Papa, don't quote
CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that he was "deeply sorry" about the angry reaction to his recent remarks about Islam, which he said came from a text that did not reflect his personal opinion.I love how the article hedges things. The Pope "said" the words that offended came from text, "some of" the teachings, etc. (The text quoted actually asserted that anything new in Mohammed's teachings was "only evil and inhuman.") You can read the full text of the Pope's remarks here. As any reasonable person would presume merely from knowing that the Pope was quoting a source, he was not advocating the claim of a 14th-century Byzantine emperor. What a shock.
Despite the statement, protests and violence persisted across the Muslim world, with churches set ablaze in the West Bank and a hard-line Iranian cleric saying the pope was united with President Bush to "repeat the Crusades."
An Italian nun also was gunned down in a Somali hospital where she worked, and the Vatican expressed concern that the attack was related to the outrage over the pope's remarks.
Benedict sparked the controversy when, in a speech Tuesday to university professors during a pilgrimage to his native Germany, he cited the words of a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam's founder, as "evil and inhuman."
Reaction to the quote in parts of the Islamic world does suggest an answer to the central rhetorical question of the Pope's address:
[A]s far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?
posted at 12:05 PM
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