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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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I thought I would resurrect some more of the pre-furor articles about the Regensburg lecture, as they were posted in the PRF thread on the APOSTOLIC VISIT TO BAVARIA at the time of the visit. First, the Reuters report filed on Sept. 13 (the lecture was given the afternoon of Sept. 12, so this was the agency's first report dedicated to the lecture itself, and not as part of its reporting on the visit). Reuters, and particularly its lead Vaticanista Philip Pulella, have been unkind to Benedict XVI, in general, but in this report, even Pulella finds no cause to excoriate Benedict XVI for what he said about Islam in the lecture - yet another dccumentary proof that MSM did not get into the fray about Regensburg until after Muslim officials started reacting to the Paleologue citation.





Like the homilies he has delivered in Bavaria, the Pope's lecture at the University of Regensburg yesterday had so many key points to lead with, that accounts have been widely divergent depending on which key point the reporter chose to emphasize.

Sometimes, the 'point' is completely off, when the writer singles out a phrase or sentence and proceeds to extrapolate his interpretation of it outside the context of how the Pope said it. Or worse, when, in paraphrasing their chosen take-off quotation, they put words into the Pope's mouth which he never said or could even remotely intend to say!

And that's the way the Italian press has been reporting the Pope's recent homilies in Bavaria, particularly the ones in Munich and Regensburg. with the miscreants focusing on two things - what he said (or did not say but they claim he did) about Islam' and what he says about science (some reporters and analysts maintain on the basis of his homily in Regensburg yesterday, that he was in effect endorsing 'intelligent design'!)

This Reuters story chose to lead with the Pope's call for dialog with Islam....

----------------------------------------------------------------

Pope invites Muslims to dialogue
By Philip Pullella and Madeline Chambers

REGENSBURG, Germany, Sept. 13, 2006 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict invited Muslims on Tuesday to join a dialogue of cultures that agrees the concept of Islamic "holy war" is unreasonable and against God's nature.

In a major lecture at Regensburg University, where he taught theology between 1969 to 1977, Benedict said Christianity was tightly linked to reason and contrasted this view with those who believe in spreading their faith by the sword.

The 79-year-old Pontiff avoided making a direct criticism of Islam, packaging his comments in a highly complex academic lecture with references ranging from ancient Jewish and Greek thinking to Protestant theology and modern atheism.

In his lecture, the Pope quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who wrote in a dialogue with a Persian that Mohammad had brought things "only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

The Pope, who used the terms "jihad" and "holy war" in his lecture, added: "Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul."

Benedict several times quoted the argument by Emperor Manual II Paleologos that spreading the faith through violence is unreasonable and that acting without reason -- "logos" in the original Greek -- was against God's nature.

At the end of his lecture, the Pope again quoted Manuel and said: "It is to this great 'logos', to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures."

Abbot Notker Wolf, head of the worldwide Benedictine order, said the Pope used Manuel's dialogue with a Persian to make an indirect reference to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Wolf, a commentator on Bavarian television for the Pope's visit, said the reference to a Persian "was a blatant allusion to Ahmadinejad" and said the Iranian leader had sent "arrogant letters" this year to President Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel urging a dialogue.

"I have heard he plans to write a letter to the Pope," Wolf added. "I think this would be a good opportunity to take up the gauntlet, so to speak, and really discuss things."

Papal spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said Benedict used Emperor Manuel's views on Islam only to help explain the issue and not to condemn all of the Muslim religion as violent.

"This is just an example. We know that inside Islam there are many different positions, violent and non-violent," he said. "The Pope does not want to give an interpretation of Islam that is violent."

Many Islamic leaders have denounced Muslim radicals for using violence, saying this perverts their faith, but a minority of extremists says the Koran commands them to use it.

Last week, the Pope said no one had the right to use religion to justify terrorism and urged greater inter-religious dialogue to stop the cycle of hate and revenge.

On Monday, he prayed for the victims of September 11 on the fifth anniversary of the attacks against the United States.

At an open-air mass earlier in the day, Benedict told about 260,000 faithful that Christians believed in a loving God whose name could not be used to justify hatred and fanaticism.

At his university lecture, Benedict also appeared to criticize Protestant and some Third World theologians for not stressing the link between faith and reason clearly enough.

Benedict stressed his criticism of empirical reasoning "has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age."

"The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application," said Benedict, who later held an ecumenical service with Protestant and Orthodox clerics.

(Additional reporting by Tom Heneghan in Munich)



On the same day, Vittorio Messori wrote a commentary for Corriere della Sera, in which his emphasis was on the homily given by the Pope at the morning Mass in Regensburg, the event that had preceded the Regensburg lecture, although he did say in passing that we might well expect a fatwa against Benedict XVI for presuming to address Muslims about Allah!





Benedict XVI in Germany
The Pope to Islam:
“Holy war (jihad)
is a war against God”

by Vittorio Messori

Sept. 13, 2006

Benedict XVI is a problem for journalists: especially for those at the editorial desks who must synthesize in the few words of a headline what the reporter in the field sends in.

