposed to this twofold error – not only Islam, but also Christianity, toward which the pope directed almost the entirety of his preaching.

Two days before the lecture at the University of Regensburg against which Muslim government officials and opinion makers launched their protests, Benedict XVI had exposed this truth in the homily for the Mass on Sunday, September 10 in Munich, with connotations that had even let him pass as pro-Islamic in some media commentaries.

The pope had said:
“People in Africa and Asia admire, indeed, the scientific and technical prowess of the West, but they are frightened by a form of rationality which totally excludes God from man's vision, as if this were the highest form of reason, and one to be taught to their cultures too.

"They do not see the real threat to their identity in the Christian faith, but in the contempt for God and the cynicism that considers mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom and that holds up utility as the supreme criterion for the future of scientific research.

"Dear friends, this cynicism is not the kind of tolerance and cultural openness that the world's peoples are looking for and that all of us want! The tolerance which we urgently need includes the fear of God – respect for what others hold sacred.
"This respect for what others hold sacred demands that we ourselves learn once more the fear of God. But this sense of respect can be reborn in the Western world only if faith in God is reborn, if God become once more present to us and in us. We don't impose our faith on anyone...”

But then came the lecture in Regensburg, and the interpretation of it made by the leaders of the Muslim world – muftis, preachers, opinionists, government officials, with a propagation and exaggeration of the offensive similar to what was seen a few months ago against the blasphemous cartoons – was the diametrical opposite.

The accusations sprang from an outrageous distortion of the theses expounded by Benedict XVI, and sidestepped precisely that exercise of reason invoked by the pope as the proper terrain for a true dialogue among the religions and civilizations.

So the new Vatican foreign minister, Mamberti, acted well when he replied not by announcing unthinkable retractions on the part of the pope, but by appealing simply for a “direct” and complete reading of the lecture he gave in Regensburg.

On September 16, the new secretary of state, Bertone, released an official note reaffirming the “unmistakable” positions of the pope, his dismay over interpretations of his thought wrongly thought to be offensive, and the hope that “those who profess Islam may be aided to understand his words in their right meaning.”

And at the Angelus on Sunday the 17th, Benedict XVI himself made this clarification:

“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.”

This does not alter the fact that the lecture by Benedict XVI in Regensburg – reissued in its entirety by www.chiesa, in Italian and English, an hour after it was delivered – was truly and audaciously impolitic.

The pope took as his point of departure a dialogue that took place in 1391 between the emperor of Constantinople, Manuel II Paleologus, and a Muslim scholar from Persia on the irrationality of spreading the faith through violence.

The dialogue was not a mere academic exercise. What little remained of the Eastern Roman Empire was under its final attack from the Ottoman armies. Around sixty years later, in 1453, Constantinople would fall under Muslim dominion, and the basilica of Hagia Sophia would be turned into a mosque.

So then, the next trip that Benedict XVI has planned, at the end of November, is to Istanbul, the current name for Constantinople. It includes an arrival at Ankara, the capital of Turkey, and a stop in Ephesus, at what is traditionally called the “House of Our Lady.”

It was the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Barthlomew I, who invited the pope in mid-2005. Benedict XVI immediately accepted the invitation, without waiting for it to be confirmed by a similar invitation from the Turkish authorities. And this alone was enough to irritate the Ankara government, which does not recognize Bartholomew I’s role as a patriarch, but treats him as an ordinary citizen.

In today’s Turkey, there are a few tens of thousands of Christians, mostly belonging to the Armenian Church. The faithful of the patriarchate of Constantinople are 3-4 thousand. And there are also a few thousand Catholics.

The Turkish government formally invited the pope last February. But shortly before this, on the 5th of the same month, there was the killing of an Italian priest, Fr. Andrea Santoro, in a church in Trabzon, on the Black Sea. After this, other priests were the targets of threats and attacks.

For a few months, a number of the representatives of the Catholic Church in Turkey have been living under the protection of unarmed, plainclothes police officials. Their telephone conversations are monitored, and their mail is often already open when it is delivered. More than being protected, they have the feeling of being watched.

Last June, another important Church leader, the “Catholicos” of the Armenians, Karekin II, visited Turkey. A reference that he made to the massacre of Armenians carried out by the Ottoman Empire during its final phase earned him a penal trial for offenses against Turkey, brought against him by the magistrate of Istanbul.

Religious liberty is largely lacking in Turkey: this is also true for the non-Sunni Muslims, the Alevi. The president of the office that oversees Turkish Islam on behalf of the government, Ali Bardakoglu, is inflexible in rejecting the request of the Alevi to be recognized as a distinct Muslim community. Their places of worship are still downgraded as “cultural centers.”

And Ali Bardakoglu was the first among the Turkish authorities to react to the lecture by Benedict XVI in Regensburg. Here is what he said:

“His was a very provocative, hostile, and prejudicial address. I hope that it does not reflect an indwelling hostility in the pope’s interior world that reveals the presumptuous, indulgent, and arrogant attitude of those who know they have the economic power of the West behind them.

"If a man of religion or a scientist criticizes the history of a religion or the members of that religion, we can talk about it. But when one speaks about holy things, about the holy Book and its Prophet, it is a sign of arrogance, of hostility, and gives way to slander that incites religious fighting. The Muslim world must look with concern at Benedict XVI’s upcoming trip to Turkey. We are waiting for him to take back his words and to apologize to the world of Islam.”

If this is the welcome Benedict XVI receives from those who oversee Islam in Turkey, the prospects are not encouraging.

It should be noted that the agency taking care of the pope’s trip – as also of the affairs of the Christian religious minorities, considered as foreigners in terms of civil law – is the Turkish foreign ministry, of the most pronounced secularist tendency, which is controlled by the “invisible government” that is heir to the anti-Islamist revolution of Kemal Atatürk. But this current is weaker today than in the past.

The currents favorable toward the entry of Turkey into the European Union also seem to be on the decline. The preliminary negotiations with the EU are stalling over two unresolved questions: Turkey’s recognition of the state of Cyprus with its capital of Nicosia, and religious freedom.

One the other hand, there is growing hostility in the Turkish media toward everything that is Western, European, and Christian. Secular opinion is outstripped by opinion with an Islamist imprint, which is increasingly more combative.

An extremely mediocre book of political fiction published in Turkey at the end of August and written by a journalist who specializes in intrigues, Yücel Kaya, has had spectacular commercial success. The title says it all: “Attack on the Pope: Who Will Kill Benedict XVI in Istanbul?”

The Turkish chapter is the first one against which the new Vatican foreign minister, Mamberti, must test himself.

As for Benedict XVI, he knows that he hasn’t made his trip to Turkey any easier. But it is the pope’s firm conviction that a visit prepared and carried out only under the shield of reticence, silence, purely ceremonial dialogue, and submission would have done more harm than good – both to the Church and to the Muslim world.

But if everyone takes seriously in hand, and reads from beginning to end, the hymn to reason that he raised in Regensburg... Because at bottom, in the view of Benedict XVI, the heart of the question is always the same one that the emperor of Constantinople and his learned Persian counterpart discussed in 1391: “Not acting according to reason is contrary to the nature of God.”

__________

Anne Applebaum, an Op-Ed columnist in the Washington Post makes the obvious point that most commentators - and leaders, I must add - in the West do not seem to see at all/ Here is an excerpt from her piece today:


None of the radical clerics accepts Western apologies, and none of their radical followers reads the Western press. Instead, Western politicians, writers, thinkers and speakers should stop apologizing -- and start uniting.

By this, I don't mean that we all need to rush to defend or to analyze this particular sermon; I leave that to experts on Byzantine theology. But we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech -- surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts -- and of the press.

And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns. B

By "we" I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News -- Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between.

True, these principles sound pretty elementary -- "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" -- but in the days since the pope's sermon, [Um, it wasn't a sermon!] I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus.

A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.

All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all.

And maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously?

Maybe it's a pipe dream: The day when the White House and Greenpeace can issue a joint statement is surely distant indeed.

But if stray comments by Western leaders -- not to mention Western films, books, cartoons, traditions and values -- are going to inspire regular violence, I don't feel that it's asking too much for the West to quit saying sorry and unite, occasionally, in its own defense.

The fanatics attacking the pope already limit the right to free speech among their own followers. I don't see why we should allow them to limit our right to free speech, too.

A Challenge, Not a Crusade

By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
Published: September 19, 2006
New York Times
Opinion

SEEN in context, Pope Benedict XVI’s citation last week of a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who claimed that the Prophet Muhammad brought “things only evil and inhuman” to the world was not intended as an anti-Islamic broadside. The pope’s real target in his lecture at the University of Regensburg, in Germany, was not Islam but the West, especially its tendency to separate reason and faith. He also denounced religious violence, hardly a crusader’s sentiment.

The uproar in the Muslim world over the comments is thus to some extent a case of “German professor meets sound-bite culture,” with a phrase from a tightly wrapped academic argument shot into global circulation, provoking an unintended firestorm.

In fact, had Benedict wanted to make a point about Islam, he wouldn’t have left us guessing about what he meant. He’s spoken and written on the subject before and since his election as pope, and a clear stance has emerged in the first 18 months of his pontificate. Benedict wants to be good neighbors, but he’s definitely more of a hawk on Islam than was his predecessor, John Paul II.

The new pope is tougher both on terrorism and on what the Vatican calls “reciprocity” — the demand that Islamic states grant the same rights and freedoms to Christians and other religious minorities that Muslims receive in the West. When Benedict said in his apology on Sunday that he wants a “frank and sincere dialogue,” the word “frank” was not an accident. He wants dialogue with teeth.

Roman Catholicism under Benedict is moving into a more critical posture toward Islamic fundamentalism. That could either push Islam toward reform, or set off a global “clash of civilizations” — or, perhaps, both.

Personally, Benedict’s graciousness toward Muslims is clear. For example, when Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani, a member of the powerful Guardian Council in Iran, wrote a book comparing Islamic and Christian eschatological themes in the 1990’s, Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, swapped theological ideas with him in the Vatican.

Immediately after his installation Mass last year, Benedict thanked Muslims for attending an inter-faith meeting. “I express my appreciation for the growth of dialogue between Muslims and Christians,” he said. “I assure you that the church wants to continue building bridges of friendship with the followers of all religions.”

