Catholic World News News Feature

Powerful papal challenge to Islam, secularism September 12, 2006

Pope Benedict XVI issued direct challenges both to the Islamic world and to secular rationalism, in a powerful lecture delivered on September 12 at the University of Regensburg.

Speaking to an audience of scientists and scholars, at the university where he himself once taught theology, the Holy Father argued that Christianity welcomes intellectual inquiry and always reveres the truth. The academic world, he said, should not be bound by a fear of addressing in turn that question raised by faith.

The Pope opened his lecture by quoting a scholarly work of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, writing late in the 14th century, about the difference between the Christian and Islamic understanding of God. Tracing the emperor's argument on the use of force and the concept of "holy war," the Pope pointedly quoted from the Qu'ran (surah 2, 256): "There is no compulsion in religion."

Pope Benedict then quoted the emperor's challenge to his scholarly interlocutor:

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.

From the Christian perspective, the Pontiff continued, any attempt to use religious faith as justification for violent attacks is impossible. "Violence is is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul," he said.

Attempting to convert someone by the use of violence is also an absurdity to Christians, the Pope continued, because the use of violence is an attempt to compel someone, rather than reason with him, and that approach is foreign to the God of the Bible. The Pope noted that "not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature."

In fact, the Christian conception of God is summarized by St. John, who refers to "the Word," using the Greek term logos. The Pope observed: "Logos means both reason and word-- a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason."

For centuries, theologians sought to follow reason in the study of God's Word, the Pope told his academic audience. In recent times there has been a reaction against that effort, and an effort to convert theology into a "scientific" endeavor, governed by the same rules as mathematics and the experimental sciences. The Pope continued with a critique of the modern project, insisting that faith and reason should not be viewed as opposing forces. The modern approach to theology also carries a serious risk, he said, because "any attempt to maintain theology’s claim to be 'scientific' would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self."

Pope Benedict emphasized that he did not intend to suggest that all modern thought is misguided. "The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly," he said. But a constructive critique of modern secularism can surely be undertaken, he said, without worrying that the effort means "putting aside insights of the modern age."

The fundamental challenge that the Pope issued to the modern academic world was simple and direct: Are scholars prepared to speak rationally about the intellectual claims posed by religious believers? He said: "A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."