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Tuesday, 26 September 2006 14:49 |
 | | Mark West |
"All things are lawful to me, but not all things are profitable."
ÇƒÓ St. Paul
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I guess by now that Pope Benedict has had ample time to ponder the wisdom of those words by St. Paul. Benedictës quotation of the sentiments of a long-forgotten Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, on the validity of conversion by force, caused a firestorm of criticism that led to the Holy Father expressing regret at how his statements were taken by some in the Islamic world.
Of course, comment on the pontiffës misstep has raged across the planet, and, at least in the United States, the surprising thing about most of the commentary is that nobody seems to have actually read what Benedict said in his comments at Regensburg. Theyëre available online, and I recommend that you dredge them up and take a look at them for yourself.
What
comes across, from the text itself, is a sense of Benedict as an old
man, returning to the university where he taught in the late 1950s. He
begins his talk by reminiscing to his audience about the good old days,
when the faculty spent a lot of time hanging out together. Then, since
heës talking to an audience of theologians and their students, he
mentions a book he was reading by a professor named Theodore Khoury, of
Munich, which described a conversation between Manuel II and a "learned
Persian" on their respective religions, in the course of which Manuel
delivers an offensive comment on Islam and jihad.
Benedict uses
the fact of this discourse as a way into the main topic of his
discourse, which is a fairly recondite attempt to justify the notion
that Christianity is rational, and that the supreme diety can only ask
of individuals that which their reason would permit. This rationality
departed from Christian theology with the modernist movements in
Western religious thought, Benedict argues, but the clock can be turned
back and reason ÇƒÓ properly understood ÇƒÓ can once again be married to
theology.
So goes
Benedictës argument. His mention of Manuel II was just a throwaway, a
squib, in a much longer lecture. Professors do such things all the
time, mentioning controversial topics en passant. But popes, like
presidents and other statesmen and women, cannot. Their every utterance
is under scrutiny, and the freedom to say what one likes is a freedom
of the obscure, not of the famous.
Benedictës statement may have made sense in the context of his speech, as the Vatican suggests.
But the standard
to which the man who claims to speak for western Christendom must hold
himself is much higher. As St. Paul would suggest, his statements must
not only be lawful; they must be profitable.
And statements which result in turmoil and disorder, I would argue, can scarcely be defined as "profitable."
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Mark West is a professor of mass communications at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
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