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Geller could not have chosen a more appropriate illustration of her title!
The Vatican submits to Islam:
Contrast 2006 with 2016!
By PAMELA GELLER
October 20, 2016
Pope Benedict spoke honestly about Islam. Now it has come to light that he was being undermined by a shadowy cabal that wanted to install Cardinal Bergoglio — the present Pope Francis — as Pope and “modernize” the Catholic Church. One thing they’ve certainly succeeded in doing is silencing within the Church all resistance to the global jihad that has victimized hundreds of thousands of Christians. The Church leadership is betraying its own people.
[She then proceeds to post the ff article, about which, however, I have a major objection regarding a blatant untruth about Benedict XVI.]
The Vatican submits to Islam (2006-2016)
by Giulio Meotti
Gatestone Institute
October 16, 2016
If 9/11 was the declaration of jihad against the West, 9/12 will be remembered as one of the most dramatic knee-bends of the Western cultural submission to Islam. [Does Meotti realize he just used a metaphor that is the exact opposite of the event he proceeds to describe? How could the Regensburg lecture be considered a knee-bend, much less, cultural submission to Islam???]
On September 12th 2006, Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) landed in Bavaria, Germany, where he was born and first taught theology. He was expected to deliver a lecture in front of the academic community at the University of Regensburg. That lesson would go down to history as the most controversial papal speech of the last half-century.
On this, the 10th anniversary of the speech, the Western world and the Islamic world both owe Benedict an apology, but unfortunately, the opposite happened: the Vatican has apologized to the Muslims.
In his lecture, Pope Benedict clarified the internal contradictions of contemporary Islam, but he also offered a terrain of dialogue with Christianity and Western culture. The Pope spoke of the Jewish, Greek and Christian roots of Europe’s faith, explaining why these are different from Islamic monotheism.
His talk contained a quote from the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman”.
This keg of dynamite was softened by a quotation from a Koranic sura of Mohammed’s youth, Benedict noted, “when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat”, and which says: “There is no compulsion in religion.”
Pope Benedict’s talk was not a surprise. “It is no secret that the Pope worried about Islam”, Christopher Caldwell noted in the Financial Times of London.
“He has doubted publicly that it can be accommodated in a pluralistic society. He has demoted one of John Paul II’s leading advisers on the Islamic world and tempered his support for a programme of inter-religious dialogue run by Franciscan monks at Assisi. He has embraced the view of Italian moderates and conservatives that the guiding principle of inter-religious dialogue must be reciprocità. That is, he finds it naive to permit the building of a Saudi-funded mosque, Europe’s largest, in Rome, while Muslim countries forbid the construction of churches and missions”.
In Regensburg, Benedict staged the drama of our time and for the first time in the Catholic Church’s history — a Pope talked about Islam without recycling platitudes. In that lecture, the Pope did what in the Islamic world is forbidden: freely discussing faith. He said that God is different from Allah. We never heard that again.
Intead, the quotation of Manuel II Palaeologus bounced around the world, shaking the Muslim umma [community], which reacted violently. Even the international press was unanimous in a chorus of condemnation of the “Pope’s aggression on Islam.”
The reaction to Pope’s speech proved that he was right. From Muslim leaders to the New York Times, everybody demanded the Pope’s apologies and submission. The mainstream media turned him into an incendiary proponent of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” In the Palestinian Authority area, Christian churches were burned and Christians targeted. British Islamists called to “kill” the Pope, but Benedict defied them.
- In Somalia, an Italian nun was shot dead.
- In Iraq, a Syrian Orthodox priest was beheaded by al-Qaeda and mutilated after the terrorists demanded that the Catholic Church to apologize for the speech.
- The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood pledged retaliations against the Pope.
- A Pakistani leader, Shahid Shamsi, accused the Vatican of supporting “the Zionist entity.”
- Salih Kapusuz, number two in the party of the Turkey’s then Prime Minister (now President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, compared Pope Benedict XVI to Hitler and Mussolini.
- The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted that the words of the Pope belong to “the chain of US-Israeli conspiracy,” and accused Benedict of being part of the “Crusader conspiracy.”
Security around Pope Benedict was soon massively increased. Two years later, the Pope had been barred from speaking at Rome’s most important university, La Sapienza. After the Regensburg affair, Benedict would not be the same anymore. Islamists and Western appeasers had been able to close his mouth. [That is absolutely false!]
A few days after the lecture, exhausted and frightened, Pope Benedict apologized. I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address … which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims,” the Pope told pilgrims at his Castelgandolfo summer residence. The quote did not “in any way express my personal thoughts. I hope this serves to appease hearts.”
