From the Ethics & Public Policy Center
By George Weigel
On the evening of Sept. 12, 2006, my wife and I were dining in Cracow with Polish friends when an agitated Italian Vaticanista (pardon
the redundancy in adjectives) called, demanding to know what I thought
of “Zees crazee speech of zee pope about zee Muslims.” That was my first
hint that the herd of independent minds in the world press was about to
go ballistic on the subject of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture: a
“gaffe”-bone on which the media continued to gnaw until the end of
Benedict’s pontificate.
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.
The first question was about religious freedom: Could Muslims find,
within their own spiritual and intellectual resources, Islamic arguments
for religious tolerance (including tolerance of those who convert to
other faiths)? That desirable development, the pope suggested, might
lead over time (meaning centuries) to a more complete Islamic theory of
religious freedom.
The second question was about the structuring of Islamic societies:
Could Muslims find, again from within their own spiritual and
intellectual resources, Islamic arguments for distinguishing between
religious and political authority in a just state? That equally
desirable development might make Muslim societies more humane in
themselves and less dangerous to their neighbors, especially if it were
linked to an emerging Islamic case for religious tolerance.
Pope Benedict went on to suggest that
inter-religious dialogue between Catholics and Muslims might focus on
these two linked questions. The Catholic Church, the pope freely
conceded, had had its own struggles developing a Catholic case for
religious freedom in a constitutionally-governed polity in which the
Church played a key role in civil society, but not directly in
governance. But Catholicism had finally done so: not by surrendering to
secular political philosophy, but by using what it had learned from
political modernity in order to reach back into its own tradition,
rediscover elements of its thinking about faith, religion, and society
that had gotten lost over time, and develop its teaching about the just
society for the future.
Was such a process of retrieval-and-development possible in Islam?
That was the Big Question posed by Benedict XVI in the Regensburg
Lecture. It is a tragedy of historic proportions that the question was,
first, misunderstood, and then ignored. The results of that
misunderstanding and that ignorance—and a lot of other misunderstanding
and ignorance—are now on grisly display throughout the Middle East: in
the decimation of ancient Christian communities; in barbarities that
have shocked a seemingly-unshockable West, like the crucifixion and
beheading of Christians; in tottering states; in the shattered hopes
that the 21st- century Middle East might recover from its various
cultural and political illnesses and find a path to a more humane
future.
Benedict XVI, I am sure, takes no pleasure in history’s vindication
of his Regensburg Lecture. But his critics in 2006 might well examine
their consciences about the opprobrium they heaped on him eight years
ago. Admitting that they got it wrong in 2006 would be a useful first
step in addressing their ignorance of the intra-Islamic civil war that
gravely threatens peace in the 21st-century world.
As for the conversation about Islam’s future that Benedict XVI
proposed, well, it now seems rather unlikely. But if it’s to take place,
Christian leaders must prepare the way by naming, forthrightly, the
pathologies of Islamism and jihadism; by ending their ahistorical
apologies for 20th-century colonialism (lamely imitating the worst of
western academic blather about the Arab Islamic world); and by stating
publicly that, when confronted by bloody-minded fanatics like those
responsible for the reign of terror that has beset Syria and Iraq this
summer, armed force, deployed prudently and purposefully by those with
the will and the means to defend innocents, is morally justified.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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