VATICAN: BENEDICT'S VIEW OF ISLAM HAS NOT SOFTENED

Pope’s views on Islam unchanged
By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: As Pope Benedict sets out for Turkey, his first visit to a Muslim country, Time magazine reports a high-ranking Vatican diplomat as saying, “The Pope has the intention to say what he thinks. He may adjust his tone, but his direction won’t change.”

According to the news magazine, while the Pope is not going to repeat what he said in his controversial speech about Islam in Regensburg, “gauzy talk about the compatibility of Christianity and Islam isn’t likely either”.

“Over the course of his career, Benedict has been averse to reciting multi-faith platitudes, an aversion that has sharpened as he has focused on Islam, and that’s what could make his coming encounter with the Muslim world,” the magazine said. David Gibson, author of The Rule of Benedict, said it would either be “a step towards religious harmony or towards holy war”.

Ratzinger has always favoured bright theological lines and correspondingly high walls between creeds he regards as “unequally meritorious”. His long-standing habit is to correct any aide who calls a religion other than Christianity or Judaism a “faith”. Prior to his papacy, the culmination of this philosophy was his office’s 1999 Vatican document Dominus Jesus, which described non-Catholics as being in a “gravely deficient situation” regarding salvation. The fact that this offended some of the deficient parties did not particularly bother him. One of his assistants said, “To understand each other ... you have to talk about what divides.” That approach includes Islam. In Ratzinger’s 1996 interview book Salt of the Earth, he noted, “We must recognise that Islam is not a uniform thing. There is a noble Islam, embodied, for example, by the King of Morocco, and there is also the extremist, terrorist Islam, which, again, one must not identify with Islam as a whole, which would do it an injustice.” Ratzinger once admonished a bishop who wanted to invite peaceable Muslims to a papal ceremony in Fatima, Portugal. In 2004, he objected to Turkish EU entry on grounds that it had always been “in permanent contrast to Europe”, a contrast his other writings made clear had much to do with religion.

According to Time, “After September 11, Ratzinger’s attitude towards Islam seems to have hardened ... the Cardinals in the conclave that elected Ratzinger made it clear that they expected a tougher dialogue with the other faith. After the London subway bombings, he responded to the question of whether Islam was a ‘religion of peace’ ... saying, ‘Certainly there are also elements that can favour peace’. When he met moderate German Muslims in the city of Cologne that August, Benedict delivered a fairly blunt warning that ‘those who instigate and plan these attacks evidently wish to poison our relations’.

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