Yet Benedict has also challenged what he sees as Islam’s potential for extremism, grounded in a literal reading of the Koran. In a 1997 interview with me, he said of Islam, “One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of pluralistic society.”

In the same interview, he accused some Muslims of fomenting a radical “liberation theology,” meaning a belief that God approves of violence to achieve liberation from Israel. He also said he opposed Turkey’s candidacy to enter the European Union, arguing that it is “in permanent contrast to Europe” and suggesting that it play a leadership role among Islamic states instead.

Thus it’s no surprise that Benedict has struck a different tone from his predecessor. John Paul met with Muslims more than 60 times, and during a 2001 trip to Syria became the first pope to enter a mosque. He reached out to Islamic moderates. He talked of Muslims and Jews along with Christians as the three “sons of Abraham.” And he condemned injustices thought to be at the root of Islamic terrorism.

Desire for a more muscular stance, however, has been building among Catholics around the world for some time. In part, it has been driven by persecution of Christians in the Islamic world, like the murder of an Italian missionary, the Rev. Andrea Santoro, in Trabzon, Turkey, in February. A 16-year-old Turk fired two bullets into Father Santoro, shouting “God is great.” But perhaps the greatest driving force has been the frustrations over reciprocity. To take one oft-cited example, while Saudis contributed tens of millions of dollars to build Europe’s largest mosque in Rome, Christians cannot build churches in Saudi Arabia. Priests in Saudi Arabia cannot leave oil-industry compounds or embassy grounds without fear of reprisals from the mutawa, the religious police. The bishop of the region recently described the situation as “reminiscent of the catacombs.”

The pope is sympathetic to these concerns, as several developments at the Vatican have made clear.

At a meeting with Muslims in Cologne, Germany, last summer, Benedict urged joint efforts to “turn back the wave of cruel fanaticism that endangers the lives of so many people and hinders progress toward world peace.”

On Feb. 15, he removed Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, who had been John Paul’s expert on Islam, as the president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, sending him to a diplomatic post in Egypt. Archbishop Fitzgerald was seen as the Vatican’s leading dove in its relationship with Muslims.

That same month, Bishop Rino Fisichella, the rector of Rome’s Lateran University and a close papal confidant, announced it was time to “drop the diplomatic silence” about anti-Christian persecution, and called on the United Nations to “remind the societies and governments of countries with a Muslim majority of their responsibilities.”

In March, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope’s vicar for Rome, voiced doubts about calls to teach Islam in Italian schools, saying he wanted assurance that doing so “would not give way to a socially dangerous kind of indoctrination.”

And on March 23, Benedict summoned his 179 cardinals for a closed-doors business session. Much conversation turned on Islam, according to participants, and there was agreement over taking a tougher stance on reciprocity.

Through his statements and those of his proxies, Benedict clearly hopes to stimulate Islamic leaders to express their faith effectively in a pluralistic world. The big question is whether it will be received that way, or whether it simply reinforces the conviction of jihadists about eternal struggle with the Christian West.

John L. Allen Jr. is the Vatican correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter.

BEST NEWS OF THE DAY SO FAR! He rode out among the faithful in an open Popemobile and held his general audience at St. Peter's Square as usual, although security was stepped up.



And the first two stories out of the wires do not even point out how unusual this openness is, considering all the death threats that have been coming his way! Would any other world leader have been so bold? But imagine what pressure Vatican security agents must be under!

[P/S. Six hours later, still no one has pointed out how, more than just physical and moral courage, it takes great faith in the protection of the Lord and confidence in the love and esteem of the faithful) who gathered there today in the tens of thousands for him), for the Pope to have gone about the Wednesday audience 'as usual' - open Popemobile and an audience al fresco in the Piazza- as though all the nastiness and threats had not been.]

I have posted a full translation of the Pope's address today at the General Audience in the AUDIENCE AND ANGELUS thread. Instead of resuming his catechesis on the Apostles, he gave a report of his recent trip to Bavaria, as is customary after each papal trip.
---------------------------------------------------------------

VATICAN CITY, Sept. 20 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict said on Wednesday his use in a speech of medieval quotes critical of Islam, which infuriated Muslims worldwide, did not reflect his own convictions and were misunderstood.

Muslims wanted the Pope to make a clear apology for quoting 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus in a speech in Germany last week, saying everything the Prophet Mohammad brought was evil, "such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

At his weekly public audience in the Vatican, the German-born Pope, speaking in Italian, repeated his earlier remarks that the crisis was caused by a "misunderstanding."

"But for the careful reader of my text it is clear that I in no way wanted to make mine the negative words pronounced by the medieval emperor and their polemical content does not reflect my personal conviction," the Pope said.

"My intention was very different. I wanted to explain that religion and violence do not go together but religion and reason do," he said.

The 79-year-old leader of the world's one billion Roman Catholics said he hoped the whole furor could eventually serve to encourage "positive and even self-critical dialogue, both among religions as well as between modern reason and the faith of Christians."

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI said Wednesday that he has "deep respect" for Islam and hopes that his recent remarks that sparked anger from Muslims lead to dialogue among religions.

"I hope that ... my deep respect for great religions, in particular for Muslims ... has emerged clearly," the pope said during his weekly audience at the Vatican.

Speaking last week at the University of Regensburg in his native Germany, Benedict cited a Medieval text that characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as "evil and inhuman," particularly "his command to spread by the sword the faith."

"I trust that after the initial reaction, my words at the University of Regensburg can constitute an impulse and encouragement toward positive, even self-critical dialogue both among religions and between modern reason and Christian faith," the pope told thousands of faithful in St. Peter's Square Wednesday. Security in the square had been stepped up.

Benedict said Sunday that he was "deeply sorry" about the reaction to his remarks, and the quoted text did not reflect his own opinions.

AsiaNews is much more expansive in its reporting about Benedict's words today:

20 September, 2006
VATICAN-ISLAM
Pope: I was misunderstood
about Islam - May my words
become an opportunity for dialogue

At the general audience, Benedict XVI said that at Regensburg, while tackling the topic of faith and reason, he had maintained that “not religion and violence but religion and reason go together”. It was a call “to dialogue both among religions and between modern reason and Christian faith”.


Vatican City (AsiaNews) – The quotation made by Benedict XVI in the “lecture” at the University of Regensburg, “lent itself to possible misunderstanding”.

“For the careful reader, however, it emerges clearly that I did not want to make my own in any way the negative words pronounced by the medieval emperor.”

That speech tackled the theme of “faith and reason”, maintaining that “not religion and violence but religion and reason go together” and aimed to “invite the Christian faith to dialogue with the modern world and all religions”, as should have emerged “clearly”, considering the overall trip to Germany.

A crowd of 40,000 people present at today’s general audience greeted with long and warm applause the pope’s words about his trip to Germany, and especially about the speech he gave in Regensburg. It was a profound reflection.

As he did last Sunday before the Angelus prayer, Benedict XVI reiterated the substance of what he had already said: everything took place in an athenaeum, and hence in language that would be employed for a university lecture. In the text of the address, there is a note that the pope intended to add footnotes.

Further, the controversial phrase was a quote referring to Muhammad “in a way that is incomprehensible and brusque for us” and which served to “introduce the drama and actuality of the topic.”

The pope said that “in no way did I wish to make my own the negative words of the emperor”, that he has “profound respect for world religions and for Muslims, who worship the one God and with whom we promote peace, liberty, social justice.”

Benedict XVI also expressed the hope that “after the initial reaction”, his words may “constitute a push towards positive, even self-critical, dialogue between religions and between modern reason and Christian faith.”

Looking back at the stages of his visit to Germany, Benedict XVI said: “A particularly beautiful experience for me on that day was to give a speech before a large audience of professors and students of the University of Regensburg, where I taught as a professor for many years.

"With joy, I was able to meet once again the university world which, for a long period of my life, was my spiritual homeland.
As a topic, I chose the relationship between faith and reason.

"To introduce the audience to the drama and actuality of the topic, I cited some words of a Christian-Islamic dialogue from the XIV century, with which the Christian interlocutor, the Byzantine Emperor, Manuel II Paleologos – in a way that is incomprehensible and brusque for us – presented to the Islamic interlocutor the problem of the relationship between religion and violence.

"This quotation, unfortunately, lent itself to possible misunderstanding. For the careful reader, however, it emerges clearly that I did not want to make my own in any way the negative words pronounced by the medieval emperor in this dialogue and their controversial content did not express my personal conviction.

"My intention was rather different: starting out from that Manuel II said later in a positive way, using a very beautiful word, about how reason should guide in the transmission of faith, I wished to explain that not religion and violence, but religion and reason, go together.

"The theme of my conference – in response to the University mission – was the relationship between faith and reason: I wanted to invite the Christian faith to dialogue with the modern world and all religions.

"I hope that on several occasions of my visit – for example, in Munich, when I underlined how important it is to respect what is sacred to others – my profound respect for world religions and for Muslims, who ‘worship the one God’ and with whom we ‘promote peace, liberty, social justice and moral values for the benefit of all humanity’ (Nostra Aetate, 3), is clear.”

The pope added: “I trust that after the initial reaction, my words at the University of Regensburg can constitute an impulse and encouragement toward positive, even self-critical dialogue both among religions and between modern reason and Christian faith.”

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/09/2006 20.34]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/09/2006 7.58]

AsiaNews offers a round-up of some positive developments in the Muslim world.
---------------------------------------------------------------

19 September, 2006
ISLAM – VATICAN
More calls for dialogue
in a Muslim world
angered by Pope

The Holy See’s diplomatic offensive seems to be working. Iran’s parliament hopes the Pope won’t fall “in the trap” set by those seeking a clash of civilisations. More and more Islamic media detail the Pope’s full speech, demand greater knowledge of each other’s religion.


Beirut (AsiaNews) – As some pour over Benedict XVI’s entire Regensburg speech instead of focusing on a single sentence about Muhammad taken out of context, others accept what the Pope said on Sunday, namely that what he quoted did not reflect his thought, and others even see that in the end the Holy Father did apologise.

