Один день, одна газета, две разнополярные статьи:
Pope Benedict reveals his intolerance
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Pope Benedict reveals his intolerance
The new Pope isn't genuinely sorry about his comments on Muslims, only sorry about 'the reactions in some countries to them.'
By Gwynne Dyer
(Sep 23, 2006)
On a scale of one to 10, Pope Benedict's first attempt at an apology was barely a three. He said nothing himself, but Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone told the world on Saturday that, "The Holy Father is very sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers."
That didn't stop the protests that have been building in the Muslim world since the Pope gave the speech Sept. 12 to an academic audience in Germany, so on Sunday he tried again. He said: "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."
That won't stop the protests either, because he really isn't sorry for what he said. He's sorry for "the reactions in some countries" to his remarks, but implicitly stands by what he said in Regensburg.
So is the new Pope really anti-Muslim?
After the 9/11 attacks, the former Cardinal Ratzinger told Vatican Radio, "it is important not to attribute simplistically what happened to Islam," but then he added that "the history of Islam also contains a tendency to violence." True enough, but Christianity has its own history of violence: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the religious wars that devastated Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and several other detours from tolerance.
Just before he became Pope last year, Benedict declared Turkey should not be allowed into the European Union because its Islamic culture is incompatible with the Christian culture of Europe. But the real case for the prosecution rests on his invitation to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci to visit him at the papal summer home last September.
It certainly wasn't a religious visit, since Fallaci (who died last week) was an atheist and her fame as a war correspondent and interviewer was decades behind her. But she carved out a second career as the most extreme anti-Muslim writer in Europe, producing two best-selling books since 2002 that vilified Muslims as dirty sub-humans who multiply "like rats," and portrayed Islam as an irrational religion that breeds hatred.
The title of her second to last book, the one that presumably inspired the Pope's invitation, was The Force of Reason. Its core argument was that the West is rational and reasonable and Muslims aren't. And there was Benedict in Germany last week, saying exactly the same thing.
What a coincidence. In his speech, Benedict quoted from the 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who told a Persian visitor that, "spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable...God is not pleased by blood." So far, so good, but then Manuel asked his Muslim visitor: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."Benedict quoted that, too, without any further comment.
He ended his speech by quoting the emperor again, "'not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God', said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God. ... It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures." In other words, you Muslims are unreasonable people, but if you do it our way, then we'll finally get somewhere. So now we know the new Pope is a parochial and intolerant man, but anybody who paid attention to Cardinal Ratzinger's previous career knew that already. "God's Rottweiler" was the late Pope John Paul's favourite hit man, reducing Karol Wojtyla's critics in the Catholic hierarchy to sullen silence or driving them out of the church altogether.
Pakistan's parliament has unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Pope's speech. Seven Christian churches in the occupied Palestinian territories have been bombed, set ablaze or shot at. A Catholic nun was shot to death in Somalia. Most Muslims are well aware violence is an inappropriate way to protest against accusations that Islam is a violent faith, but why do they even care what the Pope says? The real reason for the uproar is that so many Muslims feel under attack by the West. Two Muslim countries have been invaded by the U.S. and its allies since 9/11 and another, Lebanon, has been bombed to ruins.
At least 20 times as many Muslims have died in these wars as the number of Americans who died in the 9/11 attacks and almost none of them had anything to do with that atrocity. So the suspicion grows among Muslims that all this is not really about 9/11 at all and almost any minor insult to Islam from the West is enough to trigger outrage from Morocco to Indonesia.
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The Pope on Islam
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The Pope on Islam
The pontiff has long held that fundamental differences separate the Muslim and Christian worlds
By Dominic Lawson
(Sep 23, 2006)
There are only two great religions which seek to convert the entire world.
One is Christianity, the other is Islam.
Perhaps Islam is now alone in having the vital energy to dedicate itself to such an improbable mission. Perhaps Christianity is fully occupied with defending its existing spiritual territories. Even so, one thing is clear. There is a fundamental doctrinal incompatibility between the two faiths and Pope Benedict is serving the truth by pointing it out.
Despite his previous role as the Vatican's ideologist-in-chief, Josef Ratzinger did not approve of the extent of Pope John Paul's dialogue with Islam.
The German cardinal had come to believe that the absolutism of Islam made any meaningful theological discussion impossible. All that remained was at best insipid statements of "shared values" and at worst political obfuscation which covered up the oppression of Christians in Muslim lands.