In effect, everything that the ex-Professor Ratzinger says or writes not only has the density characteristic of German academics, but is the product of meditation and studies done over the past 60 years, added to his pastoral experience as Archbishop and the doctrinal enforcement years in the CDF.

Therefore, even in homilies to masses of people like the ones he has delivered in Bavaria, he speaks of several topics – to each of which he dedicates quick thrusts that reveal their depth, thrusts which are often surprising because non-confomist. This creates a problem for the media who must synthesize it all. The reporter is constrained to choose which of many key points to emphasize.

The accumulation of thought was obvious even in his homily at the Mass in Regensburg, the true homeland of his heart. Some commentators chose to play up his views on the relationship between faith and science, between intelligent design and evolutionism. Others chose to go with his statement about the ‘hate and fanaticism’ of some religious extremists ‘who have killed the true image of God.’

Whoever chose to take these themes would not be wrong and would not lack for arguments to support their choice.

But to stay with the second topic we mentioned, the importance and currency of the issue were such that Benedict XVI spoke of it again in his lecture to academics.

Just as the Enlightenment in the West, which has resulted in skepticism if not nihilism, is a pathology of reason, he said, religious fundamentalism which promotes terrorism and forces conversion is a pathology of religion.

And in this lecture, unlike his homily in Munich, Ratzinger did not hesitate to use the name of Islam. Not only that: he spoke of Mohammed and of his Koran, citing a ‘peaceful’ verse which will surely please the so-called Muslim moderates, but which will only earn the disdain of the radicals. [9/12/12 P.S. Note that Messori cites the 'peaceful' citation from hte Koran, but makes no mention even of the Paleologue quote! - i.e., to him, as to most sensible people, it was just a useful quote from a historical account, given in the context of the lecture, not to be singled out in such a dnesely packed lecture,and certainly not meant to be offensive.]

For the latter, it is not allowed for an infidel, even if he were the Pope, to presume to lecture the believers of Allah on true revelation. Should we expect a fatwa against Benedict XVI? Given the times and the climate of the times, we cannot rule it out.

But to return to his homily in Regensburg, allow me to pick out just one sentence which may have escaped most, but which particularizes one of the essential concerns of a man who never wanted to be a just a professor armed with theories but is a priest who has always had a calling for ‘apologetics’, the explanation of the faith.

It is a ‘passion de convaincre’ (passion to convince) that according to Pascal, is instinctive in a man who has faith and who wants to communicate his faith.

So much so that in some theological circles where no one would dare dispute Ratzinger’s evident stature as a theologian, they prefer to describe him as ‘pastoral’, not ‘dogmatic.’ From his point of view, this is no putdown but a recognition.

It is not by chance that the first book that brought him international fame was his Introduction to Christianity, a sort of robust catechism, launched in the chaos of 1968.

Nor was it by chance that he was the first to break the legendary silence and secrecy of his predecessors at the ex-Holy Office, agreeing to an extensive interview with a journalist so that, through his experience in popularizing difficult concepts, he could toss into the public arena those issues that until then were simply debated in theological laboratories. [Messori is referring to the interview-book he did with Cardinal Ratzinger which came out in English as THE RATZINGER REPORT.]

And so, I heard something familiar yesterday in the words of the man who is now Pope to the crowds gathered by the Danube:
"Faith is simple. Looking at the great Summa Theologiae, or thinking of the many being written every day for or against faith, has invited discouragement, in the thought that to believe is something complicated. “

It may seem paradoxical from a theologian but in fact, the statement is totally evangelical. Even a great intellectual, at some point in the complex course of his development, realizes that yes, study is indeed necessary; but to understand that which really counts, the ‘simple’ people are privileged in this respect.

The Church created the first universities in history and has always encouraged the gifted to do research. But it has also always preached the gospel even to the ignorant, and has made more of them saints than it has of professors.

Benedict’s ‘modesty’ (fewer documents, fewer travels, fewer speeches) comes from a concern that he already expressed in the Report, and for which he has fought for decades, not only having a role in bringing out the New Catechism but also its lighter Compendium:

“If the people keep their distance from the Church, it is because we have given them the impression that believing is a ‘complex system’ whereas everything is simple: there is a God, this God is love, and He came to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. To live in hope, to know how much is enough, the words of the Credo [Apostles Creed] say it all.”

To concentrate on the essential, to recover the brevity and simplicity of the Gospel – this, in short, is the program of his pontificate, restated anew yesterday in Regensburg.
[The Regensburg homily, that is!]

----------------------------------------------------------------

In comparison, Giuliano Ferrara - editor of Il Foglio, Communist turned conservative, a non-Catholic, and ex-minister in both Berlusconi cabinets, and self-described 'devout atheist' - wrote of the Pope's Regensburg lecture that it was a 'manifesto of Western identity with its Greek, Hebrew and Christian roots.'