[I always thought Meotti was a good journalist, but clearly about this, he is so very wrong. All he had to do was check back on the Vatican bulletins in Sept. 2016 that had to do with the Vatican response to the 'universal outrage' about Regensburg. The first was a brief statement from Fr. Lombardi on Sept. 14, as reported by John Thavis, then still editor of CNS:
A few hours after the pope returned from Germany Sept. 14, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi issued a written statement in the face of mounting criticism from Islamic representatives. Father Lombardi reviewed the papal speech, saying it was very important to the pope that there be a "clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation for violence."
But he said the pope did not intend to make a critical assessment of Islam, much less offend Muslims. On the contrary, Father Lombardi said, the pope's talk focused primarily on the religious shortcomings of the West and the reluctance of truly religious cultures to accept a Western "exclusion of the divine."
"What is clear, then, is the Holy Father's desire to cultivate an attitude of respect and dialogue toward other religions and cultures, including, of course, Islam," the Vatican spokesman said.
Two days later, Cardinal Bertone, then just installed as Secretary of State issued a statement that said very clearly:
- As to the judgment expressed by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus cited by him in the lecture at Regensburg, the Holy Father absolutely did not mean to make it his own, but used it as a point of departure to develop, in an academic context, and as is evident from a complete and careful reading of the text, some reflections on the relationship between religion and violence in general, from whatever side it may come.
It is worth calling to attention what Benedict XVI himself recently said in a message commemorating the 2oth anniverary of the inter-religious encounter to pray for peace, called by his beloved predecessor John Paul II in Assisi in October 1986: "...the manifestations of violence cannot be attributed to religion as such but to the cultural limits within which it is is lived and in which it develops over time....In fact, evidences of the intimate linkbetween the relationship with God and the ethic of love are found in all the great religious traditions."
- The Holy Father therefore profoundly regrets that some passages of his lecture could have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers and could have been interpreted in a way that does not correspond at all to his intentions. [Not once did the Vatican use the word 'apology' or 'apologize' for the quotation he cited. What he regretted was not that he had said what he said but that 'some passages of his lecture could have sounded offensive etc". It is Meotti who should apologize that he failed to do his research with due diligence and has thereby insulted Benedict XVI.]
At the same time, in the face of the fervent religiousness of Muslim believers, he has called on the secularized culture of the West to avoid "the contempt of God and the cynicism which considers mockery of the sacred as a civil right."
- In reaffirming his respect for those who profess Islam, he hopes that they may be helped to understand his words in their true sense so that, having overcome this uneasy time, we may reinforce our mutual testimony of "the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men" and our working to "defend and promote together, for all men, social justice, moral values, peace and liberty." (Nostra Aetate, n. 31).
[I lifted the above from the news reports I posted in PAPA RATZINGER FORUM on the days mentioned.]
The Pope may have said that to stop further violence. But since then [Since when? 2006? NO, after March 13, 2013!], apologies to the Islamic world have become the official Vatican policy.
“The default positions vis-à-vis militant Islam are now unhappily reminiscent of Vatican diplomacy’s default positions vis-à-vis communism during the last 25 years of the Cold War,” wrote George Weigel, a US leading scholar [recently - not in 2006-Feb. 28, 2013.] [The Vatican’s new agenda seeks “to reach political accommodations with Islamic states and foreswear forceful public condemnation of Islamist and jihadist ideology.”
Ten years since the Regensburg lecture, relevant as ever after ISIS’s attacks on European soil, another Pope, Francis, has tried in many ways to separate Muslims and violence and always avoided mentioning that forbidden word: Islam. As Sandro Magister, one of Italy’s most important journalists on Catholic issues, wrote: “In the face of the offensive of radical Islam, Francis’s idea is that ‘we must soothe the conflict’. And forget Regensburg.”
The entire Vatican’s diplomatic body today carefully avoids the words “Islam” and “Muslims,” and instead embraces a denial that a clash of civilization exists. Returning from World Youth Day in Poland last August, Pope Francis denied that Islam itself is violent and claimed that the potential for violence lies within every religion, including Catholicism. Previously, Pope Francis said there is “a world war,” but denied that Islam has any role in it.
In May, Pope Francis explained that the “idea of conquest” is integral to Islam as a religion, but he quickly added that some might interpret Christianity, the religion of turning the other cheek, in the same way.
“Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence,” the Pope claimed in 2013. A year later, Francis declared that “Islam is a religion of peace, one which is compatible with respect for human rights and peaceful coexistence.” He claimed that it is the ills of global economy, and not Islam, that inspire terrorism. And a few days ago, the Pope said that “people who call themselves Christians but do not want refugees at their door are hypocrites.”
Pope Francis’s pontificate has been marked by this moral equivalence between Christianity and Islam, which also obfuscates the crimes of Muslims against their own people, Eastern Christians and the West….
Pope Francis is still awaited for a visit at the church of St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray, where Father Jacques Hamel was murdered by Islamists this summer. That killing, ten years after the Regensburg lecture, is the most tragic proof that Benedict was right and Francis wrong.
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