It was not accidental that one of Pope Benedict's first acts was to remove Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald from the presidency of the Pontifical Council for Interfaith Dialogue. He then radically reduced the role of that council.
The ecumenists are absolutely right when they point out that Islam and the Catholic Church -- and, obviously, the Jews -- worship the God of Abraham. The three religions have many prophets in common and, as a result, have shared values that have shaped societies over the past two millennia. But Christianity exists only on the basis that Jesus Christ is the son of God. Islam exists only on the basis that God dictated his laws to Mohamed and that the Koran contains the actual words of God.
Christians do not believe the Koran is the unintermediated word of God. They can, therefore, only think Mohamed was deluded, if not a liar. Of course, the vast majority of Christians are far too polite or possibly too cowardly to say such a thing.
Muslims, too, are surprisingly reluctant to express the logic of their faith to Christians. They rarely refer to Jesus without adding the venerating phrase, "Peace be upon him."
And yet, if you look at the Koran, there is no obfuscation: "Those who say 'The Lord of Mercy has begotten a son' preach a monstrous falsehood, at which the very heavens might crack, the earth break asunder and the mountains crumble to dust. That they should ascribe a son to the Merciful when it does not become the God of Mercy to beget one!"
Despite Pope Benedict's strictures about the lack of reason within Islam, I suspect it's the notion of the Trinity which rationalists find the most implausible aspect of Christianity. For all the respect which Muslims have, or say they have, for the figure of Jesus, it is a respect which could hardly console any thinking Christian.
If Jesus was not the Son of God then he, too, was deluded or a liar. And if he -- as opposed to He -- was either of those things, then the resurrection is also a lie and Christianity, as a faith rather than a philosophy, is utterly null and void.
Pope Benedict is better equipped than anyone to understand this point and like most intellectuals is deeply unwilling to evade an argument.
He is not a politician. So when newspaper editorials primly suggest, as one has, that "the Pope should display greater awareness of the sensitive political context into which remarks about other faiths are made," they entirely misunderstand what the man is about and what he is trying to do.
He really does want to express the battle of ideas. He really doesn't want deep ideological differences to be buried under well meaning political fudge. Josef Ratzinger can be -- has been -- criticized for some of his utterances, but one thing of which he can never be accused is a lack of clarity. I rather liked Tariq Ali's description of him as, "a razor-sharp reactionary."
He is also a man of cast iron consistency. While many commentators seem to have been taken aback by his recent disobliging reference to Islam, Ratzinger has for years made his concerns startlingly clear.
The most detailed exposition of his views appeared 10 years ago in a lengthy interview with Peter Seewald, published as part of a book called The Salt of the Earth.
The then cardinal declared in it that, "Islam simply does not have the separation of the political and religious spheres which Christianity had from the very beginning. The Koran ... insists that the whole order of life be Islamic. Sharia can expect such freedom as our (European) constitutions give, but it can't be its final goal to say: Yes, now we have rights just like the Catholics and Protestants. That would not achieve a status consistent with its inner nature. It would be in alienation from itself...
"It is opposed to our modern idea of society. One must understand Islam is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society." These are devastating criticisms, which are as clear an exposition as have been made of the view that true Muslims cannot accept either the separation of powers or the freedom under the law which are the hallmarks of western civilization. To repeat, those remarks were made a decade ago, some time before the politicians of Europe began to panic about the assimilation of their Muslim immigrants.
One writer who took up Ratzinger's call was Oriana Fallaci, perhaps the most famous journalist in Italy, who died of cancer last week. By the time of her death Fallaci had become notorious for her fulminations against Islam.
She had declared, " Europe is no longer Europe, it is a province of Islam. It has more than 16 million Muslim immigrants and teems with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas and chadors. It lodges thousands of Islamic terrorists whom our governments don't know how to identify or control."
Fallaci also wrote: "I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger." The sentiment was reciprocated. Soon after becoming Pope, Ratzinger invited Fallaci to a rare private audience at Castel Gandolfo.
It is true that Islam is not alone in being run through by Ratzinger's rhetorical rapier. A few years ago, he appalled those seeking rapprochement between Anglicanism and the Catholic Church by declaring, "the nullity of Anglican ordinations is a truth to be held definitively."
As for Buddhism, Ratzinger said it proposed "the possibility of attaining true happiness without any concrete religious obligations -- a sort of spiritual auto-eroticism."
I suspect, however, it was not the Church of England or the Buddhists he was thinking of in his inaugural papal homily, when he said: "Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves."
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