Overall, the Holy See’s diplomatic offensive that has had nuncios working overtime trying to explain to the governments of Muslim countries the real meaning of what the Pope said in Regensburg is bearing fruit.

AsiaNews’s sources are saying that the situation in some countries is still tense, but mass protest and incendiary statements appeared to have died down, except for terrorist groups that are still feeding the fire in order to politically exploit the situation.

In Iran, in a statement by President Ahmadinejad read to parliament and published in the semi-official ISNA news agency, Ahmad Mousavi said that it “is expected of the Pope to have a sense of his elevated place and to think about the consequences of his words ” and show “respect” for Islam.

Mousavi expressed “hope the Pope does not fall in the trap of those who see their benefits in war between Muslims and Christians”. As for the controversial speech, the Iranian official said that the “remarks made by the Pope [. . .] were made on a poor foundation of knowledge regarding Islam”.

For Saudi online paper Arab News, “[w]hatever views people may have about Pope Benedict’s controversial speech at Regensburg University last week; it underlines the urgent need for greater dialogue between people of different faiths. There is a dangerous chasm of ignorance about other faiths and it affects Muslims, Christians, Jews and practitioners of other religions equally; it is dangerous because it is so easily exploited by bigots and opportunists for their own political ends.”

The paper goes on to say that the “Danish cartoon row should have provided the stimulus to intensify efforts. It did not. Maybe now, in the full fury of the papal row, the message will get through. It has to. In today’s global village, we cannot afford to be ignorant of each other’s faiths. Ignorance breeds fear and fear breeds hate—and hate is scarcely a step away from war and conflict.”

For its part, Turkish daily Hurriyet, which led the protest, now writes that “the reaction of radical Islamists to the pope’s speech justifies claims that Islam is a religion of violence. But if we carefully read the speech by Pope Benedict XVI, we can see that the dialogue between cultures as well as religions will be difficult.”

It adds that it “would also be wrong to demand an apology from the pope. He would say that they were the words of the Byzantine emperor. But that's not the essence of all this. It's important to emphasize the common points in a dialogue between cultures and accepting each other the way we are.”

For Jordan’s Al Ra’i, the Pope’s Angelus, many excerpts of which it reprinted, was a step in the right direction, whilst Syria’ SANA news agency briefly reported protests in some Muslim countries without any comments and without talking about any reactions in Syria itself.

Hasyim Muzadi, chairman of Indonesia’s largest Islamic association Nadhlatul Ulama, said that Muslims must accept Pope Benedict XVI's “apology” for offending Muslims, saying it was “an obligation” according to Islamic teachings.

The Jakarta Post reports that for Hasyim Benedict XVI’s regrets were “enough” and that any further resentment on the part of Muslims would only justify the Pope’s claims. “If the rage continues, perhaps what the pope said is true,” it said.

Taking its cue from Card Julius Darmaatmadja, the Bishops’ Conference of Indonesia said that it hoped “this incident does not damage the religious harmony we have tried to build all this time,” insisting that “the act of forgiving each other will be the basis for better dialogue in our coexistence.”

A singular perspective has been voiced in an editorial article in Asia Times. The paper’s editorialist claims that the Pope has called “for the conversion of the Muslims” and for this reason is dangerous. The jihad against which Benedict has spoken “is the fundamental sacrament of Islam, the Muslim cognate of the Lord's Supper in Christianity, that is, the unique form of sacrifice by which the individual believer communes with the Transcendent. [. . .] To ask Islam to become moderate, to reform, to become a peaceful religion of personal conscience is the precise equivalent of asking Catholics to abolish Mass. For this reason the Islamic world sees in Benedict XVI a danger and with “reason”.

As for Benedict characterising jihad as an insult to Reason, Muslims might have responded by asking the Pope how much rationality is there in a God that sends his son to die on a cross or in a belief that during mass bread and wine can really be turned into the flesh and blood of his dead and risen son.

For the Gulf Today and the Middle East Time, the Pope’s attempt to placate the anger of the Muslim world is a failure as demonstrations and al-Qaeda’s threat to “conquer Rome” make clear.

Today though there have been no demonstrations but in Indonesia the Islamic defence Front is still protesting. The group complained that the Pope expressed regrets but did not apologise. For the group’s spokesman, the Pope must instead apologise directly to Muslims.

I'm so glad that Pope Benedict pointed out that a "careful reader" of his text would have clearly discerned his intentions. That puts the onus on those who just took the headlines and went out and reacted with violence. This applies both to the press and to the Muslims. Occasionally, one has to read an entire text and think about it before rushing to comment, demonstrate, or kill.

Josie in the main forum has just posted this news agency item, translated here:

Madrid, September 20, 2006 - Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero today expressed his 'full understanding and support" for the Pope in the face of the current controversy .

Speaking to newsmen in the Senate, he also said he was appealing to the Muslim world to let the Pope's intention prevail [over a false interpretation of the quotation he cied in his Regensburg lecture[.

He said the Pope's explanation 'was very clear' and that the Pope could count on his "full uhderstanding and support."

He said he was "fully convinced that not for a moment did the Pope wish to provoke a controversy or a confrontation nor to criticize the Muslim religion and those who profess that faith."

Yesterday, the secretary of Zapateryo's Socialist Party, Jose Rodriguez, called on 'the moderate majority' in the Muslim world to make their voices heard against extremism and against the threats against the Pope and the West that have been coming from radical sectors of Islam.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/09/2006 15.52]

Avvenire today has put together 4 statements issued by prominent Muslim leaders in Italy in support of the Pope and condemning the violence being provoked by extremists in Muslim countries.I will post a translation here as soon as I can do them.

However, the newspaper leads off with an editorial commenting on Iranian President Ahmedinajad's latest statement about the Pope, but recognizing this could be just one of his mood swings.

Not that I would ever count Ahmadinejad with his track record among the voices of reason, but here is a translation of the editorial:
----------------------------------------------------------------

There are those in the Islamic world who have kept out of the insulting accusations and vulgar attacks against the Pope. Isolated, minor voices till yesterday when someone least expected spoke out.

"The Pope is a man of peace and deserves respect," Ahmadinejad is reported to have said, even as the top religious leaders in Iran continued to stoke the fires of anti-Vatican protests. The Iranian President is in New York for the annual meeting of teh United Nations General Assembly.

The Iranian religious leaders also accused President Bush, the United States and the West in general of "not being Christians as they claim to be."

What was striking about the Iranian president's statement was his apparently peaceful and conciliatory tone about Pope Benedict XVI, whose words, he said "have been misinterpreted."

It is very likely this is all part of Ahmadinejad's sly political tactics as he faces the United Nations and the world,
and it could all be an opportunistic ploy.

But it could also be a signal to the rest of the Islamic world, where more serious and considered thoughts have been expressed lately compared to the emotional reactions of the past few days.

"If we don't stop resentment, if we go ahead in anger, then maybe what the Pope said is true," a Muslim jorunalist wrote in a Jakarta newspaper.

The rector of a mosque in Marseilles went farther to say, "Even the Pope has a right to pass judgement on our religion."

It may be that the explanation offered patiently and with great simplicity by the Pope is slowly making a breach in the Islamic world.

Even the diplomatic initiative launched by the Holy See - which has asked its Apostolic Nuncios in the Muslim capitals to explain the Pope's words to their governments - appears to be bearing fruit.

Particularly significant was the long address made by the Holy See's permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva during a session on human rights.

"Violence is always irrational and incompatible with the nature of God," he said. "This is the sense of the quotation cited by the Pope from the Byzantine emperor. This is valid for everyone, including Christians and Muslims."

Benedict XVI has expressed his thoughts about Islam. He did so without any intent at controversy or denigration, but impelled by a wish for authentic dialog. And now they portray him as an enemy of Islam.

"It is surprising," continued the Apostolic Nuncio in Geneva, "how the demosntrations in the streets began before the speech had even be translated into a language understandable to the protestors.

He continued: "Such demonstrations were based on the misleading headlines in the media, who should assume their responsibility in this matter."

There is a way of communicating that can push the masses into fanaticism and which bsically does not recognize freedom of opinion.

The Pope has always been respectful of all cultural identities and religions. His ideas have been considered morally authoritative even for many in the Islamic world.

The caricature they have made of him in the past few days is an offense to all believers.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/09/2006 16.48]

Controversy over pope's lecture overshadows other aspects of trip

By Michael Lawton
Catholic News Service

MUNICH, Germany (CNS) -- The controversy over remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI during a scholarly lecture at the University of Regensburg has swept away all other aspects of the papal trip in German media.

Right after the pope's six-day visit in Bavaria, German newspapers were full of praise. The Financial Times Deutschland said, "Pope Benedict brings ecstasy to Bavaria," and the Rheinische Post said the pope had created "a new feeling for the holy."

The Munich-based Sueddeutsche Zeitung included six pages a day covering the visit, including critical analysis of the pope's sermons. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung printed the entire Regensburg lecture. The Bild, a daily tabloid, included excerpts from the lecture.

The pope's celebration of the Sept. 10 Mass in Munich had a 50 percent TV rating in Bavaria, and wall-to-wall coverage of the whole visit provided the local public broadcaster with dream-size audiences.

But the controversy over the pope's quotation of remarks critical of Islam made by 14th-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus in the Sept. 12 Regensburg lecture soon dominated the headlines.

In the lecture, which dealt with the relationship between faith and reason in the Western tradition of thought, the pope quoted the emperor, who wrote, "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 that he preached."

Initial reaction from Germany was muted. Father Hans Kung, a dissident Swiss theologian and expert on Islam, wondered if Muslims would find the remarks offensive.

The secretary-general of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, initially responded that he saw no reason to be offended. The pope cannot have intended to attack Islam, he said, since Christianity had its own history of violence.

But the mood soon changed, and Muslim leaders began to call for an apology.

The chairman of the Central Council of Muslims, Ayyub Kohler, told a newspaper it would be a "grand gesture of peace and reconciliation" if the pope issued "a general apology to the Muslims for Crusades, forced baptism and the expulsion of Muslims" throughout history.

But following the pope's expression of regret Sept. 17 at the offense the remarks had caused, the Central Council of Muslims issued a statement saying it hoped the Vatican would dialogue with Muslim representatives "so that the controversy does not lead to a long-term worsening of Christian-Muslim relations." The statement also sharply condemned "insults and threats of violence against Pope Benedict XVI."

