Folks,
One of my favorite countries is the Vatican, the world’s smallest, with less
than a 1,000
inhabitants and voting limited to cardinals who mostly do not live there and
under 80 years
old. It has income of some 250 million dollars per year, mostly donations and
investments.
Big business is banking and printing at the Vatican. If the $250 mil was all
donations from
from the world's 1 billion catholics, that would work out to dues of about 25
cents each per
year to belong to the club. And you gotta love a country where the gift shops
are an
important revenue source. If I was in the rag trade, I’d design a hooded
sweatshirt in white
and yellow, the Vatican colors, with a high relief of the Pope’s crest
embroidered on the front.
I would have bought one when I was there.
Whenever there is a controversy over what the Pope said, I am confident of one
thing: the
Pope is being misquoted. It is guaranteed the press will get the story exactly
wrong. The
antidote is to simply read what the Pope said, and everything he says is posted
on the
vatican.va website (no, the vatican’s website is NOT www.vatican.com).
Now the problem with reading what the Pope says is popes are terribly well
educated, in
several languages, and are usually addressing world-class intellects. Popes are
always
circumspect, and often what they do not say is as important as what they
actually say.
The current controversy got started when the Pope, addressing some German
bishops at a
Catholic university, made the point that there should be truth-in-advertising in
Catholic
Universities; to wit: Catholic Universities should be Catholic, and it is the
bishops job to see
to it. It is the Universities where the questions of the day ought to be
handled. Pope John
Paul II made the same point, and met with much resistance.
A cultural concern in Europe is whether Europe is being overrun by Moslems, a
question of
the day. I can go back to the 1970’s and say “folks, we’ve seen this all
before...” But the
Pope can go back farther, to 1391, and say ‘we’ve seen this all before.”
He brought up a time when Islam had moved into a militant phase and a Byzantine
Emperor
arguing religion with a learned Moslem says “"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". As a side note, the context in
which the pope
makes this quote is one of criticism of the emperor who said it.
Now, this scene brings many ideas to his audience’s minds. We hear the same
thing said
today about Islam, said by people in power. People criticizing militant Islam
are missing the
problem and barking up the wrong tree when they whip up fear of militant Islam.
Militant
Islam has no power, is usually called stateless, except in highly compromised
areas like
Lebanon.
The Pope’s audience knows the Moslems who are immigrating into European capitals
and
building grand mosques and “taking over,’ as some fear, are not suicide bombers,
they are
adherents to the earlier peaceful, powerless Mohammed. They are the ones who
may grow to
a majority in Europe. (The building of those mosques is aided by
socialist/activist anti-
Christian city councils who issue building permits to a few moslems who want to
build a
mosque, yet harass any bishop who wants to repair a church).
Now, what his audience knows quite well is the history of the spread of Islam.
Islam spread
easily and relatively peacefully over lands where heretical Christians were
dominant. And by
quoting this emperor, one of the last Byzantine emperors, the pope recalls this
emperor’s
error in assessing the situation, and intimates even mere schismatics will fall
to Islam.
What checked Islam's advance? The Pope carefully reminds his listeners.
integrated
christianity, authentic christianity, specifically at Vienna, as his audience
knows. Most of the
Pope’s talk recounts how Christianity grew organically with Greek and Roman
science and
philosophy, as well as Jerusalem’s faith. the Pope argues modern universities
are wrong to
teach disintegration of the organic whole. (The Pope calls it de-hellenization
in his talk.)
So what was the Pope’s message? “Worried about militant Islam? You are barking
up the
wrong tree. Your defeat, if it comes, will be at the hands of peaceful Moslems.
How to defend
yourselves? Try Christianity, and better yet, teach it at your universities.
Let Jesus back into
school.” The kind of thing you’d expect a pope to say.
If anything, the Pope is criticizing Christians, not Moslems. He is saying
worry about the
beam in your own eye before you worry about the speck in someone else’s.
So how did this get so out of hand? My guess is the pope was probably burned by
some tenured biology
professor at a Catholic college, embarrassed by Catholicism, who posted to some
extremist
islamic website only the "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" as something “the pope said” in hopes of embarrassing the pope and
fogging
his message. I personally know several tenured professors who have done as
much, and
would do worse if given the chance. If so, whoever the Judas was that did this
got a nun working
at an orphanage in Somalia killed. It’s a bishops job to knock these people
into line.
Instead, we have the Pope bogged down with defusing an unfair situation, on top
of his job
as supreme pontiff. Anyone who would like to get the Pope’s blessing on a new
line of
sweatshirts for the Vatican museum store will just have to wait until this blows
over.
John
