In talks in Munich and Regensburg, the pope developed a central message of his trip: that in a world where religions and cultures risk colliding, Christians must make sure their faith is firm and is reflected in their own culture.
Other religions, he said, do not see a threat to their identity in the Christian faith but in the "contempt for God" and the "mockery of the sacred" in the West.
That was an interesting approach to the issue of secularization. By distinguishing the church’s agenda from that of the dominant Western culture, the pope seemed to stake out new ground in the debate over the potential "clash of civilizations" — or, as the pope prefers to view it, the "dialogue of cultures."
Although he is concerned about radical Islam, the pope was emphasizing that the church wants no part of a political crusade that would impose a materialistic, godless society on the rest of the world, under the banner of "enlightenment."
But when he expanded on this theme in an address to academics in Regensburg, the pope discovered that some of his scholarly ideas were just too dense for the sound-bite culture.
His main point in the speech was that reason and faith must be reconciled in the West, and his critique of the "de-Hellenization" of Christian theology was detailed and provocative.
But he introduced it by quoting a medieval emperor on the errors of Islam and jihad, or holy war, which the press naturally found more exciting. The pope’s speech was not about Islam, but the headlines the next day were.
Although the pope did not specifically endorse the 600-year-old criticisms of Islam that he quoted, he did not distance himself from them, either. Thus, the story quickly morphed into "Pope hits out at Islam" — an exaggeration, but one that might have been foreseen by a media-savvy pope.
Oh, I don’t know. Looking at it from my 20-degrees of separation, fairly uninformed perspective, I’m thinking the Pope is not stupid and given that there were a million other ways he could have introduced the subject, choosing a 14th century dialogue that critiques the presumptions and assumptions of Islamic concepts of God was not an accident. Perhaps Benedict is indeed inviting us to take a closer look.
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