Revisiting Benedict’s Blunder: Unanswered Questions

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  On January 4, 2007, a most knowledgeable expert from St. Louis University on relations between Islam and Christianity, Professor John Renard, posted one of the best of the literally hundreds of articles published over the past few months on Pope Benedict XVI’s elocution to the assembled scholars at the University of Regensberg, Germany.  The major theme of Professor Renard’s article, “Benedict XVI and Islam: In Search of Balance,” was captured in a sentence near the end: “From the perspective of the accusing majority, bigotry is always right, always upstanding, always patriotic, always beyond reproach … and always a projection of what accusers fail to recognize in themselves.”

  Is it possible that Pope Benedict XVI, known for a generation as Cardinal Karl Ratzinger and as the right-hand man of Pope John Paul II, could have been so ignorant as the seemingly obvious interpretation of what he said would indicate?  Cardinal Ratzinger was always a hard taskmaster as defensor fides in defending the teachings of Christianity and of all religion against what 19th-century moralists very correctly called “modernism,” meaning the substitution of human arrogance for God. 

  This is why his elocution at Regensberg is so valuable in defining the role of a true university as a center for the pursuit of universal knowledge through the interdependent disciplines of faith and reason.  No Muslim could have stated the Islamic position better.  As Chairman of the Crescent University Foundation, which was blocked by 9/11 from founding a Muslim university modeled after Cambridge and Oxford with a billion-dollar budget planned by the Year 2010, I would gladly accept the Pope’s statement at Regensberg as a founding document.

  My view was published in the online journal, http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, on September 26th, 2006, under the title, “Benedict’s Blunder: Time for Muslims to Emphasize the Positive.”  This was followed up with a serious caveat in my subsequent article in TAM on October 7, 2006, entitled “Will Blunders Never Cease? Vatican Lumps Cultural Relativism with Religious Pluralism.”  If the Holy Father indeed does confuse relativism with its opposite, this would suggest that he could have seriously been attacking Islam for the exact opposite of what it indeed has always stood for, despite countless actions by many Muslims to the contrary. 

  His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, in his books often portrayed hostility to Islam, despite the general view that he was open-minded, but never to the extent that he would demonize it as would be suggested in the Regensberg quote from the Byzantine emperor, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

  Questions not only remain but multiply.  When will there be adequate follow-up to the almost universally ignored footnote in the original text of the Regensberg talk to the professors at Pope Benedict XVI’s old alma mater?  In this footnote, the reader was alerted to the intention to follow up this oral delivery with an written expansion replete with footnotes.  Were we justified in presuming that this referred to a plan to elaborate on the absurdly misleading quotes in the form of an encyclical on faith and reason in religion?  Where is the badly needed scholarly follow-up?  Merely to say that Muslims have misunderstood what was intended is like Muslims saying “Don’t blame me for 9/11.”

  The flap is over and the martyred nun is buried, but legitimate questions will dog scholars for years and decades unless they are answered and answered soon.  I seem to be in a minority of one in giving the Holy Father the benefit of the doubt, but the absence of any follow-up, at least that I have seen, is beginning to make even me doubt the sincerity of his subsequent, inadequate attempts at damage control.  John Reynard is one of the most knowledgeable experts anywhere about Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s knowledge of Islam as a religion.  He should take it as a personal challenge to address the unanswered questions, perhaps by providing us with the first draft of an interfaith encyclical.  Truth usually bubbles up from the bottom.