Only 18 months into his papacy and already Pope Benedict XVI has
stirred up unprecedented controversy. As the explanations and
apologies pour out of the Vatican - and thousands of Catholic
churches around the world - the questions about what exactly
this man intended by quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor's
insult of the Prophet Mohammed have only multiplied.
Some say this was a case of naivety, of a scholarly
theologian stumbling into the glare of a global media storm,
blinking with surprise at the outrage he had inadvertently
triggered. The learned man's thoughtful reasoning, say some, has
been misconstrued and distorted by troublemakers, and the
context ignored.
But such explanations are unconvincing. This is a man who has
been at the heart of one of the world's multinational
institutions for a very long time. He has been privy to how
pontifical messages get distorted and magnified by a global
media. Shy he may be, but no one has ever before accused this
pope of being a remote theologian sitting in an ivory tower. On
the contrary, he is a determined, shrewd operator whose track
record indicates a man who is not remotely afraid of
controversy. He has long been famous for his bruising, ruthless
condemnation of those he disagrees with. Senior Catholic
theologians such as the German Hans Kung are well familiar with
the sharpness of his judgments.
But in the 18 months since Benedict was elected, the wary
critics who have always feared this man were lulled into
believing that office might have softened his abrasive edges.
His encyclical on love won widespread acclaim and the
pronouncement on homosexuality being incompatible with the
priesthood (and its inference that homosexuals were to blame for
the child sex abuse problems in the church) were explained away
as an inheritance from Pope John Paul II's reign.
But while the Pope has tried to build a more appealing public
image, what has become increasingly clear is that this is a man
with little sympathy or imagination for other religious faiths.
Famously, the then Cardinal Ratzinger once referred to Buddhism
as a form of masturbation for the mind - a remark still repeated
among deeply offended Buddhists more than a decade after he said
it. Even his apology at the weekend managed to bring Jews into
the row.
In fact, Pope Benedict XVI's short papacy has marked a
significant departure from the previous pope's stance on
interreligious dialogue. John Paul II made some dramatic
gestures to rally world religious leaders, the most famous being
a gathering in Assisi of every world faith, even African
animists, to pray for world peace. He felt keenly the terrible
history of Catholic-Jewish relations, and having fought with the
Polish resistance to save Jews in the second world war, John
Paul II made unprecedented efforts to begin to heal centuries of
hostility and indifference on the part of the Catholic church to
Europe's Jews. John Paul II also addressed himself to the
ancient enmity between Muslims and Catholics; he apologised for
the Crusades and was the first Pope to visit a mosque during a
visit to Syria in 2001.
In contrast, Pope Benedict has managed to antagonise two
major world faiths within a few months. The current anger of
Muslims is comparable to the anger and disappointment felt by
Jews after his visit to Auschwitz in May. He gave a long address
at the site of the former concentration camp and failed to
mention anti-semitism, and offered no apology - whether on
behalf of his own country, Germany, or on behalf of the Catholic
Church. He acknowledged he was a "son of the German people" ...
"but not guilty on that account"; he then launched into a highly
controversial claim that a "ring of criminals" were responsible
for nazism and that the German people were as much their victims
as anyone else. This is an argument that has long been
discredited in Germany as utterly inadequate in explaining how
millions supported the Nazis. Given his own involvement in the
Hitler Youth movement as a boy, and his refusal to make a clean
breast of the Vatican's acquiescence in the horrors of Nazism by
opening its archives to historians, this was a shabby moment in
Catholic history. Not for this pope those dramatic,
epoch-defining gestures that made the last Pope such a
significant global figure.
Even worse, in his Auschwitz address, he managed to argue in
a long theological exposition that the real victims of the
Holocaust were God and Christianity. As one commentator put it,
he managed to claim that Jews were the "themselves bit players -
bystanders at their own extermination. The true victim was a
metaphysical one." This theological treatise bears the same
characteristics as last week's Regensburg lecture; put at its
most charitable, they are too clever by half. More plainly
speaking, they indicate a deep arrogance rooted in a blinkered
Catholic triumphalism which is utterly out of place in the 21st
century.
