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Catholic World News News Feature

Islam was not Pope's focus, spokesman repeats September 14, 2006

Father Federico Lombardi, the new director of the Vatican press office, has renewed his argument that Pope Benedict XVI did not intend a condemnation of Islam in his speech on September 12 at the University of Regensburg.

When he denounced the use of violence in the cause of religion, Father Lombardi said, the Pope was setting out "an important starting point in the speech, but it is not the aim of the speech."

"It wasn't among the Pope's intentions to make a detailed study of jihad or of Muslim thought on this subject, much less to offend the sensibilities of Muslim believers," the Vatican spokesman told reporters on September 14. On the contrary, he said, Pope Benedict intends "to cultivate an attitude of respect and dialogue toward other religions and cultures, and clearly toward Islam."

The central point of the Pope's presentation at the university, Father Lombardi said, was that the tendency to dismiss religious attitudes and arguments is a serious flaw in Western thought today. He cited a key sentence from the Pope's lecture: "Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions."

The Vatican spokesman sought to direct reporters' attention to the central theme of the Pope's talk-- which, he said, was the need to include theological reflection in academic life. The Pope's speech, Father Lombardi said, was a scholarly argument that "an idea of reason reduced simply to the criteria of natural or positive science cannot respond to the needs of man today."

The Pope, he said, advocated a broader vision of human knowledge, in which "the religious dimension is essential." This broad vision was contrasted against an approach to knowledge limited to "purely mathematical-scientific of experimental criteria."

The speech in Regensburg also show the rich scholarly and cultural background that Pope Benedict possesses, the Jesuit spokesman said. "In about 10 minutes," he observed, "the Pope was able to give us an enormously broad view of cultural history and of the history of theology, bringing it all up to date."