The Central Institute of the Islamic Archive in Germany called for Christians and Muslims to be careful not to insult each other.

Politicians took sides, with conservatives defending the pope, while those on the left tended to criticize him.

Meanwhile, church leaders defended the pope. Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne said Muslims should read the pope's text. He said the issue of religion and violence was one of the most serious problems in recent years.

"The attempt to deal with this issue with the appropriate thoroughness for the sake of God and man will one day be counted among the great acts of Pope Benedict XVI," he said.

Peter Huenseler, director of the German bishops' Center for Christian-Islamic Dialogue and Documentation, told Catholic News Service that he felt the controversy would not harm Muslim-Christian relations in the future.

"I think that Muslims here in Germany were initially upset, but they are now aware of what the pope meant," he said. "If anyone has reason to feel attacked it should be atheistic materialists," since the pope spoke about them in his address.

Huenseler called the use of the quote undiplomatic and said that "one could have chosen another source."

Huenseler said Muslims in Germany realized the pope was committed to dialogue, and he recalled that "Muslims welcomed the fact that the pope called for greater integration of Muslims into German society" during his private talks with German President Horst Koehler in Munich Sept. 9.

Auxiliary Bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke of Hamburg, who is responsible for interfaith relations for the German bishops, told Bild Sept. 18 that he was shocked by the fanaticism resulting from the remarks.

"The representatives of all the great religions must, together with the pope, recognize what is reasonable before God. Violence in the name of God must always be seen as unreasonable and detestable," said the bishop. "That means for us in Germany: contact from neighbor to neighbor, from parish to mosque, from club to club, especially in sport. Those who do that will discover the perfectly normal things we have in common."

Syria’s Grand Mufti says Pope’s explanation “more than enough”

by Jihad Issa

After meeting the Nuncio, the head of Sunni clerics called for respect for the personality of Benedict XVI and urged one and all to pursue the path of dialogue.

Damascus (AsiaNews) – “The clarifications supplied by the Pope are more than sufficient, although I would ask for, if possible, more explanation.” With these words, the Sunni Grand Mufti of the Arab republic of Syria, Ahmad Badr El Din El Hassoun summed up a meeting yesterday – Tuesday – with the Apostolic Nuncio of Syria, Mgr Giovanni Morandini. In a statement to AsiaNews, he added: “The disapproval of Pope Benedict XVI and his bitterness after the recent reactions are more than an ‘apology’ for us and a great sign of respect towards the Islamic world.” El Hassoun called on “all to respect this great personality, Pope Benedict XVI.”

The Grand Mufti also thanked the Apostolic Nuncio for bringing a message of brotherhood and peace and said the latest position of the Holy See – expressed by the Pope himself, by the Secretary of State, by the Vatican Press Office and by some religious leaders – should be viewed as an expression of the “good intentions reigning in the hearts of Christian brothers”.

The Arab Group for Inter-faith Dialogue, in a statement released to the public also yesterday, upheld “the necessity of pursuing the path of dialogue, the only way capable of purifying hearts and of designing a project for the future of the region.” The group asked differences in vision, which will not help Muslim-Christian coexistence in Syria, be dropped from debate, and thanked the government of Damascus for security measures taken “that avoided violence and hate.”

In Syria, there was practically no aggressive and violent reaction at all to the address of the Pope, although the odd person sought to take advantage of the situation to boost his position in the country.

Pope Provocateur
He was defending reason, not attacking Islam.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Wednesday, September 20, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Wall Street Journal Online Opinion

Five days: That's how long it took Pope Benedict XVI to express regret for all the offense caused by his speech last week at the University of Regensburg, in his native Bavaria. But maybe his apology--on Sunday, he said he was "deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages in my address"--was as sly as the speech itself.

That speech deserves to be read in its totality, and not simply as the spark that set fire to churches across the West Bank because some Muslim fanatics object to the suggestion that there is too much violence in their religion. And yes: Contrary to nervous Vatican disclaimers, Benedict plainly implies that Islam is a faith of the sword, though he makes the point abstrusely, in the form of an anecdote about the late-14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus.

But that is neither the central theme of the address nor the main purpose of the anecdote. Benedict begins by recalling his own days as a professor at the university, when every semester faculty members from every department would convene before the student body, "making possible," he says, "a genuine experience of universitas." He goes on to note that the faculty included believers and unbelievers alike: "This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: It had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist--God."

That is the immediate prologue to the story he tells about a conversation between the "erudite" Byzantine emperor and an "educated Persian" in the winter of 1391. In it, the emperor condemns the notion of holy war, calling it "evil and inhuman." This is the line in the speech that inspires the current controversy. Yet the emperor's point--and the pope's--is that "God is not pleased by blood. . . . Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats."

This story, and Benedict's personal recollections that precede it, have something in common: Both involve dialogue between men of radically different beliefs. The dialogue is possible, Benedict suggests, because despite their differences the respective sides are bound by a "single rationality," capable of inquiring broadly into all fields of knowledge, including the "reasonableness of faith." The more important point for Benedict, however, is that genuine dialogue is possible only if there is a shared conviction among the speakers that the alternatives to dialogue--violence, forced conversion and so on--are "contrary to God's nature."

These reflections lead Benedict to a much graver indictment of Islam: "For Muslim teaching," he says, "God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality." Citing the 11th century polymath Ibn Hazm, Benedict adds that in Islam, "God is not bound even by his own word."

Let's play that again, since the rest of the media failed to notice: Pope Benedict suggests that the God of Mohammad is, or may seem to humans to be, "not even bound to truth and goodness." Who knows whether that really reflects a consensus view down the ages among Muslim theologians--Benedict makes his case about Islam by citing one scholar who cites another scholar who cites another. The more interesting question is why Benedict goes out of his way to use Islam as an example, since he also warns against similar tendencies toward insisting on God's radical "otherness" within the Catholic tradition itself. So why can't he simply illustrate the controversies of faith without going outside the boundaries of his own?

In fact, Benedict saves his sharpest barbs for non-Muslim targets: Protestantism, which seeks a "primordial" form of faith; liberal theology, which reduces Jesus to "the father of a humanitarian moral message"; scientific rationalism, the ethics of which are "simply inadequate" to answer the "specifically human questions about our origin and destiny"; and what might be called Catholic pluralism, a culturally adaptive notion of the faith that Benedict denounces as "false" and "coarse."

These aren't mere provocations. There is an overarching philosophical architecture to Benedict's critique, expressed in the notion of the "de-Hellenization of Christianity." Christianity, in his view, is shaped and defined by the great dialogue between Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation. When the Apostle John says "In the beginning was the Word," the "word," literally, is logos--which is reason, or argument. This, according to Benedict, expresses "the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry."

That rapprochement--a triumph of dialogue--lies at the heart of Benedict's theology: Strip faith from reason (as scientific rationalism does), or reason from faith (as Protestant literalism does), and "it is man himself who ends up being reduced."

There is a political subtext. Precisely in the middle of his speech, the pope describes the convergence of faith and philosophy as decisive to the character of "what can rightly be called Europe." He does not mention Europe again, nor, except obliquely, Islam. But near the end of his speech he warns that the "exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason" may be seen by other cultures "as an attack on their most profound convictions." "Reason which is deaf to the divine," he adds, "is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."

A Europe that cannot understand its own religion, except as a form of subjective irrationalism, cannot possibly engage another. A Christianity that voluntarily recuses itself from reason cannot sustain a belief in the goodness of its convictions, to say nothing of its truth. A West that abandons a critical dialogue between faith and rational inquiry ceases to be the West. It becomes, in a peculiar way, guilty of the same errors Benedict accuses Islam of making. This is the pope's teaching, and it requires no apology. Notice that he offers none.

Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.

The Pope Was Right


In his controversial speech last week, Benedict set forth a bold agenda for the civilized world.

By George Weigel
GEORGE WEIGEL, a senior fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the author of "God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church."

September 20, 2006
LATimes.com

IN A BRILLIANT lecture at the University of Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict XVI made three crucial points that are now in danger of being lost in the polemics about his supposedly offensive comments about Islam.

The pope's first point was that all the great questions of life, including social and political questions, are ultimately theological. How we think (or don't think) about God has much to do with how we judge what is good and what is wicked, and with how we think about the appropriate methods for advancing the truth in a world in which there are profound disagreements about the truth of things.

If, for example, we imagine that God is pure will, a remote majesty with whom our only possible relationship is one of unthinking submission, then we have imagined a God who can even command what seems to be irrational — like the murder of innocents. Pope Benedict reminds us, however, that mainstream Christian tradition, following its Jewish parent, has a different concept of God. The God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus is a God of reason, compassion and love, a God who comes searching for man in history, appeals to the human mind as well as the human heart and invites human beings into a dialogue of salvation.

This God cannot demand the unreasonable or the irrational. This God's revelation of himself, in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, does not cancel out or abrogate human reason. That is why mainstream Christianity has always taught that human beings can build decent societies by attending to reason.

The pope's second point, which flows from the first, was that irrational violence aimed at innocent men, women and children "is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the [human] soul." If adherents of certain currents of thought in contemporary Islam insist that the suicide bombing of innocents is an act pleasing to God, then they must be told that they are mistaken: about God, about God's purposes and about the nature of moral obligation.

Responsibility for challenging these distorted views of God and the distorted understanding of moral duty that flows from them rests, first, with Islamic leaders. But too few Islamic leaders, the pope seemed to suggest, have been willing to undertake a cleansing of Islam's conscience — as Pope John Paul II taught the Catholic Church to cleanse its historical conscience.

We know that, in the past, Christians used violence to advance Christian purposes. The Catholic Church has publicly repented of such distortions of the Gospel and has developed a deep theological critique of the misunderstandings that led to such episodes. Can the church, therefore, be of some help to those brave Islamic reformers who, at the risk of their own lives, are trying to develop a parallel Islamic critique of the distorted and lethal ideas of some of their co-religionists?

By quoting from a robust exchange between a medieval Byzantine emperor and a learned Islamic scholar, Benedict XVI was not making a cheap rhetorical point; he was trying to illustrate the possibility of a tough-minded but rational dialogue between Christians and Muslims. That dialogue can only take place, however, on the basis of a shared commitment to reason and a mutual rejection of irrational violence in the name of God.

