Political Cartoon of the Century

So Much for Papal Infallibility

Well, that wasn’t very helpful was it? I am referring, of course, to Pope Benedict’s ham-fisted challenge to Islam to prove itself a non-violent religion. ‘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,’ quoth the Pope this week, citing 14th Century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos.

Now the Armchair Historian appreciates historical references more than most, but this one strikes me as specious and spectacularly unenlightened. Consciously reaching back to a pre-Enlightenment source, especially to a Christian emperor of what is now Islamic Turkey, bespeaks intellectual juvenility unbecoming a modern global statesman.

Certainly Islam deserves to be challenged from within and from without. This youngest of the world’s great religions has much trouble in its tent, having failed to negotiate a harmonious entry into our now very small modern world, thus allowing itself to be defined by the death worshipping extremists of its lunatic fringe.

Indeed the entire world waits with baited breath for Islam to slough off its adolescent cloak of petulance so it can reclaim its heritage as a source of light among the family of men. Will this take ten more years, or fifty, or another century, or the better part of this fledgling millennium? No one knows, not the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Grand Ayatollahs or the Grand Muftis, not a roomful of Rabbis or even the Dali Lama. Though many of these learned leaders might dispute the form and even the premise of the question, the fate of the world rests on the answer.

More important than the environmental health of the Earth, than increased prosperity, than the eradication of disease, the maturation of Islam is the overriding issue of the current age. Which is why the Pope’s public entrée into the debate is so terribly disappointing.

He might have extended a hand of empathy to the vast majority of Muslims who are dismayed at the highjacking of their faith by a dogmatically corrupt minority. He might have pointed out that when the 14^th Century Christian Emperor made his challenge to Islam, Christianity was roughly the same age as Islam is now, yet sadly was more than a century away from halting the religiously inspired slaughter of infidels by Christians and even of Christians by other Christians.

In short, he might have said ‘Christianity had a difficult adolescence when we were 1400 years old too, so we know of whence we speak.’ He could have gone on to observe how Christianity made terrible mistakes, Protestants beheading Catholics, and Catholics torturing Jews, to name just a couple of depredations. He could have pointed out that as unspeakably horrible as these atrocities were, they occurred before technology brought us all into a small world studded with weapons of mass destruction, observing that the stakes are therefore profoundly higher today than in those relatively simple times.

He could have proposed a summit of the leaders of the world’s great religions, a Global Ecumenical Council, charged with identifying the truths that unite us, in order to repudiate the forces that benight us.

But he didn’t. He failed, proving yet again that we’re all just human.