Pastor's
Page
By
Fr. George Welzbacher
December
3, 2006
As we go to press Pope Benedict has just begun his
apostolic visit to Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, for more than a
thousand years (from 330 A.D. to 1453 A.D.) the capital of the
Christian Roman Empire. In a last-minute change of script Pope Benedict
was greeted at the airport by the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyup
Erdogan, who shortly thereafter enplaned for a NATO conference in
Latvia. Pope Benedict will also visit Ankara, capital of modem Turkey,
and then he will spend some time in prayerful meditation in the midst
of the ruins of the ancient great city of Ephesus, where St. Paul
preached the Gospel for two years and where, generations later, in the
year of grace 431, the Third Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church
met to clarify definitively that in Jesus Christ there
is no human
person but only the single Divine Person of God the Son, joined from
the moment of the Incarnation to a human body and a human soul in what
is called the Hypostatic Union. I fervently pray that by the
time that
you are reading these words Pope Benedict will have safely returned to
Rome, with no fanatic Muslim or mercenary "hit- man" having drawn
inspiration from the recently published Turkish novel Who Will Kill the
Pope in Istanbul? (I kid you not! A novel with that title has
been
published in Turkey and is selling well).
Istanbul today, despite its Christian past, is an
overwhelmingly Muslim city in an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, a nation
whose generals during World War I instigated the massacre of perhaps a
million and a half of the Sultan's Christian subjects, Armenians and
Greeks, many of whom were herded into churches that were then set on
fire. Some managed to evade their co-religionists' fate by trekking for
hundreds and hundreds of miles through mountainous country to find
refuge in Persia and Mesopotamia, in today's nomenclature Iraq and
Iran. This Turkish massacre of Christians early in the twentieth
century proved in time to be merely the curtain-raiser for a ghastly
parade of organized mass murders that would contribute to the twentieth
century's unenviable distinction as history's most blood-drenched
century.
Though Turkey has made spectacular progress in developing
the institutions of secular democracy since the birth of the Turkish
Republic in the 1920's, discrimination against Christians is still
entrenched in the Turkish legal code. Even so eminent a Christian
figure as the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew
I, is disqualified as a Christian from maintaining a seminary or owning
a publishing house.
Pope Benedict's prime objective in visiting Turkey is to
visit Patriarch Bartholomew, in response to the invitation that the
patriarch extended early in Benedict's pontificate. As the titular
primate to whom in varying degrees the Orthodox Churches of Eastern
Europe and the Middle East concede a precedence of honor the patriarch
possesses estimable prestige if but little administrative authority.
Pope Benedict's decision to proceed with his visit despite raging
protests was inspired by his resolve to offer an eloquent gesture of
fraternal solidarity with a beleaguered churchman and a persecuted
creed. He is also following in the footsteps of
Popes Paul the Sixth and John Paul the Great in establishing warm
personal relationships with prominent leaders of the Orthodox Churches
in the hope that full communion, such as once prevailed, might, God
willing, eventually be restored.
In the November 27th issue of Time magazine, riding "piggy
back" on the cover story dealing with the pope's visit to a hostile
Muslim nation, one of American Catholicism's leading thinkers, Father
Richard John Neuhaus, offered his comment on Pope Benedict's recent
lecture at the University of Regensburg,
the lecture that clarified the
preconditions for a productive dialogue between Christian and Muslim
theologians. This is the lecture which was denounced in furious
demonstrations around the Islamic world, thereby proving the very point
that the pope had made. I reprint Father Neuhaus's commentary here:
"What the
Pope Gets Right"
By Richard John Neuhaus
Benedict XVI's journey to Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, is laden
with the wounds of history both ancient and painfwly contemporary. The
Pope's controversial September 12th lecture in Regensburg, Germany,
quoted a 14th century exchange between a Byzantine Christian Emperor
and a Muslim intellectual in which the Emperor made some distinctly
uncomplimentary observations about Islam. The Pope admitted that the
Emperor's statement was brusque. But his point in reaching so far back
into history was to demonstrate that problems between the Christian
West and Islam long precede today's "war on terrorism."