The pope's third point — which has been almost entirely ignored — was directed to the West. If the West's high culture keeps playing in the sandbox of postmodern irrationalism — in which there is "your truth" and "my truth" but nothing such as "the truth" — the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because the West won't be able to give reasons why its commitments to civility, tolerance, human rights and the rule of law are worth defending. A Western world stripped of convictions about the truths that make Western civilization possible cannot make a useful contribution to a genuine dialogue of civilizations, for any such dialogue must be based on a shared understanding that human beings can, however imperfectly, come to know the truth of things.

CAN ISLAM BE self-critical? Can its leaders condemn and marginalize its extremists, or are Muslims condemned to be held hostage to the passions of those who consider the murder of innocents to be pleasing to God? Can the West recover its commitment to reason and thus help support Islamic reformers? These are the large questions that Pope Benedict XVI has put on the world's agenda. Men and women of reason and goodwill should be very glad that he has done so.

[Modificato da benefan 20/09/2006 20.49]

As a rejoinder to Mr. Stephens' excellent piece above, allow me to re-post here a comment I made on 9/14/06 in the ..VOYAGE TO BAVARIA thread, shortly after the first volleys started coming from the Muslim world :

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!

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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Earlier, shortly after the text of the Regensburg lecture was released that day and I had read through it once, twice, three times - I posted something to the effect that there was more than enough there to keep analysts and commentators going for months! Little did I think that the first week (8 days ago it was!) of discussion would focus on the words in the lecture that were not even his!

In an excess of enthusiasm, which does not minimize my conviction that it would be very helpful to do so, I even suggested that the lecture be made available to all university authorities and university students so they can reconsider once more what a university should really be, in terms of discussing ideas and considering the age-old questions on existence.

So after all the current furor passes, that lectio magistralis still stands there, magisterially and majestically, for those with open minds to read and learn from.

And it isn't even abstruse at all! It is so well-structured and reasoned that the ideas flow naturally, in language that is clear, unequivocal, quite un-academic, almost anti-academic, in fact, in its ability to engage attention and compel reflection.

PAPINO, SEI GRANDISSIMO!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/09/2006 20.58]

Well, the New York Times appearss to have caught up with the Italian media in reporting about Iran's Ahmadinejad, whose apparently placatory remarks were teh subject of an Avvenire editorial today (posted earlier on this thread). The news item below, although datelined Sept. 19 from Rome, only came out in today's paper.

Iranian Leader Accepts Efforts
by Pope to Recast His Remarks

By IAN FISHER
Published: September 20, 2006
ROME, Sept. 19 — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran suggested Tuesday that Pope Benedict XVI had satisfactorily “modified” his remarks on Islam, one sign of an easing of anger since the pope issued an apology on Sunday for having caused offense with a speech he delivered last week.

“We respect the pope and all those interested in peace and justice,” Mr. Ahmadinejad, an observant Muslim and a hard-liner against the West, said in Venezuela before leaving for the United Nations in New York. “I understand that he has modified the remarks he made.”

On Sunday, Benedict said he was “very sorry” for the anger and protests following his speech, in which he quoted a medieval text that described Islam as “evil and inhuman.” Several churches were attacked Friday and Saturday in the West Bank and Gaza, and an Italian nun was killed Sunday in Somalia, although it is not certain why she was attacked.

Since Sunday, some Muslims have said the pope did not go far enough in his statement: Although he said he did not agree with the description of Islam he had quoted, he did not apologize for having quoted it. On Tuesday, some Muslims continued to demand a fuller apology.

“Either apologize or don’t come,” read banners at a protest on Tuesday in Turkey, which the pope is scheduled to visit in November.

In Libya on Monday, a son of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the nation’s leader, rejected the apology. “If this person were really someone reasonable, he would not agree to remain at his post one minute, but would convert to Islam immediately,” said the son, Muhammad el-Qaddafi. [ A nut, obviously ] *
But on Tuesday, other Muslims echoed the sentiments of Rome’s top imam, who said that the pope had retreated from his original comments.

“We are always ready for dialogue, always ready for cohabitation, anywhere, even in those moments when we are wounded,” the imam, Sami Salem, said after an interfaith meeting. He added, “Dialogue is not an empty word; it should be a fact.”

Also at the meeting was the Vatican’s top official on interfaith dialogue, Cardinal Paul Poupard, who echoed the imam’s call for discussion. “The alternative to terrorism and violence is dialogue,’’ he said.

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*[Allow me a personal parenthetical on this nut! - To think I saw him in 1985 as a little boy trying out a new tricycle on the porch of his father's residence in the military camp of Bab Aziz in Tripoli !]

Carl Olson at the Ignatius bloghttp://insightscoop.typepad.com
samples the typical comments from those who have been lecturing the Pope on having goofed (or worse!), and deflates their inflated egos with a few well-placed pin pricks. That should put them in their place. But we know it won't. They're what another commentator has called the 'intellectualoids' and will go on strutting their stuff, unsolicited or not....
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The Usual Suspects with
the Usual Suspect Stuff
Posted by Carl Olson on
Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Funny, isn't it, how certain experts and leaders of other religions are so eager to explain to Pope Benedict XVI how to really be a pope? Of course, their "arguments" and statements can also make you wonder why they are considered experts or gained positions of leadership.

A shining example is this piece in today's Baltimore Sun. First up, the former editor of America magazine:

"I think his problem is that he's a German academic who hasn't realized yet he's a pope," said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. "There's certain things that an academic can say and have intellectual, unemotional discussions of. ... He's an extremely bright man, but he doesn't have any street smarts."

Next, a professor of history:

"He's not as political or diplomatic as was John Paul II," said Frank J. Coppa, a professor of history at St. John's University in New York. "He's more theologically oriented than he is diplomatically oriented."

Then a communications director:

"When you compare his efforts to reach out to the Muslims to those of the previous pope, there's a lot to be desired," said Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations. "We hope that the incident is not a signal of things yet to come. "Unfortunately, these most recent remarks are harming relations that were built up over years."

The chairman of the "theology" department at Georgetown University, which has a mysterious, even vague, relationship with the Catholic Church:

"His lenses are very thickly Christian in terms of how he views the world," Gillis said. Although "Benedict is a very distinguished Christian theologian," Gillis said, "he's not an expert on the history of religions."

Then this advice from a rabbi:

Rabbi Jack Bemporad of the Center for Interreligious Understanding, said the new pope has been forced to look beyond his previous "narrow kind of job." "He really had to understand the broader aspects of what being pope was," Bemporad said.

So, let's summarize so far:

• Benedict doesn't realize he is pope. This is because Germans, especially German academics (as opposed to American academics), have a hard time comprehending that they were actually elected pope. Whether this is due to excessive stupidity or humility is not clear.

• Benedict doesn't have "street smarts," which is to say, I'm guessing, that he never was the editor of America magazine.

• He's not political enough, and is too "theologically oriented." And when it comes to the spiritual leadership of a billion Christians, that simply won't do.

• He's not John Paul II. And we know that everyone — and I mean everyone — loved everything that John Paul II ever said or did. I dare you to find proof to the contrary.

• He's too Christian in his thinking. Again, this won't make the cut when it comes to being pope. A pope today really must be a pope of all people; he must be a Hindu pope, a Muslim pope, a Jewish pope, an atheist pope.

• He's not an expert on the history of religions. This, again, from the chairman of the "theology" department at Georgetown. Take it or leave it.

• His work as head of the CDF was so narrow, he's having difficulty understanding what it means to be pope. As for the fact that he has been a priest for over fifty years, was a theological expert at Vatican II, one of the greatest Catholic (nay, Christian) theologians of the 20th century, an archbishop, and a high-ranking Vatican leader, and one of John Paul II's trusted advisors. Well, that's nice, but he's going to have to stop focusing on Christian theology and ideas. Who does he think he is, the pope?!

Finally, the truth does start to come out toward the end of the article:

There have been other missteps in his past, Coppa said. As prefect, the future pope "had some explaining to do" after publication of the declaration Dominus Iesus, which argued that the path to salvation was through Jesus Christ.

"When you're dealing in ecumenical dialogue, you try to focus on the points you have in common rather than how you differ from each other," Coppa said.

Ah ha! So perhaps, just perhaps, the problem is that some of the Catholic experts interviewed by the Sun have a problem with Benedict being, well, too Catholic and too hung up on the whole Jesus is Lord thing.

First, dialogue with Muslims is not "ecumenical dialogue," which is limited to dialogue among Christians; it is more properly known as interreligious dialogue. Secondly, Coppa's understanding of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue is faulty. Consider the words of the Holy Father:

"First, they are silent about Christ: the kingdom of which they speak is "theocentrically" based, since, according to them, Christ cannot be understood by those who lack Christian faith, whereas different peoples, cultures and religions are capable of finding common ground in the one divine reality, by whatever name it is called.

"For the same reason they put great stress on the mystery of creation, which is reflected in the diversity of cultures and beliefs, but they keep silent about the mystery of redemption.

"Furthermore, the kingdom, as they understand it, ends up either leaving very little room for the Church or undervaluing the Church in reaction to a presumed "ecclesiocentrism" of the past, and because they consider the Church herself only a sign, for that matter a sign not without ambiguity."

That, by the way, was the late Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, from his encyclical Redemptoris Missio. Another helpful quote from the same document:

"Those engaged in this dialogue must be consistent with their own religious traditions and convictions, and be open to understanding those of the other party without pretense or close-mindedness, but with truth, humility and frankness, knowing that dialogue can enrich each side.

"There must be no abandonment of principles nor false irenicism, but instead a witness given and received for mutual advancement on the road of religious inquiry and experience, and at the same time for the elimination of prejudice, intolerance and misunderstandings."

"Truth, humility, and frankness." To me, that summarizes very well the work of Benedict XVI. It is others who seem to be practicing the "abandonment of principles" and "false irenicism".