I always have big problems with analysts or commentators who try to interpret, or at least, to paraphrase what Pope Benedict XVI says or writes. Because what he says or writes always comes across to me very clearly and he presents his thoughts so logically that one can follow him through without a problem.

Such was the case with the lecture at Regensburg yesterday. Even my first reading of it unfolded so effortlessly despite the multiplicity of ideas presented.

Many responsible commentators would not rush to write an appreciation or a critique of such a dense "accumulation of thought" (as Vittorio Messori describes this Pope's texts) overnight.

What I have read so far of commentary in the Italian press has been disheartening. An editorial in Avvenire which I thought to be promising turns out to be muddled in thought and language. [9/12/12 P.S. In short, most journalists did not quite know how to report the Regensburg lecture initially, because few had the intellectual overview of someone like Ferrara who saw it comprehensively for what it was, and not merely as a discourse which focused on Islam in some parts!]

Ferrara was the first journalist and commentator to realize the magnitude of the speech - and also the most audacious, even if his language and presentation are not quite the Pope's!




'OUR GOD IS DIFFERENT FROM ALLAH'
By Giuliano Ferrara
Translated from

Sept. 13, 2006

In his colossal lecture in Regensburg yesterday, Benedict XVI, returning in Papal vestments to his true arena for intellectual and pastoral combat - the university and the chair of theology -said, with a subtlety of thought not less than his intellectual and political courage: We are Jews, Greeks, Christians; Mohammed and his god are different.

He adds: In order to dialogue with those who are different from us, in a tempestuous time of religious violence and proselytic aggression against Western civilization, we should know who we are, namely, that we are men and women blessed with two sources of wisdom and love - reason and faith.

These sources together have preserved us from doing away with God, from the monolithism of Islam - which is other than Judeo-Christian monotheism, and from the god of chance.

Ultimately, to know who we are, we should get rid of reductionism and relativism, of the idea that faith and love and reason are not closely linked, in true analogy, with truth, with being, with metaphysics, with the experience of faith in an incarnated God...

[9/12/12 P,S. How prescient Ferrara is, in the following paragraphs, that already anticipate the line of attack that would be taken, once the MSM's Pavlovian reflexes set in:]

Many newspapers today will say "The Pope attacks Islam" or will attenuate his words with their usual simplification and atrocious banalization of the great thoughts he expressed about our identity - the roots of Western civilization in Greek, Jewish and Christian thought.

They will use the shortcut of a citation by the Pope of what the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus wrote about his conversation with a Persian Muslim in the 14th century: Show me what Mohammed has brought forth that is new, and you will see that these are only mean and inhuman things, like his order to spread by the sword the faith that he preached.

A citation that was carefully preceded by an early surah (verse) from the Koran, "in which Mohammed himself says: No constrictions in matters of faith." (Surah 2, 256).

But the emperor's words were then explained without hypocritical scruples by Ratzinger himself: the emperor was condemning - by invoking the rationality of the God-Logos, the God of reason, "who is not happy with blood-letting" - the Islamic doctrine of jihad.

The emperor condemns 'acting without reason' as being 'contrary to the nature of God' (the God of Christians). But for the Muslim religion, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not tied to any of our categories, 'perhaps not even to rationality," said the Pope.


Clearer and less politically correct a Pope could not have been: the God of Islam is different, radically different, from ours.

To be even clearer, he adds: "It opens up, in our understanding of God and therefore in the concrete practice of religion, a dilemma which challenges us very directly today."

It is a confrontation between the Bible, the gospel of John and its Logos, and of Greek thought, on the one hand, and a religion of conquest which is also political and violent, in the name of an arbitrary God who is remote and apart from human reason.

Only a vulgar, simplistic reading of this lecture could call it an "attack on Islam." The Pope of reason - as some called him at the time of the Conclave - has another purpose which he made clear in the rest of this extraordinary lecture in Regensburg.

And that is, to evangelize the West, to correct the apostasy of faith, the trend to agnosticism or indifference - but to do so with wide-open rationality, with a re-Hellenization of Christianity, which would revive the Pauline, Augustinian and Thomist grandeur of our culture and Christian practice, in a solid link with metaphysics - thought that questions the truth of being, of the natural condition of the world.


The theologian and philosopher Pope then examines how the West - by dehellenizing Christianity from the Middle Ages onwards - lost contact with objective reason, with a reason that understood faith and that faith could comprehend, in favor of existentialist ultimatums, of a totally different god, the God of sola scriptura, the God of Von Harnack and Karl Barth and of the Christian sub-cultures of 'peace and love' so in vogue today.

He goes on to decry radical enlightenment, that of Kant, which reduces faith to mere practice, to a private morality. And he concludes with the mooring point that was predictable on the basis of all his theology, a powerful thought that is in contact with the spirit and the drama of our vulnerable times:

"A reason which is deaf to the divine and pushes down religion to a subculture is not capable of taking part in the dialog between cultures."

What he read yesterday in Regensburg was the manifesto of Western identity with its Greek, Hebrew and Christian roots.



[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/09/2012 17:03]
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