Time for Benedict?

There seems to be a collective holding of breath while Pope Benedict heads to Turkey next week, and a lot of speculation about the image that precedes him. Time magazine has a lengthy cover story this week. 

Right up front it sets the stage for this papal visit by recalling John Paul’s 1979 successful journey to Turkey and his image as a “uniter, not a divider”, thus giving readers the cue to regard Benedict as the latter.

That was 1979 and Pope John Paul II. But when Benedict XVI travels to Turkey next week on his first visit to a Muslim country since becoming Pope last year, he is unlikely to cloak himself in a downy banner of brotherhood, the way his predecessor did 27 years ago. Instead, Benedict, 79, will arrive carrying a different reputation: that of a hard-knuckle intellect with a taste for blunt talk and interreligious confrontation.

“A reputation for interreligious confrontation”? That’s just reckless and irresponsible.

Just 19 months into his tenure, the Pope has become as much a moral lightning rod as a theologian; suddenly, when he speaks, the whole world listens.

Good.

And so what takes place over four days in three Turkish cities has the potential to define his papacy–and a good deal more.

Few people saw this coming.

Except for Vatican watchers, orthodox Catholics, and the faithful followers of Cardinal Ratzinger’s thought and teachings. 

Nobody truly expected Benedict to be a mere caretaker Pope–his sometimes ferocious 24-year tenure as the Vatican’s theological enforcer and John Paul’s right hand suggested anything but passivity.

Ferocious? What qualifies this description? And the cliche phrase ‘Vatican enforcer’ is old and uninformed. And yet, the analysis sets itself up as very familiar with Benedict.

But this same familiarity argued against surprises. The new Pontiff was expected to sustain John Paul’s conservative line on morality and church discipline and focus most of his energies on trimming the Vatican bureaucracy and battling Western culture’s “moral relativism.” Although acknowledged as a brilliant conservative theologian, Benedict lacked the open-armed charisma of his predecessor.

Why do they have to compare these two popes so much? “They” have been quite surprised during his papacy at just how charming Benedict actually is.

…this year he has emerged as a far more compelling and complex figure than anyone had imagined.

Again, only to anyone who did not know Ratzinger.

And much of that has to do with his willingness to confront what some people feel is today’s equivalent of the communist scourge–the threat of Islamic violence. The topic is extraordinarily fraught. There are, after all, a billion or so nonviolent Muslims on the globe, the Roman Catholic Church’s own record in the religious-mayhem department is hardly pristine…

Of course they had to get that in there.

But by speaking out last September in Regensburg, Germany, about the possible intrinsic connection between Islam and violence, the Pontiff suddenly became a lot more interesting. Even when Islamic extremists destroyed several churches and murdered a nun in Somalia, Benedict refused to retract the essence of his remarks.

“Even when” seems to suggest the alternative that Benedict might have capitulated to these acts of hostility and violence against Christians and taken back what he said to appease the perpetrators. They don’t know Benedict.

In one imperfect but powerful stroke, he departed from his predecessor’s largely benign approach to Islam and discovered an issue that might attract even the most religiously jaded. In doing so, he managed (for better or worse) to reanimate the clash-of-civilizations discussion by focusing scrutiny on the core question of whether Islam, as a religion, sanctions violence. He was hailed by cultural conservatives worldwide. Says Helen Hull Hitchcock, a St. Louis, Mo., lay leader who heads the conservative Catholic organization Women for Faith and Family: “He has said what needed to be said.”

They had good sense in interviewing Helen Hitchcock, though the rest of her insight didn’t make the story.

Good to see that Time also turned to Amy Welborn for comment.

The widely read Catholic blogger Amy Welborn says, “I think there’s a pretty widespread fed-up-ness with Islamic sensitivity. I agree that elements of Islam that either explicitly espouse violence or are less than aggressive in combatting it need to be challenged and nudged, [just as] I would like to see the Pope continue to challenge and nudge people of all different religions–Christian and non-Christian–to look at the suffering of people.” She thinks that, given the heat he’s taking in parts of the Islamic world, his willingness to go through with his Turkish trip is “so brave.”

Especially in the face of things like this:

Although modest, sales of a Turkish novel subtitled Who Will Kill the Pope in Istanbul? (the book fingers everyone but Islamists) have increased as his trip approaches. The country is expected to place about 22,000 policemen on the streets of Istanbul while he is there. “This is a very high-risk visit,” says Cengiz Aktar, a Turkish political scientist. “There is a vocal nationalist movement here, and there is the Pope, a man who likes to play with fire.”

Actually, Benedict will probably try to stay away from matches during his successive stops in Ankara, Ephesus and Istanbul. Speculation about what the Pope will say and do on this visit has consumed Rome for weeks. Papal watchers say Benedict cannot out-Regensburg himself, but gauzy talk about the compatibility of Christianity and Islam isn’t likely either. Over the course of his career, Benedict has been averse to reciting multifaith platitudes, an aversion that has sharpened as he has focused on Islam. And that’s what could make his coming encounter with the Muslim world, says David Gibson, author of The Rule of Benedict, either “a step toward religious harmony or toward holy war.”

The writers analyze some of Benedict’s pontifical acts, trying to figure him out.

In Rome, he removed Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, a relatively dovish Islam expert, as head of the Vatican’s office on interreligious dialogue and replaced an ongoing study of Christian violence during the Crusades with one on Islamic violence today. And he has stepped up the Vatican’s insistence on reciprocity–demanding the same rights for Christians in Muslim-majority countries that Muslims enjoy in the West.

Archbishop Fitzgerald has been moved to Cairo and into a position at a place where he can be extremely instrumental in dialogue with some of the top scholars in the Muslim world. Benedict dissolved the Council for Interreligious Dialogue into the pontifical Council for Cultures in a deft move that eludes a lot of media still. And…what would be the argument against reciprocity, by the way?

That’s something the media should focus on at least as much as they have covered his Regensburg address. But that coverage has not widely been deep and thorough, and distortions of it are still being used to incite hostility.

The reaction to the speech was intense. Small bands of Muslim thugs burned Benedict in effigy, attacked the churches in the Middle East and, on Sept. 17, murdered the nun in Somalia. Over the course of a month, Benedict issued a series of partial apologies and corrections unprecedented in the papacy. He expressed regret to those offended, summoned a group of Muslim notables to make the point personally and disowned the “evil and inhuman” slur on Muhammad as Manuel’s sentiment but not his own. He even issued a second version of the speech to reflect those sentiments.

But he never retracted his more basic association of Islam with unreason and violence. Indeed, if he had, it would have caused considerable confusion–if only because the behavior of the extremists seemed, at least to some, to prove his point.

Exactly. 

No editorialist could express frustration with him for initiating the row without condemning the subsequent carnage–and a good many decided his only fault was in speaking truth.

His only fault was in speaking truth. Now that would have made a good lead for this story.