Finally, it is only right to end on a positive note, provided by a somewhat (to my mind) surprising, but welcome, source:

Cardinal William H. Keeler of Baltimore, a member of an interreligious committee of the United States Conference of Bishops who is known for his outreach to the Jewish community, wrote yesterday in response to some of the criticism that "it should be clear that rather than being a critical analysis of Islam, [Pope Benedict's] address invites us all to reject violence as a way of solving problems. ... For the discerning reader, Pope Benedict offers his plea for reconciliation and peace in terms both scholarly and persuasive."

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/09/2006 21.53]

Bush defends beleaguered pope
amid Islam uproar


WASHINGTON, Sept. 20. 2006(AFP) - US President George W. Bush defended Pope Benedict XVI's attempts to explain recent remarks about Islam that were deemed deeply insulting by many Muslims around the world.

"I was appreciative of the fact that he tried to clarify what he meant," the US president said in a television interview with CNN.

"This is a struggle not between religions -- and that's what people have got to understand," he said.

"It's a struggle between people who use religion to kill -- and those of us who are for peace," Bush said, noting that at times the "issue gets muddied up" and "confuses people."

"People say it's a struggle of civilizations. I strongly disagree with that. I think this is a struggle for civilization," the US president continued.

"And, to the sense the pope clarified the issue, I think it helps those of us who are trying to make it clear to the Muslim world in particular -- we're not fighting Islam," he said.

"We're protecting ourselves, and trying to help you (the interviewer) protect yourself against people who kill in the name of religion to achieve a political objective."

Out off topic but has Muhammad el-Qaddafi. really said that? The Col. Qaddafii's eldest son? :
Oh dear the world's really mad!
And Teresa I've just posted an article in the "Benedicto XVI - notocias y articulos" ( EL Papa que no tiene que le lean los dircusos") if you want to have a mixing reaction of laughs and tears I highly recomend it!

[Modificato da @Nessuna@ 21/09/2006 3.21]

...because he is BENEDICT THE BELOVED.


Interacting with the crowd at St. Peter's Square yesterday, 9/20.

Now, tell me, what other world figure - given all the death threats that have been directed at him
this past week - would dare to come out among 40,000 people this way, out in the open for at least
an hour?

According to Avvenire, the Pontifical Household only issued 20000 tickets for the audience but
twice that number came yesterday - and we must all applaud them as well for not having been intimidated.

IF WE ARE TO JUDGE BY THE FACT THAT THE YAHOO PAGE ON 'PAPACY AND THE VATICAN' HAS NOT BEEN UPDATED
SINCE 7:20 PM LAST NIGHT, EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME, ARE WE TO CONCLUDE THAT THE FUROR HAS DIED DOWN?
OR IS DYING DOWN AT LEAST?

ANDIAMO AVANTI, LET'S MOVE ON!

(THANKS TO RATZIGIRL, as always, for finding the photos!)
--------------------------------------------------------------
OK - There may not have been anything new by way of news on the Yahoo 'Papacy and the Vatican' page,
but look at what they currently lead off in Opinions and Editorials .

It's opportunistic Pope-bashing time in the Western mainstream media! {As in "Oh boy, when will we ever
have another chance to tell off the pope! Let's go to it!"]

Now everyone is more Pope (not popish) than the Pope and either lecturing him or berating him, from the
titles alone -

The Pope's quandary at Globe and Mail (Canada) - Wed, Sep 20, 2006

The pope's damaging words at Baltimore Sun - Wed, Sep 20, 2006

The Pope should know better than to endorse the idea of a war of faiths at The Guardian (UK).
Wed, Sep 20, 2006 [DID HE DO THAT?]

The Pope's Act of Contrition at The New York Times - Wed, Sep 20, 2006 [DID HE DO THAT?]

Don't try to explain - it only makes it worse at The London Times - Wed, Sep 20, 2006 [DID HE DO THAT?]

The only exception was this - because it was the George Weigel commentary:

The Pope Was Right at The Los Angeles Times (reg. req'd) - Wed, Sep 20, 2006

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TO NESSUNA - I looked. With that particular piece, it ws all practically - not tears - but just lots
of annoyance! I did see a number of other interesting raction and commentary but I can't keep up with
translations as it is. I was behind on the Bavarian trip wrap-ups and then this came up...

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/09/2006 18.00]

Parliamentarians Get Copy of Pope's Speech


STRASBOURG, France, SEPT. 20, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The vice president of the European Parliament has sent 732 Euro-deputies the text of Benedict XVI's address at the University of Regensburg.

In a statement, Mario Mauro said that with today's initiative, it is hoped that "future manipulations will be avoided and that the European Parliament will assume a clear position in favor of freedom of speech."

The Holy Father's address Sept. 12 prompted widespread criticism in the Muslim world.

"In his address," Mauro noted, "the Pope did no more than invite to dialogue, an address that evidently has been misunderstood and manipulated by a part of the Muslim world and part of the media, which have not understood the authentic thought of the Pope."

Why is it that an online Italian news service can report something like this ahead of an American news agency?
Josie in the main forum shares an item reported on ravennainforma.it about Bill Clinton commenting on the Pope.

I don't have time to translate the whole thing, but the gist is that:

Clinton was on Larry King last night and he was asked about his reaction to all that's happened.

He started by praising the Pope for having clarified things up himself but then went on to say - and I will have to re-translate the quotes from him translated to Italian:

"I think we ought to give credit to the Pope when he says that he regrets his words were misinterpreted. I think that he was, however, really trying to say [in the Regensburg lecture] what many serious people think - namely, that the religious aspect of Islam has always had a political and military component.

"But I also think it was an unfortunate episode, as he admitted, because at this time there are a gret number of moderates, religious Muslim moderates, like those who are with King Abdullah of Jordan, who affirm that Islam is not a bloodthirsty religion and that Islam does not tolerate terrosim nor the murder of innocents.

"And so, we make the task of the moderates more dificult, with things like the Danish cartoons or the words the Pope said. He has apologized [I am surmising that is the term he used, because it is translated in Italian as 'si e excusato', as in 'asked to be excused'] and I think we should move forward."

He repeated the above thought in concluding:

"...But everytime one of us - especially someone as illustrious as the Pope - makes statements of this sort, we make the task of Muslim moderates more difficult. The extremists ask Muslim youths to strap bombs on themselves or carry liquid explosives on airlines or commit assassinations in the name of God, but they are really asking them to carry out a political action."

--------------------------------------------------------------
I need not comment. The statements speak for themselves - and for the former President!

EU should take Pope threat very seriously-EU official

21 Sep 2006 13:07:29 GMT
Source: Reuters

TAMPERE, Finland, Sept 21 (Reuters) - European Union countries should take "very seriously" the threat to Pope Benedict after his comments on Islam sparked outrage in the Muslim world, the EU's top security official said on Thursday.

"(It) is not only a threat to Rome and to Italian territory, it is a threat against humanity, not only Christianity, for which the symbolic person is the Pope," said Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini.

He was speaking after addressing European interior and justice ministers meeting in Finland. He did not specify the nature of the threat.

Muslims worldwide have been angered by remarks the Pope made in a lecture last week which they say portrayed Islam as a religion tainted by violence and irrationality.

Benedict has said he is deeply sorry Muslims have been offended by his use of a mediaeval quotation on Islam and holy war, but has stopped short of retracting his comments.

Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, warned Benedict not to visit Turkey, saying his life would be in danger, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

Frattini told a news briefing Europe should stand united in defending the Pope's message of tolerance.

"I cannot accept ... misinterpreting voluntarily the speech of the Pope by reacting with violence, by attacking churches round the world."

Benefan just posted this commentary in REFLECTIONS ON ISLAM, and I am feeding off it by re-posting it here, because it goes against the grain of most commentators I have seen so far (and ties in with what I said from the very beginning that the Pope obviously wants to start any dialog not on the basis of hypocritical platitudes, but on reasoned fact, reasoned ideas, reasoned faith]. In other words, time to call a sword a sword!

It is also an answer for those who have the attitude described by one of our German members as - "Most Europeans treat Muslims as if they were crazy children and one mustn't do anything to provoke them!" That,I believe, is in effect, the attitude of Mr. Clinton and all those who have been cowering before the threats - actual or perceived, present and future - of radical -Islam, instead of standing up to it.

This piece is as much a tribute to Benedict as it is an analysis of his premises. Mr. Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (I believe it is considered an 'conservative' think tank).

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

The Pope's Divisions
Benedict XVI promotes "interfaith" dialogue.
Muslims and Christians need it.
BY REUEL MARC GERECHT
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Wall Street Journal Opinion

Although many Muslims have apparently found Pope Benedict XVI's recent oration at the University of Regensburg deeply offensive, it is a welcome change from the pabulum that passes for "interfaith" dialogue.

Since 9/11, his lecture is one of the few by a major Western figure to highlight the spiritual and cultural troubles that beset the Muslim world .

Think of the awfulness that we've observed in the last years: the suicide terrorism in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, but especially the holy-warrior carnage in Iraq, where Sunni diehard believers have tirelessly slaughtered Shiite women and children.

Then think of the tepid, not always condemnatory, discussions these atrocities have provoked among devout, especially fundamentalist, Muslims. We should have seen many more Westerners and Muslims posing painful questions about the well-being of Islamic culture and faith.

With the exception of President Bush's remarks about "Islamofascism," which provoked dyspeptic reactions inside the U.S. government and out, the administration has generally avoided using powerful language connecting Islam to terrorism.

Let us be frank: There is absolutely nothing in the pope's speech that isn't appropriate or pertinent to a civilized discussion of revealed religions and ethics.

Even if one is not a believer in any revealed faith, or has some memory of the conflict, daily cruelty and forced conversion meted out by representatives of Rome's bishops, or has some skepticism about the church's commitment to defending the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment, one can be thankful that the pope sees Christianity as a vehicle of peace and tries to explain why he thinks this is so.

And by extension why Islam is so often today the loudly proclaimed faith of men who define their relationship to God through violence. Joseph Ratzinger's explanation, as befits a former professor of theology and philosophy, is an abstract one, but it is in the broadest sense undeniably true.

Popes ought to help clarify - not camouflage - the great troubling issues, as Shiite Islam's most senior ayatollahs try to illuminate the most perplexing questions that confront their followers and Muslims in general.

