Posted on 09/18/2006 10:22:46 AM PDT by Wuli
Understanding Benedict
By DANIEL JOHNSON September 18, 2006
Many people, Catholics no less than non-Catholics, are bewildered and dismayed by the sudden firestorm of Muslim hostility that has overtaken Pope Benedict XVI since his lecture in Regensburg last Tuesday.
The most charitable interpretation, said one BBC correspondent, is that he is culpably naïve — that he simply forgot that he was speaking not as a scholar to his peers, but as pope. Even his defenders have suggested that it was a faux pas to quote a 14th-century Byzantine emperor on the subject of Muhammad. Surely, they say, it was an aberration for the spiritual leader of more than a billion Catholics to use words such as "evil and inhuman" to describe the prophet of more than a billion Muslims. Was it not inconsistent,..........
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
Here, Benedict refuses to back down because he cannot tell a lie.
"Many people, Catholics no less than non-Catholics, are bewildered and dismayed by the sudden firestorm of Muslim hostility that has overtaken Pope Benedict XVI since his lecture in Regensburg last Tuesday."
Only an idiot could possibly be bewildered; anyone who's been following events of the last five years will know that the Saracens now insist that any and all statements with respect to Middle Eastern/Islamic affairs be vetted in advance by their mullahs, and that anything less than glowing praise for the "miracle that is Islam" will be followed by media whining, complaints, protests, burnings, riots, beatings, bombs, executions et cetera et cetera yada yada yada by the proponents of what is laughably referred to as the Religion of Peace. It's become so predictable you can set your watch by it.
Can there be any dispute that Pope Benedict XVI got the whole world talking about this? Obviously a lot of people are going to be clueless, but it seems the Pope was spectacularly successful.
moHAMed is dead.
It would have been a surprise had muslims published a reasoned response to his remarks, offered to debate, or merely turned it aside in good humor. As it is, they have only proved the pope right. He is right. They are violent people, and while all humans share a violent nature Islam tends to actually encourage violence.
Where are the muslim martyrs who die blessing and forgiving their attackers?
There aren't any.
It is wrong to murder people in order to spread your religion. You would think that was so obvious a pope wouldn't need to say it, and if he said it, it would go unnoticed so obvious is it.
The pope has indirectly accused muslim radicals of being violent, and they are already planning to murder him for it. The Left is already cheering them on. When the killers come for him, the Left will say that he brought it on himself, which is exactly what they said and continue to say about us and the 911 attacks.
As a Cardinal he declared our actions against Iraq as "unjust". He sure got me talking then.
"moHAMed is dead. "
DEATH TO FOLLOWERS OF moHAMed THAN.
Nor is he inconsistent. The Ratzinger of old, his skill in disputation honed over many years of patiently defending Catholic orthodoxy against liberal or secular opponents, was never going to duck the long-postponed doctrinal confrontation with Islam. In his subtle, scholarly way, he is urging the rest of us to face the fact that if we have no faith, we cannot hope to withstand the onslaught of a resurgent Islam.
The Pope is willing to place himself in danger of assassination in order to impress upon folks the dire necessity of understanding those whom we have to confront.
Exactly -- the conversation has begun. Now if only the Muslims will sit down and talk -- enter the dialogue!
At least he didn't draw cartoons.
The current Roman Catholic Pope and Daniel Johnson are both long-time intellectuals, and Johson is also a first class writer, who can write well for any audience. Thus Johnson is in an ideal position, much better than others, to understand the Roman Catholic Pope and produce a quality explanation of the Roman Catholic Pope's statements.
And I'm an ordained Methodist pastor.
Besides, allah is no God. mohammed is no prophet. and the koran is no scripture.
Maranatha.
The problem with saying that everything about Islam is wholly evil is that there are good things in the Koran BECAUSE Mohammed stole them from the Old and New Testaments. Mohammed was a polytheist converted from that to monotheism because of learning about the Bible from Christians. MOhammed was right about giving to the poor, he was right about the immorality of slavery and some other things too. Because there are Christian principle in the Koran that Mohammed retained (mixed with plenty or error) I don't think you can expect the pope to ever roundly condemn ALL Islamic teaching. And that might be why he said the quote by the long dead Emporer in no way represented his opinion. That quote condemed ALL things new Mohammed brought and used conversion by the sword as an example. The pope agreeded with the conversion by the sword part but perhaps not the the idea that all things Mohammed brought were evil. New things he brought that were compatible with Christian thought were not evil.
I don't remember Cardinal Ratzinger's exact words on the subject of the war, but I do know that the Church NEVER declared that the Iraq war was an UN-Just War. Thus Catholics could take part in it's execution in good conscience. The Church was worried, and still is, about the impact on Catholics, and other Christians as a result of Muslim violence against them in retaliation for the war. But as we all know, Muslims attack Christians even without the pretext of a war.
Raztinger was very emphatic that our going into Iraq on our own was unjust and that only the UN had the morale authority to make such a move.
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