The Pope and his quote
(From Shaun McGregor, one of our Briefing readers in Kurrajong, Australia.)
Reports on the reaction to the Pope's comments are everywhere: Muslims around the world were outraged, church leaders were scrambling to repair the damage, even the Prime Minister put in his 2 cents.
Finding what the Pope had actually said—apart from a few words from a 600-year-old quote—was far more difficult. Finally my googling bore fruit.
What did I find? First and foremost, a very highbrow discussion of the relationship between faith and reason—far above the ability of mere mortals like me to follow. Immersed amongst all the big words was a quote from a 14th-century Pope by the name of Manuel who seemed to be arguing the very old-fashioned idea that compelling someone to change religion by the threat of death was self-evidently a bad thing—that “spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable”. And in Manuel's opinion, Muhammad had been in favour of that sort of unreasonableness—presumably because he thought that's what Muhammad said in the Koran.
The whole reference to Islam was no more than an archaic starting point for a lengthy discussion of a completely different topic, and at no point did the current Pope endorse the quote in any way.
Surely everyone agrees spreading religion by violence is not a good idea (at least everyone who spoke out in the media thought so), and I don't think there can be any doubt that at least some parts of the Koran promote the idea. And let's be honest: there's no doubt that Christians have sometimes been guilty of such ‘unreasonable’ behaviour. The big question is: why can't you talk about it?
Stephen Bates from the British Guardian newspaper put it well:
[I]f you cannot, as part of a lengthy and profound academic lecture, cite a 600-year-old text for fear of stirring the aggravation of noisy politicians halfway around the world, what CAN you do? We might as well all retreat into obscurantism. And keep our mouths shut, for otherwise, who knows who we might offend. And if, as a result of the outrage, some Catholics get killed or their churches burned down by offended scholars and textual exegesists it might be thought that Manuel's original point had rather been made.