HOW MANY DIVISIONS DOES THE POPE HAVE?
By Daniel Johnson
New York Sun, NY
Nov 30 2006
How would you like to be in Pope Benedict XVI’s shoes right now? He
needs all the prayers that a billion Catholics are offering up for the
duration of his current visit to Turkey. They, along with countless
others who wish Benedict well, will thank God if he returns in one
piece. For in the age of the global jihad, the most dangerous thing
a man can do is to tell the truth about Islam.
If, as Turkey’s senior Islamic official, Ali Bardakoglu, told the pope
on his arrival, Islam is a religion of "vast tolerance" that rejects
all violence and terror and "assumes that killing an innocent person
is a heavy crime and sin," it is singularly extravagant of the Turkish
government to assign an army of 15,000 security men to one frail old
priest. How many divisions does it take to protect the pope?
If, as Mr. Bardakoglu also lectured the pope, it is "Islamophobic"
to say that Islam "was spread over the world by the sword," why is it
that almost all the major conflicts in the world today occur on the
fault lines between Islam and other faiths? Even in Turkey, the most
secular of Muslim countries, persecution has reduced the proportion
of non-Muslims in the population from a majority in Byzantine times
to less than 1% today. It is still a crime in Turkey to refer to
the Armenian genocide. And it is still dangerous to be an observant
Christian or Jew. Synagogues in Istanbul were attacked by Islamist
terrorists in 1985 and 2003, killing scores and wounding hundreds of
Turkey’s tiny Jewish minority.
No, the reason that Turkey is mounting its largest ever peacetime
security operation right now is that a significant proportion of
Muslims – nobody knows how many – want the pope killed for daring to
quote a remark by a 14th-century Byzantine emperor that was critical
of Islam in his famous speech at Regensburg in September. A novel
that glories in the imagined assassination of Pope Benedict is a
bestseller in the bookstores of Istanbul. This is hardly surprising:
During the Regensburg furor, Mr. Bardakoglu told Muslims that the
pope is "filled with enmity" and the spirit of the Crusades.
Even Prime Minister Erdogan initially claimed he could not find time
for a meeting. Realizing that snubbing the pope might not improve
Turkey’s image in Europe, he thought better of it, and a brief airport
encounter took place. Yet Mr. Erdogan just could not resist ambushing
the man who was supposedly his guest. After their private audience,
Mr. Erdogan emerged to wow the waiting press by claiming that the
pope had dropped his opposition to Turkish membership of the European
Union. Mr. Erdogan then flew off to the NATO summit in Riga, leaving
embarrassed Vatican officials to issue denials.
The pope must have had mixed feelings as he paid his respects at the
secular shrine to the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk.
Abolishing the caliphate, banning the fez, the veil, and other
Muslim symbols in order to secularize the Turkish state was a great
achievement. But Mr. Erdogan and his ruling party are Islamists,
dedicated to tearing down the wall that Ataturk erected to separate
religion and politics. It is no accident that Mr. Erdogan refused
to allow his country to be used by American forces against Saddam
Hussein and still refuses to support Iraqi democracy.
On a visit to Oxford a few years ago, Mr. Erdogan took questions
from the press. I asked him what he thought was meant when he was
described as a "moderate Islamist," which seemed to me an oxymoron.
The prime minister chose to interpret this as a question about Islam,
rather than Islamism – apparently he does not recognize a distinction
between religious and political Islam. "Moderate Islam," he said, did
not exist, except in the minds of ignorant people in the West. Islam
was one and indivisible. To divide Muslims into "moderates" and
"extremists" was itself Islamophobic. But he thought Turkey should be –
already was – a European country.
Under these circumstances, to hold what Benedict called "an authentic
dialogue between Christians and Muslims, based on truth" is by
no means easy. It would be absurd to expect the pope to repeat in
Istanbul his critique of the role of reason in Islamic theology.
Benedict may sit on the throne of St. Peter, but he has no desire to
emulate his predecessor’s martyrdom.
But the historical symbolism of the pope’s presence in this "bridge
between Europe and Asia" cannot be overstated, for all that the
Vatican insists that the visit is pastoral rather than political. In
the Muslim world, the pastoral is the political.
Benedict’s original and primary purpose was to reconcile Catholic
and Orthodox Christians from the consequences of a schism that goes
back to the 11th century. Benedict’s dream of healing a millennial
theological rift will not be realized in his lifetime, but the fact
that he is prepared to risk his life to meet the patriarch of what
the Greek Orthodox stubbornly persist in calling Constantinople proves
that this pope is nothing if not courageous – and ambitious.
It is from that seminal epoch, too, that the pope selected another
of his significant quotations, this time from one of his most
controversial predecessors: Pope Gregory VII. This Tuscan monk, known
as Hildebrand, began what the great medievalist Karl Leyser called
"the first European revolution": the struggle, which convulsed Europe,
for what Gregory called the libertas ecclesiae, the "liberty of the
church." Long before the Reformation, this Gregorian revolution pitted
church against state over an issue that is still alive in China,
where the communist-controlled state church has just installed a new
bishop whom the Vatican refuses to recognize.
For the sake of this far-reaching libertas, Gregory was prepared to
sacrifice everything, and he expected his clergy to do so too – it
was he who established celibacy as the norm for Catholic priests, and
he who damned the sin of simony, the sale of ecclesiastical offices.
Gregory brought the most powerful man in Europe, Emperor Henry IV,
literally to his knees, as Henry had to wait in the snow outside the
papal castle at Canossa to be forgiven. But Henry broke his word and
Gregory ended his days in exile. He was vindicated only posthumously.
It was this Gregory, then, whom Benedict quoted thanking a Muslim
prince for his benevolent treatment of his Christian subjects.
Christians and Muslims owed such charity to one another, Gregory wrote,
"because we believe in one God, albeit in a different manner."
Note that this goodwill was to be reciprocal. When Muslim rulers
refused to allow Christian pilgrims access to the holy land, Gregory’s
successor, Urban II, declared the First Crusade in order to enforce
that access.
If Benedict XVI is now taking his inspiration from Gregory VII,
we can expect no compromise from him on the issue of religious freedom.
Nor will he retract what he said in Regensburg: The Judeo-Christian
West believes in one God, the God of logos and love – not an irrational
God who rewards terrorists. The pope has given his Muslim interlocutors
a choice: Islam can have an authentic dialogue with the West, based
on mutual respect and toleration, or it can have jihad.
It cannot have both.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress