How Many Divisions Does the Pope Have?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

How would you like to be in Pope Benedict XVI’s shoes right now? He needs all the prayers that a billion Catholics are offering up for the duration of his current visit to Turkey. They, along with countless others who wish Benedict well, will thank God if he returns in one piece. For in the age of the global jihad, the most dangerous thing a man can do is to tell the truth about Islam.

If, as Turkey’s senior Islamic official, Ali Bardakoglu, told the pope on his arrival, Islam is a religion of “vast tolerance” that rejects all violence and terror and “assumes that killing an innocent person is a heavy crime and sin,” it is singularly extravagant of the Turkish government to assign an army of 15,000 security men to one frail old priest. How many divisions does it take to protect the pope?

If, as Mr. Bardakoglu also lectured the pope, it is “Islamophobic” to say that Islam “was spread over the world by the sword,” why is it that almost all the major conflicts in the world today occur on the fault lines between Islam and other faiths? Even in Turkey, the most secular of Muslim countries, persecution has reduced the proportion of non-Muslims in the population from a majority in Byzantine times to less than 1% today. It is still a crime in Turkey to refer to the Armenian genocide. And it is still dangerous to be an observant Christian or Jew. Synagogues in Istanbul were attacked by Islamist terrorists in 1985 and 2003, killing scores and wounding hundreds of Turkey’s tiny Jewish minority.

No, the reason that Turkey is mounting its largest ever peacetime security operation right now is that a significant proportion of Muslims — nobody knows how many — want the pope killed for daring to quote a remark by a 14th-century Byzantine emperor that was critical of Islam in his famous speech at Regensburg in September. A novel that glories in the imagined assassination of Pope Benedict is a bestseller in the bookstores of Istanbul. This is hardly surprising: During the Regensburg furor, Mr. Bardakoglu told Muslims that the pope is “filled with enmity” and the spirit of the Crusades.

Even Prime Minister Erdogan initially claimed he could not find time for a meeting. Realizing that snubbing the pope might not improve Turkey’s image in Europe, he thought better of it, and a brief airport encounter took place. Yet Mr. Erdogan just could not resist ambushing the man who was supposedly his guest. After their private audience, Mr. Erdogan emerged to wow the waiting press by claiming that the pope had dropped his opposition to Turkish membership of the European Union. Mr. Erdogan then flew off to the NATO summit in Riga, leaving embarrassed Vatican officials to issue denials.

The pope must have had mixed feelings as he paid his respects at the secular shrine to the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk. Abolishing the caliphate, banning the fez, the veil, and other Muslim symbols in order to secularize the Turkish state was a great achievement. But Mr. Erdogan and his ruling party are Islamists, dedicated to tearing down the wall that Ataturk erected to separate religion and politics. It is no accident that Mr. Erdogan refused to allow his country to be used by American forces against Saddam Hussein and still refuses to support Iraqi democracy.

On a visit to Oxford a few years ago, Mr. Erdogan took questions from the press. I asked him what he thought was meant when he was described as a “moderate Islamist,” which seemed to me an oxymoron. The prime minister chose to interpret this as a question about Islam, rather than Islamism — apparently he does not recognize a distinction between religious and political Islam. “Moderate Islam,” he said, did not exist, except in the minds of ignorant people in the West. Islam was one and indivisible. To divide Muslims into “moderates” and “extremists” was itself Islamophobic. But he thought Turkey should be — already was — a European country.

Under these circumstances, to hold what Benedict called “an authentic dialogue between Christians and Muslims, based on truth” is by no means easy. It would be absurd to expect the pope to repeat in Istanbul his critique of the role of reason in Islamic theology. Benedict may sit on the throne of St. Peter, but he has no desire to emulate his predecessor’s martyrdom.

But the historical symbolism of the pope’s presence in this “bridge between Europe and Asia” cannot be overstated, for all that the Vatican insists that the visit is pastoral rather than political. In the Muslim world, the pastoral is the political.

Benedict’s original and primary purpose was to reconcile Catholic and Orthodox Christians from the consequences of a schism that goes back to the 11th century. Benedict’s dream of healing a millennial theological rift will not be realized in his lifetime, but the fact that he is prepared to risk his life to meet the patriarch of what the Greek Orthodox stubbornly persist in calling Constantinople proves that this pope is nothing if not courageous — and ambitious.

It is from that seminal epoch, too, that the pope selected another of his significant quotations, this time from one of his most controversial predecessors: Pope Gregory VII. This Tuscan monk, known as Hildebrand, began what the great medievalist Karl Leyser called “the first European revolution”: the struggle, which convulsed Europe, for what Gregory called the libertas ecclesiae, the “liberty of the church.” Long before the Reformation, this Gregorian revolution pitted church against state over an issue that is still alive in China, where the communist-controlled state church has just installed a new bishop whom the Vatican refuses to recognize.

For the sake of this far-reaching libertas, Gregory was prepared to sacrifice everything, and he expected his clergy to do so too — it was he who established celibacy as the norm for Catholic priests, and he who damned the sin of simony, the sale of ecclesiastical offices. Gregory brought the most powerful man in Europe, Emperor Henry IV, literally to his knees, as Henry had to wait in the snow outside the papal castle at Canossa to be forgiven. But Henry broke his word and Gregory ended his days in exile. He was vindicated only posthumously.

It was this Gregory, then, whom Benedict quoted thanking a Muslim prince for his benevolent treatment of his Christian subjects. Christians and Muslims owed such charity to one another, Gregory wrote, “because we believe in one God, albeit in a different manner.” Note that this goodwill was to be reciprocal. When Muslim rulers refused to allow Christian pilgrims access to the holy land, Gregory’s successor, Urban II, declared the First Crusade in order to enforce that access.

If Benedict XVI is now taking his inspiration from Gregory VII, we can expect no compromise from him on the issue of religious freedom. Nor will he retract what he said in Regensburg: The Judeo-Christian West believes in one God, the God of logos and love — not an irrational God who rewards terrorists. The pope has given his Muslim interlocutors a choice: Islam can have an authentic dialogue with the West, based on mutual respect and toleration, or it can have jihad. It cannot have both.


The New York Sun

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