The speech that Pope Benedict XVI gave at his old
stomping grounds last week continues to reverberate in unexpected
ways, like the last note of a Bach fugue played by a ballpark
organist on loan from the nearest cathedral. I do not mean that the
reaction among radicalized Muslims comes as a surprise. By now even
the most jaded news consumers realize that protest signs are as
common in the Muslim world as shaving razors are in ours.
The Olympian stupidity of some commentators is also predictable
enough to sound almost comforting. These are people who explore the
limits of that old Forrest Gump line about life being like a box of
chocolates, except that with them, you always know what
you’re going to get. One wrote that the pope had asked us to distrust
reason, which is plainly and viciously — how to put it? — “bass
ackwards.” Another proved that research is not his strong suit by
calling the speech a “temporary lapse of
infallibility.” A third pundit filled radio time on San Diego’s Air
America affiliate complaining that the world has grown more divided
“because the pope can’t keep his mouth shut.”
None of those reactions is as puzzling as the cool response to
the pope’s language from some popular Catholic bloggers who don’t
usually line up with wire services like Agence France-Presse or
iconoclasts like Christopher Hitchens.
Recall that in a lecture on the necessity of reasonable faith
rooted in the revealed character of God, the pope quoted a medieval
Christian ruler whose capital city was besieged by followers of
Mohammed. That emperor asserted, with what the pope called
“startling brusqueness,” that the only novelties to which
Mohammedans could lay claim were negative, not least because they
saw nothing wrong with spreading their faith by the sword. One does
not have to agree with that Byzantine emperor to understand why he
might think that way. Christopher Orlet provided
readers of this publication with welcome historical context just
the other day. Moreover, as the Archbishop of Denver reminded his
flock last month, without jihad, there would have been no
crusade.
A SURPRISING NUMBER OF CATHOLICS think the pope should not have
quoted someone so blunt. They would have preferred a diplomatic
paraphrase. Mark Shea, for example, was grateful to Benedict XVI
for lamenting “de-Hellenization” in a public conversation about
faith and reason, and certain the pope had said nothing untrue.
Nevertheless, he was also sure that the pope’s choice of material
was needlessly reckless.
James Akin agreed with Shea, pointing to the same passage
as “inflammatory,” and suggesting in view of the upcoming papal
visit to Turkey that it might be a rhetorical gaffe serious enough
to get Benedict killed.
Sherry Weddell, the co-director of a program that trains lay
Catholics to be modern-day apostles, reminded me that the pope is
smart enough to have made his point about the evil of religious
violence without quoting obscure Byzantine emperors to do so.
Seconding that opinion, a law professor argued that by opening a
“frank conversation on the historical use of force by Muslims in
spreading their faith,” the pope had done the world a service “in
an imprudent way.”
It falls to the rest of us to decide whether the pope should be
taking friendly fire for what he said in televised remarks to that
university audience.
My answer is no. To assume that the pope was needlessly
provocative is to surrender in advance. Under the white hair and
behind the grandfatherly eyes, he’s still the man who once had a
bear on his coat of arms, and still the man once described by his
enemies as “God’s Rottweiler.” That the Rottweiler has since become
a “German Shepherd” is poetic justice, because although his older
brother worries about his heart, the ursine and canine imagery fit
Benedict’s intestinal fortitude.
Some critics see the recent murder of a Catholic nun at SOS Kindergarten
Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia as proof that part of the pope’s
lecture was irresponsible. It should give them pause that the order
of nuns to which Sister Leonella Sgorbati belonged does not fault
the pope’s lecture for her death. And it should give all of us
pause that Sister Sgorbati had a bodyguard, who was also shot and
killed.
How many nuns have you met who needed bodyguards? It’s safe —
and sad — to say that Sister Sgorbati recognized the hazards of
working in a Muslim country.
Moreover, as Daniel Johnson pointed out in a masterful column for
the New York Sun, Benedict is the first pope elected since
September 11, 2001. Johnson also noticed that “Benedict believes
passionately that people of faith in general, and Catholics in
particular, must either fight for their corner in the intellectual
arena or shut up shop.”
WHAT, THEN, SHOULD SUCH a man have done while fulfilling his
pastoral duties? To decry any link between violence and religion
without mentioning Islam is possible, but sooner or later, the
elephant in the room must be named, and the 79-year-old pope is
quick to do that sort of thing. In fact, if you look past the manic
energy unique to the younger man and the obvious limitations of any
metaphor, Benedict is to theology what the late Steve Irwin was to
biology. Both men are or were known for confidence, competence,
enthusiasm, and teaching ability. Both could have served honorably
as caretakers (Steve of the Australia Zoo received from his
parents, and Benedict of the pontificate he hadn’t wanted), but
each set about leaving a mark instead.
The thundering sermon that Benedict preached against relativism
just before being elected pope is well-known. Fewer people remember
how that sermon was of a piece with the way that then-Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger stunned Vatican bureaucrats by writing against “filth in the priesthood” in a
published meditation for Good Friday.
He has now posed a question that Amy Welborn ably summarizes as “a point of clarity for the Muslim
world,” namely “Can you explain how the expressions of Muslim law,
as lived out in your societies, are consistent with other teachings
of your own religion, not to speak of thinking about basic human
rights, which the rest of the world has arrived as via…you
know…centuries of…reasoned thinking?”
If the only response to that from Muslim authorities is that it
is rude even to ask such questions, then the reciprocal respect for
which Benedict works as a way to interfaith peace becomes harder to
maintain. And while it’s true that secular Western journalists
typically shift from “theology is hard” to “let’s you and him
fight,” it is also true that were it not for the hook of that the
provocative medieval quote in Benedict’s lecture, very few people
would still be reading or thinking about the important issues that
the pope raised.
