Yes, the Pope Is Catholic - They Called Europe 'Christendom' For a Reason
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.
Probably nothing to worry about.
The last time that Europe was seriously threatened by the forces of Islam was September of 1683, when the Polish King Jan Sobieski responded to the banner of Pope Innocent XI and led a force to free Vienna from the Ottoman siege. Western leaders were divided both by geopolitics and intrigue, and the Pope had to get his hands dirty with internal Polish politics to secure the consent of the Polish nobility for Sobieski's march. But with Christendom in the balance, the Vatican used its considerable resources to rally opposition to Muslim invaders - because someone had to.
For centuries upon centuries, European history was the history of the Church. So when the Vatican seeks to protect Catholicism it seeks to protect the identity and legacy of modern Europe. That's why we were the exact opposite of 'concerned' by all the talk about the Pope's conservativism when he was appointed. The only way that Europe will be saved is if Europeans find their way into belief system other than the shallow, ironic postnationalism that passes for European identity. And since there's not really enough time for them to develop a new and relatively stable non-appeasing, non-multiculturalist identity, if they're going to get one it's going to have to come ready-made. Since we think religions are attractive precisely to the extent that they actually insist on the truth and rightness of their belief system, we were quite happy to see a Pontiff who would tell Europeans that they should be Catholic because Catholicism was truer than other religions - which is, of course, what the Pope is getting in trouble for. And which is, of course, why the condescending NYT statement that "a doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue" is outrageously stupid on so many levels (not least of which is that 'uniform Catholic identity' is either redundant since collective identity is more or less uniform or contradictory in its implication that the Pope should let Catholics believe whatever they want without being rude and telling them that they're violating Catholic dogma).
There's something else that Western journalists are having trouble understanding, and the tone that the Times took with the Pope is both a symptom and a cause of it. Since the 1990s, the West has been used to having religious figures like the Dali Lama - globetrotting mystics who write self-help books about openness. There's a very, very long book to be written about how part of the problem with Western journalists is that they simply don't appreciate that jihadists are driven by religion because they're lost the ability to conceptualize religion as something that people genuinely believe. And that short-sightedness is true also in the case of the Pope: we don't think that many people appreciated that the serious underside to Pope John Paul II's quip that he couldn't retire because he had no one to hand his resignation to. A deeply devout Pope like the last one and this one genuinely believes that the Holy Ghost has designated him to shepherd souls in a sacred mission of redemption, and that his office is one endowed with divine mandate by the living Christ himself. And so Pope Benedict doesn't really consider Muslim sensibilities to be of that significant when the task he's faced with is to prevent Christian civilization itself - the bolt of the Kingdom of God into temporal existence - from crumbling and sinking.
That's one of the longer ways to get at why the Pope didn't apologize on Saturday. The other way is to approach this more viscerally:
[T]he statement stopped short of the apology demanded by Islamic leaders around the globe, and anger among Muslims remained intense. Palestinians attacked five churches in the West Bank and Gaza over the pope's remarks Tuesday in a speech to university professors in his native Germany.
An Iraqi insurgent group threatened the Vatican with a suicide attack over the pope's remarks on Islam, according to a statement posted Saturday on the Web. "We swear to God to send you people who adore death as much as you adore life," said the message posted in the name of the Mujahedeen Army on a Web site frequently used by militant groups. The message's authenticity could not be independently verified. The statement was addressed to "you dog of Rome" and threatens to "shake your thrones and break your crosses in your home."
The New York Times demanded that a man who is in every way the intellectual heir of Augustine and Aquinas apologize to that. If the West loses this war, it won't be because of a lack of bravery - it will be because decades of stupefying insistence that there's no difference between a scientist and a savage have killed its sense of taste and shame.
Previous: The Imbecility of Interfaith Dialogue --- Juan Cole As a Study In Pro-Jihadist Faux Liberal Sophistication --- Confused? We'll Translate: He Believes in God --- So Catholic That He Actually Thinks Catholicism Is True --- On How to Really Believe (Without Blowing Things Up)