The odds are good that few of the pope's most vociferous Muslim critics read his highly philosophical disquisition, which affirms a position on a needed harmony between reason and faith that many of Islam's great jurists and philosophers would quickly recognize.

Benedict is trying to tackle many of the very same subjects that Iran's former president, Mohammad Khatami, approached in his book, "From the City World to the World City" - but with considerably more erudition and tact.

Mr. Khatami's language, thought and historiography are often an intellectual mess and egregiously insulting to Christians, Jews and, most of all, Western atheists and agnostics. Yet Mr. Khatami is esteemed by many of those who scold the pope.

Is the pope wrong to imply - in a rather roundabout way - that there is today something amiss inside Islam, as a community of believers sharing one faith and a long, common cultural tradition?

There probably isn't a single liberal editor at a major American or European paper who doesn't think that there is something a little dysfunctional - a disposition that tolerates, if not encourages and admires, violence as expression of religious outrage - among young Muslim males from Northern Europe to Indonesia.

We might not be able to put our finger precisely on it - the problems of a radicalized British Muslim of Pakistani ancestry are not the same as a Sunni Iraqi suicide bomber who blows up Jordanian and Palestinian women and children - but we know there is something wrong within Islam's global house, something that cannot be blamed exclusively on Western prejudice, bigotry, military actions or colonialism.

Many Muslims know it too, even if they are not inclined to say so publicly - it's often dangerous and always enormously difficult for believing and nonbelieving Muslims to aggressively critique their own when they know non-Muslims are listening.

Self-described Muslim intellectuals (often meaning the traditionally devout, clerics) really have a hard time engaging in self-criticism that fortifies non-Muslim critiques of Islamic society. The notion of "us" and "them" is very powerful in Islam, even though Muslims have often aligned themselves with infidels against their religious brethren.

The truly hard-core, radical Muslims of the West - the most frightful of the jihadists - have much more in common temperamentally and culturally with militant European left-wingers than they do with the devout farther east-, yet they ferociously separate the world into two camps like the most primitive Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia.

And self-confidence is a huge problem. Militarily triumphant in the past, traditional Muslims had an easier time being tolerant toward the minorities in their midst; they certainly were unperturbed by the theological arguments and invective put forth by practitioners of a superseded faith.

As many believing Muslims have become less self-confident - and the world around them has become ever more incongruent with the imagined, pure world of early Islam, when the faithful were unceasingly victorious because they were more perfect in their submission to God's will - they have become more acutely conscious and aggressive about their Muslim identity.

Clerics in London, Copenhagen, Cairo or Tehran dictating terms about the appropriate comportment of non-Muslims toward believers has naturally followed.

Pope Benedict nailed two facts about Islam that are contributing factors to the faith's very rough entry into modernity. The prophet Muhammad, the model for all Muslims, established the faith through war and conquest. His immediate successors, the Rightly Guided Caliphs, whom traditional and radical Muslims cherish, reinforced Islam's identity as a victorious faith through the rapid creation of a world empire.

Christianity was also at times spread by "the sword," and its use of that sword against nonbelievers and heretics was more savage than any Muslim imperialist's. But Christianity was not born to power. Jesus is not a conqueror.

The doctrine of the "two swords" always existed in Christian lands - the division of the world between church and state - and created enormous tension. It helped produce Western civic society.

And the image of God in Islam, which the pope underscores by talking about the Muslim philosopher Ibn Hazm, is a cleaner expression of unlimited, almighty Will than it is in Christianity.

Islam is akin to biblical Judaism in accentuating the unnuanced, transcendent awe of God. When radical Muslims take a hold of this divine fearsomeness, it can untether itself quickly from "conventional" morality, thereby allowing young men to believe that the slaughter of women and children isn't an abomination. In that sense, Muslim jihadism, like fascism, rewrites our ethical DNA, turning sin into virtue.

The pope doesn't tell us how we should proceed to counter the defects he sees in Islam. He should, since that would begin a real, painful but meaningful dialogue, which will surely cut both ways between the West and Islam.

But what is most disturbing in the Western reaction to the pope's speech - and one sees the same reaction among those who are uncomfortable with President Bush's use of the term "Islamofascism" - is the often well-intentioned refusal to talk openly about the other side.

No one wants to offend, so we assume a public position of liberal tolerance, hoping that good-willed, nonconfrontational dialogue, which criticizes "our" possibly offensive behavior while downplaying "theirs," will somehow lead to a more peaceful, ecumenical world.

We won't talk about the history of jihad in Islam. We would rather emphasize that jihad can mean an internal moral struggle for believers, even though the most progressive, revisionist Muslim (unless he has been completely secularized in the West) knows perfectly well that when Muslims hear the word "jihad," they proudly remember holy warriors, from the prophet Muhammad forward.

We won't probe too deeply, and certainly not critically, into how the Quran and the prophet's traditions, as well as classical Islamic history, have given all believing Muslims certain common sentiments, passions and reflexes.

We don't even talk about how the post-Christian West's great causes - nationalism, socialism, communism and fascism--entered Islam's bloodstream and altered Muslim ethics, often catastrophically.

Many in the West, on both right and left, prefer to see Osama bin Laden's terrorism as a violent reaction to Western, particularly American, behavior. It is thus something that could be avoided. (Israel usually enters the discussion here.)

We shy away from the more existential arguments that suggest that bin Laden's popularity in Islamic lands is the product of an enormous religious and philosophical distemper that derives from the world being the reverse of what God had ordained: Muslims on top, non-Muslims down below.

But we need to talk and argue about these things. We need to stop treating Muslims like children, and viewing our public diplomacy with Islamic countries as popularity contests.

Given what's happened since 9/11, a dialogue of civilizations is certainly in order. To his credit, Benedict has at least tried to approach the invidious issues that will define any helpful discussion.

For 200 years, the West has, for better and worse, helped create the intellectual framework within which all Muslims think. Muslim saints, like the Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, or Muslim devils, like Ayatollah Khomeini, have Western ideas profoundly within them.

If we withdraw from this civilizational debate, the decent men and women of the Middle East, most of whom are faithful Muslims, will have a very hard time defeating those who have brutalized and coarsened their culture and religion.

Westerners are doing Muslims an enormous disservice - a lethal bigotry of low expectations- by telling the pontiff to be more diplomatic.

This isn't how anti-Western Islamic theocrats, holy warriors and ordinary teachers in much of the Muslim world act. They're having a real, vibrant discussion. We should turn it into a debate.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/09/2006 3.25]

Not having the time just now to translate the Holy Father's address today to new bishops who have gathered in Rome, here is the VIS English-service account of the event.

The Pope's adresses to his fellow priests always strike me as very personal, as the fruit of his own 55 years as priest. This time, he is addressing bishops who, of course, have a wider responsibility, but remain priests nonetheless.
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BUILDING ECCLESIAL COMMUNION
IS EVERY BISHOP'S DUTY

VATICAN CITY, SEPT 21, 2006 (VIS) - This morning in the Apostolic Palace at Castelgandolfo, in a traditional encounter for this time of year, the Pope received a group of recently-appointed bishops who are participating in a meeting in Rome.

"Following Christ's example," the Pope told them, "each of you, in the daily nurture of your flock, must become 'all things to all men,' presenting the truth of faith, celebrating the sacraments of our sanctification and bearing witness to the Lord's charity. Welcome with an open heart those who knock at your door, advise them, console them and support them on the way of God."

"Demonstrate this care, in the first place, towards priests. Always act towards them as fathers and elder brothers who know how to listen, accept, comfort and, when necessary, also correct."

Benedict XVI then went on to remind the bishops that, by virtue of their power to govern, they are called "to judge and discipline the life of the people of God entrusted to their pastoral care, with laws, indications and suggestions, in accordance with what is laid down by the universal discipline of the Church."

"This right and duty of bishops is absolutely vital in order that the diocesan community may be internally united and progress in profound union of faith, of love and of discipline with the Bishop of Rome and with the entire Church. ... Building ecclesial communion must be your daily duty.

"Serenity in relationships, delicacy in dealings with others and simplicity of life are gifts that without doubt enrich the human personality of a bishop. ...

"The total giving of self, which the care of the Lord's flock requires, needs the support of an intense spiritual life nourished by assiduous individual and community prayer."

The Holy Father called on the bishops to ensure that their days be characterized by "a constant contact with God" :
"Living in intimate union with Christ will help you to strike that vital balance between inner meditation and the exertions required for the multiple occupations of life, avoiding the danger of excessive activism."

"Following Christ, the Pastor and Bishop of your souls," he concluded, "you will be encouraged to tend tirelessly towards sanctity, which is the fundamental aim of the life of all Christians."

Here's the New York Times story today on the Holy Father's general audience yesterday.

So, finally, mainstream media have deigned to 'cover' a Papal audience - I mean, to actually send
a reporter out to St. Peter's Square, observe the event, and talk to people present. But only
because they wanted to see if the Pope was going to talk about the quote!

If only Mr. Fisher had been interested in the audience as an event and in the audience as who they are,
instead of having focused only on 'Manuelgate" as some wag coined!

I hope he didn't waste the occasion to be able to talk to more people and observe the entire audience
itself, so he can write a separate story about "This is how a general audience with Benedict is".

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

Despite threats from angry Muslims, Benedict arrived in St. Peter’s Square Wednesday in his open vehicle.

FOR THE FOURTH TIME,
POPE CLARIFIES REMARKS
By IAN FISHER
Published: September 21, 2006

VATICAN CITY, Sept. 20 — Muslims angry about Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks on Islam are not the only ones talking about an apology.

“What should he apologize for?” asked Daniele Corbetta, 43, a psychologist in Rome. “There is freedom of speech, and what he said is objectively true.”

There was, without doubt, a low-grade seething where Mr. Corbetta stood, with thousands of pilgrims and tourists — probably few of them Muslims — in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday, as the pope again addressed a speech in which he had quoted a medieval emperor who called Islam “evil and inhuman.”

Three days after saying he was “very sorry” about the reaction to his remarks, delivered last week in Germany, Benedict sought to clarify them again.

“This quotation, unfortunately, was misunderstood,” he said, alluding to protests and attacks on churches by offended Muslims. “In no way did I wish to make my own, the words of the medieval emperor.”

