| All hell broke loose last week following Pope Benedict XVI’s lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Pakistan’s parliament passed a resolution condemning the Pope’s remarks. Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya was equally critical, while in Turkey one politician likened the pontiff to Hitler and Mussolini. There were reports of the Pope being burned in effigy in India, and of attacks on churches in Gaza and the West Bank. On Sunday, an Italian nun was killed in Somalia.
The provocation for such anger and violence had been the Pope’s reference to an exchange of views between Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus and an unspecified "educated Persia," in the late 1300s. Early in the course of his 4,000-word address, Benedict quoted the Emperor’s assertion that, "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."
Admittedly, linking "evil," "inhuman" and "Mohammed" in a single sentence probably isn’t the wisest decision the Pope has ever made. But, as he swiftly went on to explain, he was simply trying to make the point that "violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.... To convince (i.e. convert) a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death."
But even this rather reasonable assertion was not the main argument of the Pope’s lecture. Rather, it was the starting point for a discussion of reason and religion, of the often conflicting claims of science and faith. "For Muslim teaching," Benedict observed, "God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality." By contrast, western Christianity had, from the start, been infused with the rationalist logic of Greek culture, with its emphasis on reason. What the Pope wanted to know, therefore, was whether "the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature (was) merely a Greek idea, or [was] it always and intrinsically true?"
A number of things, mostly obvious, need to be said about the Pope’s delivery. First, above all it was a complex and often nuanced academic discussion of a complex and often nuanced theological problem. Its meaning and intent cannot be reduced to — or extracted from — any individual sentence, no matter how incendiary it might appear at face value.
Second, Benedict’s allusion to Emperor Manuel’s opinion of Islam, however ill-judged it may have been, was just the point of departure for a much wider discussion of the relationship between faith and reason, and hardly (if at all) the purpose of his address. Critics of the Pope need to view his comments in the context that they were made.
Finally, it seems only fair to note that the Pope took pains to emphasize that he was quoting another’s point of view, one that was not his own. That said, he might have been a little more judicious, bearing in mind he was speaking just one day after the fifth anniversary of 9/11, a moment in which violence and Islam were likely to have been linked in many people’s minds. The Pope "simply goofed," commented the Globe and Mail last Saturday - probably a fair comment, if also a sly dig at the outworn notion of papal infallibility.
Still, as leader of the world’s 1.1 billion or so Catholics, you have to be a bit more careful about not only what you say, but how you might reasonably expect it to be received. Admission of this fact seems to have been swift, with the Vatican scrambling to clarify the Pope’s remarks late last week and to reaffirm his respect for Islam. "The Holy Father… sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful," a statement announced, "and should have been interpreted in a manner that in no way corresponds to his intentions."
The "could have sounded" construction is a bit lame, admittedly, as his comments clearly have offended many, regardless of his intent. Perhaps with that in mind, and aware that Muslims around the world were unsatisfied with this initial clarification, the Pope himself delivered a second apology last Sunday, though to what effect remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, back to Benedict’s speech itself. As the first new pope of the new millennium, he had already signalled his desire to re-open theological debate on the relationship between science and religion. "He probably believes there is not enough public discussion about this," noted one of the organizers of the Regensburg lecture, "so that’s why he wants to revive it."
In particular, Benedict has rekindled the evolution versus intelligent design debate. In As Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote in 1986 that, "We cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and breath of God… does not in fact explain how human persons came to be, but rather what they were." In short, science may well have advanced our understanding questions of how, but still fails to provide answers for why or to what purpose.
Last year, he went a step further and referred to the universe as an "intelligent project" in which "God’s love" could be seen in the "marvels of creation." In support of this viewpoint, Benedict cited St. Basil the Great, a 4th-century theologian, who had argued that, "some people, fooled by the atheism that they carry inside of them, imagine a universe free of direction and order, as if at the mercy of chance."
And so it was that, just before last week’s lecture, Pope Benedict convened a seminar of his former students to discuss the question of evolution. The conclusions of this closed-door meeting will be published later this year, but in the meantime it is likely that supporters of the so-called "intelligent design" theory of creation will be rubbing their hands in anticipation of a new ally in Rome.
Funny thing is, though, I don’t recall any scientists, Darwinists, or anyone else who accepts the proven tenets of evolution taking to the streets or burning the Pope in effigy in reaction to this news. Perhaps Pope Benedict was right about reason after all. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.