Posted on 09/25/2014 9:12:10 AM PDT by Biggirl
- Ethics and Public Policy Centre Eight years later, the Regensburg Lecture looks a lot different. Indeed, those who actually read it in 2006 understood that, far from making a “gaffe,” Benedict XVI was exploring with scholarly precision two key questions, the answers to which would profoundly influence the civil war raging within Islam—a war whose outcome will determine whether 21st-century Islam is safe for its own adherents and safe for the world.
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It was vindicated the day he gave it.
Indeed. His Holiness shined divine light on the twin heresies of moslemism & secularism, which we see joined, as all lies are at some point. The delusional notions that secularism favors the protection of women in their natural state of vulnerability, or protection of individual freedom as bequeathed by Natural Law from God, is seen, in its alliance with what on the surface would appear to be its nemesis in Mohammedism, in that courageous speech.
“Islam is destined to remain unchanged in the future, as it has been until now, the only possible outcome is a difficult coexistence with those who do not belong to the Muslim community: in an Islamic country, in fact, the non-Muslim must submit to the Islamic system, if he does not wish to live in a situation of substantial intolerance. Likewise, on account of this all-embracing conception of religion and political authority, the Muslim will have great difficulty in adapting to the civil laws in non-Islamic countries, seeing them as something foreign to his upbringing and to the dictates of his religion. Perhaps one should ask oneself if the well-attested difficulties persons coming from the Islamic world have with integrating into the social and cultural life of the West are not explained in part by this problematic situation. We must also recognize the natural right of every society to defend its own cultural, religious, and political identity. It seems to me that this is precisely what Pope Saint Pius V did. “ (Christianity and Islam in History by Monsignor Walter Brandmüller, president of the Vatican Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences.)
About the time the West discovered Aristotle's Ethics and Politics in the twelfth century, Islam had reached it's peak. The top imams at the time decided that Islam would no longer use the elements of philosophy which had been their strong suit for 500 years. So in began their decline when they rejected all that they had been able to glean from the Greek philosophers.
The West then took all that the Greek civilization had and entered into the Renaissance.
So, Pope Benedict was only inviting them back to the dialogue they dismissed in the 12th century.
Pope Benedict XVI is a deeply insightful and spiritual man. He has always been underestimated because he followed the very charismatic Saint John Paul II.
Not so much underestimated as rejected. By the secularists, of course, but by “liberal” Catholics, who were dismayed by his election.
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