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19 Sep 06
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Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that he was “deeply sorry” about the angry reaction to his recent remarks about Islam, which he said came from a text that didn't reflect his personal opinion. “These [words] were in fact a quotation from a medieval text which do not in any way express my personal thought,” Benedict told pilgrims at his summer palace of Castel Gandolfo, outside Rome, according to a report by The Associated Press.
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“A clash ensues only when Islam or Christianity is misconstrued or manipulated for political or ideological ends.”
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“And given that Islam and Christianity worship the one God, Creator of heaven and earth, there is ample room for agreement and cooperation between them,”
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the tradition most ruthlessly excluded in the first few centuries of the faith was one devoted to extreme violence, the Kharijites.
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“Truth and Tolerance,” in which he wrote that “religion demands the making of distinctions, distinctions between different forms of religion and distinctions within a religion itself, so as to find the way to its higher points.” One of the pities of Regensburg is that he made no such distinctions about Islam.
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“Historically, there is no more basis for arguing that Islam is irrational than there is for arguing the same about Christianity or Judaism. In all three you can find tremendous discussion about revelation and reason, and there are people in all three who have landed outside the rational. Islam has bloody borders right now, but Christianity has certainly been bloody, as has Judaism in its more extreme forms.”
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by speaking of jihad without alluding to Christianity’s dark history of violence in the name of God—the Crusades, forced conversions, pogroms, the Inquisition—Benedict seemed to be denouncing Islam while failing to acknowledge that any religion, including his own, can be manipulated and perverted to evil ends.
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“We must seek paths of reconciliation and learn to live with respect for each other’s identity,”
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“a hard-headed conversation”
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“A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures,” Benedict said, “is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.”
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In the stormy aftermath of the address—on Saturday two churches in the West Bank were bombed
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“It’s a very different direction for the papacy, and reflects Benedict XVI’s worries about secularism, Islam and a declining Christian vigor in Europe.”
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an early Qu’ranic “surah” (chapter), which says “there is no compulsion in religion”
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If the goal, in Lombardi’s words, had been to articulate “a clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation for violence,” then Benedict failed.
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Roughly put, his argument was this: to Benedict, Islam’s conception of God so stresses God’s will that God can be understood to command the irrational.
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