When Pope Benedict XVI Was Right, and the World Wrong

Eight Years After the Regensburg Lecture by Pope Benedict, Cameroon Concord's Agbaw-Ebai Maurice Ashley (AMDG) tells of the significance of the greatest lecture in modern history.

                                            Recently, Pope Francis dispatched Fernando Cardinal Filoni, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples to Iraq, for a special mission: to bring the comfort, aid and support of the Holy Father and the Catholic Church to the persecuted Christians of the country. What had happened there was unprecedented in resent world history: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had declared a caliphate after the capture of city of Mosul, and had offered three options to the Christians: convert to Islam; pay a high tax for being Christian; or die! For the first time in 1600 years, no mass was celebrated in the city of Mosul! Thousands of Christians took to the Kurdish mountains, with no food; water, clothes, no nothing! As if that wasn’t enough, we have been witnessing gruesome daily killings of hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens by these militiamen of the Caliphate, in Iraq and Syria, unimaginable proportion of violence and killings, all in the name of God!

 These timorous events have once more brought to the fore the burning question of religion and violence, for even though one might rightfully argue that a majority of Muslims are not terrorists, it happens to be the case that a majority of terrorists are Muslims. In addition, the reticence in condemning these actions by moderate Muslims remains a puzzle. It was only after the beheading of a second US journalist, Steven Sotloff, on September 2, 2014, that the Organization of US Muslims judged it fit to condemn ISIS! Not even the sight of fleeing old women and children, forced to sleep under the cold; the destruction of ancient religious sites; the guillotining of thousands of men, women and children by ISIS, was capable of moving many Muslim groups to offer condemnations. With these events in mind, some are beginning to ask whether, if anything, Benedict was right after all at Regensburg?

 When Benedict XVI delivered his now famous lecture at the Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg on Tuesday, 12 September 2006, hell was let loose on the Holy Father! Less than twenty-four hours after the lecture, effigies of the Pope were being burnt in Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, and many other parts of the Muslim world. Christians were targeted and killed in Egypt, Somalia, Tunisia, et cetera. Even within the ranks of the Catholic Church, some high clergymen suffering from a certain politically correct Islamophilism made abrasive remarks about the lecture and Benedict! The Pope was accused of being insensitive to Muslim sentiments; he was accused of insulting Islam; he was accused of declaring that Islam was a violent religion!

 It was a lachrymose moment, especially when the cards at play were obviously false vis-à-vis the truth and profundity of the lecture. A citation made by Benedict of the erudite Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, to the effect that “show me just what Mohammed 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.” The headlines followed: “Pope says Islam is a Violent Religion!” Few bothered to read the preceding two lines in which Benedict himself had declared that this position of the emperor was “a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general.”

 Of course, all these caricatures did not do justice to the lecture, which, to my opinion, was the best, and most insightful lecture ever delivered by a Supreme Pontiff that analyzed a burning contemporary issue, namely, violence in the name of religion, in the name of God! In his typically placid style, Benedict apologized that parts of his lecture came across as offensive to some sectors of the Muslim world. In a meeting with diplomats from Muslim countries accredited to the Holy See, the Pope called for a much more engaged commitment to dialogue and peace on the part of all religions, once more pointing out that violence should always be eschewed by religious adherents. He did not repeal a single syllable of the lecture! In the context of not only ISIS but also other similar radical groups such as Boko Haram in Nigeria and Northern Cameroon, perhaps it is fitting to recall some of the lessons taught by this son of Bavaria in that breath-taking lecture. Put differently, eight years after Regensburg, what lessons does that lecture still teach us today about religion and violence?

 At Regensburg, and facing ISIS and Boko Haram today, we are once more reminded that violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. God, Benedict said then, citing emperor Paleologus, “is not pleased by blood.” Faith in God is born of the soul, not of the body. This implies, Benedict argues in tandem with Paleologus that whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.

 The decisive lesson from Regensburg vis-à-vis violence and religion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. At issue here is the place of rationality in the way God acts, and in the human response to the action of God. If God is not bound even by the category of reason, according to Islamic voluntarism, then what will be required from its followers will be obedience, not intellectual agreement nor rational obedience. Faith easily becomes a political tool that takes up cutlasses and guns, as we see in the activities of ISIS and Boko Haram. The effects are terrorism and religious fanaticism.

 If, on the other hand, one adheres to the Kantian notion of setting aside reason to make room for faith, or vice versa, then the obvious consequences are what Benedict righty referred to as pathologies of both faith and reason. Reason becomes ossified and petrified, uninspiring and boring, undercutting the very gains of the Enlightenment properly understood. History testifies to the atomic bomb and others, products of a reason gone wild!

 In a debate with Jürgen Habermas in the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, on January 19, 2004, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, when talking about the pre-political moral foundations of a free state, pointed to the necessity of a mutual restriction of religion and reason. In a post-secular society, there has to be the willingness to learn from each other, seen in self-limitation on both sides in the polyphony of relations.

 May be, as the world wrestles with the repugnant images stemming from ISIS and Boko Haram activities, reminding ourselves of these abiding lessons from Regensburg on the eight anniversary of the lecture might be a worthwhile effort.