The Passion of the Pope

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A BRIGHT-LINES KIND OF GUY

In 1986, Pope John Paul convened a remarkable multifaith summit in the medieval Italian town of Assisi. Muslims and Sikhs, Zoroastrians and the Archbishop of Canterbury, among others, convened to celebrate their (distinct) spiritualities and pray for peace. It was a signature John Paul moment, but not everybody caught the vibe. "It was a disaster," sniffs an observer. "People were praying together, and nobody had any idea what they were praying to." The witness, whose view undoubtedly reflected that of his boss, was an aide to Cardinal Ratzinger.

Unlike John Paul, who had a big-tent approach, Ratzinger has always favored bright theological lines and correspondingly high walls between creeds he regards as unequally meritorious. His long-standing habit is to correct any aide who calls a religion other than Christianity or Judaism a "faith." Prior to his papacy, the culmination of this philosophy was his office's 1999 Vatican document Dominus Jesus, which described non-Catholics as being in a "gravely deficient situation" regarding salvation. The fact that this offended some of the deficient parties did not particularly bother him. Notes the same assistant: "To understand each other ... you have to talk about what divides." That approach includes Islam. In Ratzinger's 1996 interview book Salt of the Earth (with Peter Seewald), he noted that "we must recognize that Islam is not a uniform thing. No one can speak for [it] as a whole. There is a noble Islam, embodied, for example, by the King of Morocco, and there is also the extremist, terrorist Islam, which, again, one must not identify with Islam as a whole, which would do it an injustice." This sophisticated understanding, however, did not keep Ratzinger from slapping down a bishop who wanted to invite peaceable Muslims to a papal ceremony in Fatima, Portugal, or, in 2004, from objecting to Turkish E.U. entry on grounds that it has always been "in permanent contrast to Europe," a contrast his other writings made clear had much to do with religion.

Islam played a particular role—as both a threat and a model—in the drama that probably lies closest to Benedict's heart: the secularization of Christian Europe. In the same 1996 book, he wrote that "the Islamic soul reawakened" in reaction to the erosion of the West's moral stature during the 1960s. Ratzinger paraphrased that soul's new song: "We know who we are; our religion is holding its ground; you don't have one any longer. We have a moral message that has existed without interruption since the prophets, and we will tell the world how to live it, where the Christians certainly can't."

After Sept. 11, Ratzinger's attitude toward Islam seems to have hardened. According to Gibson, the Cardinals in the conclave that elected Ratzinger made it clear that they expected a tougher dialogue with the other faith. After the London subway bombings in July 2005, the new Pope responded to the question of whether Islam was a "religion of peace"—as George W. Bush, among others, has always stressed— by saying, "Certainly there are also elements that can favor peace." When he met with moderate German Muslims in the city of Cologne that August, Benedict delivered a fairly blunt warning that "those who instigate and plan these attacks evidently wish to poison our relations." In Rome, he removed Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, a relatively dovish Islam expert, as head of the Vatican's office on interreligious dialogue and replaced an ongoing study of Christian violence during the Crusades with one on Islamic violence today. And he has stepped up the Vatican's insistence on reciprocity—demanding the same rights for Christians in Muslim-majority countries that Muslims enjoy in the West.

All of this led observers to expect him to eventually make a major statement about Islam, although most assumed that it wouldn't stray too far from John Paul's fraternal tone. Nobody anticipated what happened in southern Germany.

THE POINT OF NO RETURN

On Sept. 12, 2006, the day after the world had marked the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Benedict threw himself into the maelstrom. The unlikely venue was his old teaching grounds, the University of Regensburg. His vehicle was a talk about reason as part of Christianity's very essence. His nominal target was his usual suspect, the secular West, which he said had committed the tragic error of discarding Christianity as reason-free. But this time he had an additional villain in his sights: Islam, which he said actually did undervalue rationality and which he strongly suggested was consequently more inclined to violence.

To show that Islam sees God as so transcendent that reason is extraneous, Benedict cited an 11th century Muslim sage named Ibn Hazm. To establish the connection between this position and violence, he quoted a 15th century Christian Byzantine Emperor (and head of the Byzantine, or Eastern, Church) named Manuel II Paleologus. Paleologus criticized Muslims for "spreading [their faith] by the sword," both because "God is not pleased by blood" and because true conversion depended on reason. "Show me just what the Muhammad brought that was new," Paleologus said, in a passage quoted by Benedict, "and there you will find things only evil and inhuman."

It remains unclear whether Benedict was deliberately trying to raise the temperature. Many analysts, especially in Rome, think he knew exactly what he was saying and regard the Islamic section of the 35-min. speech as a brave and eloquent warning of Islam's inherent violence and of a faithless West's inability to offer moral response. Yet Benedict's argument was slapdash and flawed. His sage, Ibn Hazm, turned out to have belonged to a school with no current adherents, and although reason's primacy is debated in Islam, it is very much part of the culture that developed algebra. Paleologus' forced-conversion accusation misrepresents the sweep of Muslim history, since more often than not, Islam has left religious groups in conquered territory intact, if hobbled. And assuming that a punctilious scholar like Benedict really wanted to engage on Islam and violence, why do it through the idiosyncratic lens of an embattled king in the 1400s who made his name partly for his efforts at drumming up enthusiasm for a new Crusade?

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