Although the West, and most notably Europe, may be less
Christian today, Muslims still view it as the Christian West. For a
thousand years, from the days of Muhammad in the 7th century, Islam
enjoyed a run of triumphant conquest, interrupted only momentarily by
the Christian Crusades. The time of conquest lasted until the failed
siege of Vienna in 1683. [The opening skirmish between the Turks and
the newly arrived Christian coalition forces under the command of
Poland's King John Sobieski took place, please note, on September 11,
1683. Was Osama bin Laden sending America and the West an even more
subtle message, namely that he was initiating a reversal of Sobieski's
great victory?] After Vienna, and most dramatically under 19th
and 2oth
century Western colonialism, Islam was sidelined from history-one of
the
main sources of the rage and resentment of today's jihadists.
The
jihadists believe their time of resumed conquest has
come. Through terrorism and the mass immigration of Muslims in Europe,
the jihadists are pressing for the reversal of the military outcome of
1683. This is the context in which Benedict attempted to make a larger
point at Regensburg. He acknowledged that Christians have
sometimes had
a problem, and he suggested that Muslims still have a problem, in
understanding the relationship between faith and coercion. Violence,
said the Pope, is the enemy of reason. Violence has no place in the
advancing of religion. To act against reason is to act against the
nature of God.
The
violent responses to the Pope's speech reflect the
belief of jihadist groups, such as al-Qaeda, that their religion
mandates the use of any means necessary, including suicide bombers and
the mass killing of civilians, to bring about the world's submission to
Islam. In an Oct. 12th "Open Letter to His Holiness Pope Benedict
XVI"
38 distinguished Islamic religious authorities, including Grand Muftis
in Turkey, Egypt, Russia, Syria, Kosovo, Bosnia and Uzbbekistan, wrote
that "jihad ... means struggle, and specifically struggle in the way of
God. This struggle may take many forms, including the use of force."
The signers delicately criticized some acts of Muslim terrorism, such
as the killing of a nun in Somalia, but failed to address the
relationship between religion and politics in Islam, or whether
the
"maintenance of sovereignty" includes, as radical jihadists claim, the
violent re-conquest of Western lands that were once Muslim. Whether
out of conviction or fear of being targeted by terrorists, THE 38 DID
NOT FRONTALLY REJECT THE LINKAGE BETWEEN VIOLENCE AND THE ADVANCE OF
ISLAM [Emphasis added].
Nonetheless,
the open letter was framed in respectful
terms and was welcomed at the Vatican. It is noteworthy, however, that
the Pope has not retreated from his challenge to Islam. Moreover,
under
his leadership, the Vatican has taken a much stronger line in insisting
on "reciprocity" in relations with Islam. Mosques proliferate
throughout the cities in the West, while any expression of non-Islamic
religion is strictly forbidden in many Muslim countries. In the Vatican
and elsewhere, the feeling has been growing that the way of tolerance,
dialogue, and multicultural sensitivity can no longer be a one-way
street. In fact, that shift predates Benedict's papacy. In
his
1994 book, Crossing the Threshold of
Hope, John Paul II said
complimentary things about the piety of Muslims. But John Paul
concluded his discussion of Islam with this: "For [these reasons] not
only the theology but also the anthropology of Islam is very distant
from Christianity."
The theology has to do with the relationship between faith
and reason, the
anthropology with the dignity of the human person that
requires a free and uncoerced response to truth, including religious
truth. God ("Allah" in Arabic), Benedict contends, should be
viewed not
as an arbitrary ruler who issues capricious commands but as the Divine
Reason that human beings through reason and freedom are invited to
share. Speaking
for the Catholic Church, which includes over half of the
more than 2 billion Christians in the world. Benedict says that, in
matters of religion, violence is the enemy of reason, and to act
against
reason is to act against God. Challenging the leaders of the more than
one billion Muslims in the World, he asks them to join in that
affirmation. [Emphasis added throughout]
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