“I wished to explain that not religion and violence, but religion and reason, go together,” he said. He added that he hoped he had made clear his “profound respect for world religions and for Muslims.”

But in the crowd here, and around much of the world that is not Muslim, there were voices like Mr. Corbetta’s, saying the pope did not need to keep explaining himself.

Perhaps, some of them said, he should have been more diplomatic in his choice of quotations in his speech, in Regensburg, Germany. But some Catholics and other non-Muslims say that Benedict has distinguished himself from other world leaders in these tense times by speaking about violence and Islam — and that the violent reaction to his remarks simply proved his point.

“It’s about time that somebody from the Western, Judeo-Christian religions finally came out stating that some of the teachings of Muhammad are used violently,” said Steven Gottesfeld, 40, an American Jew who attended the pope’s weekly audience with his wife, Patricia, a Roman Catholic.

For some Catholics, Benedict’s speech — for all its complexity and all that remains unclear about what he meant to say — was a turning point in this papacy and, perhaps, a historic moment of clarity. They say that just as his predecessor, John Paul II, played an important role in ending Communism, maybe Benedict’s role will be in speaking against militant Islam.

Some supporters of the pope say he absolutely should not issue the further apology that many Muslims are demanding. For them, his use of the words “very sorry” on Sunday already gave the impression of retreat.

“It just seemed to me that by apologizing and backing away a little, he was encouraging more of the violence and anger on the streets,” said Edward Morrissey, 43, who this week posted an anguished “open letter” to Benedict on his popular blog, Captain’s Quarters, urging the pope not to apologize further.

“It’s the nature of radicalism that if you give an inch, they will take a mile,” he said in a telephone interview from Minnesota, where he blogs and works as a call center manager. “That’s why I wanted to say: Don’t go any further.”

It is hard to know how Catholics and other non-Muslims split on the pope’s remarks. Certainly a large number in the church feel that he did, in fact, slip up in his speech.

“He should apologize,” said Jennifer Ferreris, 20, a theology student at Boston College who came to see the pope speak during a trip to Rome. “Too much emphasis is placed on the fundamentalists of Islam, the militants, and not enough on the faith. We adore the same God. They have respect for the Virgin Mary.”

Even if the pope suggested something that some believe is true — about a link between violence and Islam, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks — critics say it is not necessarily the pope’s job to say so. It could, they say, undermine his authority as a figure above conflict, or even feed a hatred against Muslims (that) is contrary to Christianity.

“I lost a little respect for him,” Ms. Ferreris added. “Inadvertent as it might have been, he’s the head of our church. He should be the most tolerant.”

If security for the weekly general audience, which is open to everyone, was tighter than usual, in response to death threats on militant Islamic Web sites, it was hard to see. The pope arrived at the canopy in front of St. Peter’s on the perfect early autumn day, as usual, in a “popemobile” not encased in bulletproof glass.

Anger in the Muslim world appears to be waning. On Tuesday, even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who has made extreme statements about numerous subjects, expressed “respect” for the pope and approval that he had “modified” his remarks.

Still, the Vatican seemed eager to reduce tensions. Benedict’s remarks on Wednesday were the fourth time the Vatican had tried to clarify what he said — including the rare papal expression of personal regret on Sunday.

But whether his words constitute an apology is one of the most contentious questions, no less among some Catholics than among Muslims.

“The pope expressed regret for the reactions but did not retract one iota of what he said, for the simple reason that he has no intention or need of doing so,” said the Rev. Thomas Berg, executive director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person, outside New York. “What he said at Regensburg was very carefully calculated, and the message still stands. He was challenging the Islamic world to take a seat at the table of reasoned religion.”

For some of the pope’s more conservative supporters, his original remarks were welcome as an assertion of his generally tougher approach to Islam than his predecessor’s. For them, the speech hinted at the sort of honest talk that could produce results, rather than mere talk about religious freedom and “reciprocity,” the idea that Christians should enjoy the same freedoms in Muslim countries as Muslims do in Christian ones.

Rocco Buttiglione, the former Italian culture minister and a conservative Catholic intellectual who knows the pope personally, said the speech was an example of Benedict’s belief that dialogue with other faiths begins with honesty, about oneself and the other. He noted that that pope’s speech largely criticized the West.

“In the beginning it is difficult,” he said. “If you are a friend to a person and you want to talk the truth with him, the first reaction is likely to be a bad reaction. But with time, he will understand.”

But the issue is muddied by the fact that the pope and the Vatican appear to be saying that he was making no specific point about Islam, that the speech was a general condemnation of violence in the name of religion. [Of course, they have to say that. You expect the Church to rub salt into the wound?]

So uncertainly lingers: about whether he said anything about Islam, whether he in fact apologized or whether he was completely straightforward, either in his original remarks or in his subsequent clarifications.

But more broadly, for Mr. Buttiglione and other supporters, it is an emerging example of how this new pope works when he feels strongly about something, even if it causes controversy.

“I think this is just the beginning,” he said. “I am sure Benedict XVI has many surprises in store. He is not afraid.”

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At any rate, Mr. Fisher does his best to report a balanced story. His biases may show (for instance, he gets two 'anti' man-on-the-street statements to one 'pro')....

But none quite so glaring as his editors' biases in:
1) the choice of picture they used - instead of showing the Pope in the press of the crowd as he generally is, they show him surrounded by his security men before they have fanned out to their duty positions with respect to the Popemobile; and

2) the headline: "Pope explains himself for the fourth time" -it may be almost factual (the first 'explanation" was by Fr. Lombardi, the second by Cardinal Bertone, and then the Pope himself on Sunday and yesterday), but any supporter of the Pope will immediately feel the barb there! If they were friendlier to the Pope, the headline could have read "Pope defies threats, addresses 40,000 in the open'.

I probably should be thankful that after complaining yesterday that not one of the stories had made this point, finally someone does make it, even if it's a secondary aspect.

Now the choice of picture to use is one of the subtlest but most effective ways of pushing your bias on a story. Why would they choose a picture showing a dozen black-clad security men around the Pope instead of pictures like these:





Because they don't want to advertise to their readers, who have generally no idea of what's taking place in the Vatican, that this Pope is actually so popular he gets mobbed like - I was going to say, a rockstar, but no, let me say instead - mobbed like John Paul II might have been.

Oh no, to illustrate that would go against the image they want to show about this Pope - that he is remote, he is cold, he is stern, he can't relate to the masses, sooooooo unlike John Paul! And especially now - when they have been taking to scolding him and lecturing him on what he should and should not do? Won't do at all!

And have we ever seen the MSM use a picture of the Pope like this? In our dreams perhaps!


They could have used something like this (also from yesterday's audience) even if they captioned it something sardonic like "What's he happy about?" They would never report him preaching joy, for instance, because that sounds even more saccharine and un-'newslike' than preaching love (after all, everyone's preaching love, including the 60s generation who had an 'A-sissy' idea of love, even as they vandalized universities and spewed blasphemies at timid theologians!)

The MSM always like to show the Pope like the mental image one used to have when one hears the word Pope - ascetic like Pius XII or stern like Paul VI.

The media couldn't very well bash Blessed John XXIII because he was like everyone's Grandpa, even if to the media and the way they reported on him, he was simply 'the Council' - a historic event. But they gave short shrift to Paul VI, even if he bore the brunt of implementing Vatican-II.

Then along came JPII, who was a phenomenon. But they don't believe phenomena come in succession, so they ruled out from the start that anyone who succeeded JPII would ever amount to very much, in every way, compared to his predecessor.

And if the evidence so far shows otherwise, why, they'll just shut their eyes and ears, and pretend there is nothing unusual going on, nothing to get excited about with Benedict. Unless he gives them an occasion like this when they can all vent their biases in the guise of commenting on the news.

And one last word. Why couldn't Mr. Fisher have mentioned that the crowd was over 40,000 - twice the number expected for this time of year? Noooooo, because once again, it would redound to Benedict's favor. How many people outside us Benaddicts and other Vatican watchers know about Benedict's crowds? Very few.

Don't forget: they don't hesitate to use numbers if it suits their purpose. Like saying over and over about the Munich Mass that John Paul drew 600,000 and Benedict could not even get half of that! Forgetting that 1980 was the first visit ever by a Pope to Germany since God-knows-when, and he only went to one major city, I believe. Forgetting further that the man who organized the Papal welcome and the program in Munich in 1980 was an Archbishop called Joseph Ratzinger.

So let us echo Mr. Buttiglione and hope the media start giving Benedict XVI his due:
“I think this is just the beginning. I am sure Benedict XVI has many surprises in store. He is not afraid.”

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/09/2006 4.12]

I was surprised, AP actually used this photograph yesterday with one of their articles:
Pope expresses 'deep respect' for Islam.

The caption is:
Pope Benedict XVI kisses a child during the weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square...

[Modificato da Music of Lorien 22/09/2006 0.09]

Thanks, Music - and good for AP! Their photographers take the pictures and offer them to their news clients, but it's still the news clients' choice which picture to use, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, what is he so happy about?

Thanks to Paparaxvi for finding this.

Sites in support of the Pope are sprouting up in Italy. One of them called 'io sto con il papa' (I am with the Pope)
has this striking logo/decal which says, "I am with the Pope....even at the cost of the Cross' - the sense,
of course, is to be willing to suffer for it if one has to.

img80.imageshack.us/img80/8281/iostoconilpapanv6.jpg

One called 'con il papa sensa se e senza ma' (With the Pope - without ifs or buts)
www.conilpapa.net/
is running an electronic sign-in page for supporters, sympathizers, admirers and ... all Benaddicts, of course
(if they but knew.!)

Not to mention our own initiative here at PRF to send Papa an e-mail daily to let him know we care - and how!
benedictxvi@vatican.va

If you find any similar 'expressions of support' AND IMAGES, please post them here.

Of course you have seen how some of our members have converted their signature blocks to a support motif.

MaryJos created this one and shares it with Wulfrune.


Ellen's is more unconventional but says it all:

I SUPPORT POPE BENEDICT XVI 100%
*"*~* Magna est veritas, et prevalebit *~*"*

(Sorry, Ellen, I can't copy the bottom part of the design as it appears!)

So if you are one of those handy with computer graphics, by all means, share your creations with us.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/09/2006 17.54]