But if his visit to Auschwitz disappointed many and failed to
resolve outstanding resentments about the murky role of German
Catholicism, this latest incident seems even worse. Quoting
Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologos, he said: "Show me just
what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find
things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by
the sword the faith he preached." It was a gratuitous
reawakening of the most entrenched and self-serving of western
prejudices - that Muslims have a unique proclivity to violence,
a claim that has no basis in history or in current world events
(a fact that still eludes too many westerners). Even more
bewildering is the fact that his choice of quotation from Manuel
II Paleologos, the 14th-century Byzantine emperor, was so
insulting of the Prophet. Even the most cursory knowledge of
dialogue with Islam teaches - and as a Vatican Cardinal, Pope
Benedict XVI would have learned this long ago - that reverence
for the Prophet is a non-negotiable. What unites all Muslims is
a passionate devotion and commitment to protecting the honour of
Muhammad. Given the scale of the offence, the carefully worded
apology, actually, gives little ground; he recognises that
Muslims have been offended and that he was only quoting, but
there is no regret at using such an inappropriate comment or the
deep historic resonances it stirs up.
By an uncanny coincidence the legendary Italian journalist
Oriana Fallaci died last week. No one connected the two events,
but the Pope had already run into controversy in Italy by
inviting the rabid Islamophobe to a private audience just months
ago. This is the journalist who published a bestseller in 2001
which amounted to a diatribe of invective against Islam. This is
the woman who was only too happy to fling out comments such as
"Muslims breed like rats" and "the increasing presence of
Muslims in Italy and Europe is directly proportional to our loss
of freedom." At the time of her papal audience, Fallaci's
ranting against Islam had landed her in court and there was
outrage at the Pope's insensitive invitation. The Pope refused
to backtrack and insisted the meeting was purely "pastoral".
Put last week's lecture in Bavaria and the Fallaci audience
alongside his vocal opposition to Turkish membership of the EU,
and the picture isn't pretty. On one of the biggest and most
volatile issues of our day - the perceived clash between the
west and the Muslim world - the Pope seems to have abdicated his
papal role of arbitrator, and taken up the arms in a rerun of a
medieval fantasy.
An elderly Catholic nun has already been killed in Somalia,
perhaps in retaliation for the Pope's remarks; churches have
been attacked in the West Bank. How is this papal stupidity
going to play out in countries such as Nigeria, where the
tensions between Catholics and Muslims frequently flare into
riots and death? Or other countries such as Pakistan, where tiny
Catholic communities are already beleaguered? Or the Muslim
minorities in Catholic countries such as the Philippines - how
comfortable do they feel this week?
Two lines of thought emerge from this mess. The first is that
the Pope's personal authority has been irrevocably damaged; how
now could he ever present himself as a figure of global moral
authority and a peacemaker after this? At the weekend, a message
was read out from Cardinal Murphy O'Connor at all masses in
Catholic churches in England; he spoke of the regret at any
offence caused and urged good relations between Catholics and
Muslims. For a church that prides itself on taking centuries to
respond, this was unprecedented crisis management. It cannot but
damage the pope's authority with the faithful that such
emergency measures were necessary, and it compromises not just
this pope but the papal office itself. (This is a job, after
all, that is supposed to be divinely guided and at all times
beyond reproach: a claim that looks a bit threadbare after the
past few days.)
The second is a more disturbing possibility: namely, that the
Catholic church could be failing - yet again - to deal with the
challenge of modernity. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it
struggled to adapt to an increasingly educated and questioning
faithful; now, in the 21st century, it is in danger of failing
the great challenge of how we forge new ways of accommodating
difference in a crowded, mobile world. The Catholic church has
to make a dramatic break with its triumphalist, bigoted past if
it is to contribute in any constructive way to chart this new
course. John Paul II made some dramatic steps in this direction;
but the fear now is that Pope Benedict XVI has no intention of
following suit, and that he has another direction altogether in
mind.
More from Pope Benedict
On homosexuality
"Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is
not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward
an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be
seen as an objective disorder. Therefore special concern and
pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this
condition, lest they be led to believe that the living-out of
this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable
option. It is not."
On Buddhism
"Auto-erotic spirituality."
The ordination of women
On the excommunication of seven women who called themselves
priests: "... the penalty imposed is not only just, but also
necessary, in order to protect true doctrine, to safeguard the
communion and unity of the church, and to guide consciences of
the faithful."
On same-sex marriage
"Call[s] into question the family, in its natural two-parent
structure of mother and father, and make[s] homosexuality and
heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of
polymorphous sexuality."
On rock music
"[A] vehicle of anti-religion"; "the complete antithesis of the
Christian faith in the redemption."
On cloning
"[A] more dangerous threat than weapons of mass destruction."
