Hey friends, before we dive into today’s article on Pope Benedict and the Regensburg Address, just a quick update: our book club has voted to read Moby-Dick next!
We’ll be reading it over three discussions, with our first one covering Chapters 1–40 on October 13 at 12pm ET. So grab a copy and start reading… I’m really looking forward to this one.
Also: on Sunday, I’ll be announcing something HUGE that I’ve been working on for a while. Stay tuned for that, and now enjoy today’s piece!
Two decades ago, Pope Benedict XVI lectured at the University of Regensburg (Germany) and challenged the Islamic world to debate the place of reason in religion. The result? Muslim wailing, gnashing of teeth, and violence, directed at Christians in general and Catholics in particular. Islamic political leaders fulminated, variously, that the leader of the world’s largest Christian denomination didn’t understand “real Islam”; that he must “retract his erroneous, ugly and unfortunate remarks and apologize to the Islamic world”; even that the UN should criminalize “defamation of Islam.” Numerous Islamic clerics agreed that Benedict simply didn’t understand Islam, had “insulted its religion and prophet” and even “threatened world peace.” Even some Christian leaders—like fellow Catholic Cardinal Bergoglio—later Benedict’s successor as Pope Francis I—criticized the lecture, stating that “[his] statements don’t reflect my own opinions.”
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Unreasonable (and clueless about denominational differences) Muslim mobs engaged in actual, not just verbal, attacks—attacking Anglican and Orthodox churches in the Palestinian territories. Assyrian Christian churches were also bombed in Iraq and an Assyrian priest decapitated (a favorite tactic of Islamic fundamentalists). Somali Muslims killed a nun working at a Mogadishu hospital. A Pakistani terrorist group called for killing Pope Benedict.
What in God’s name did the head of the Catholic church say that was so inflammatory to Muslims?
Continue reading below.