PINOY HACK

When Pope Benedict XVI quoted during his visit at Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg in Germany.

Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread the sword by the faith he preached

The pope’s intentions in discussing “holy war” were presumably good—he approvingly quoted an early Qu’ranic “surah” (chapter), which says “there is no compulsion in religion”—and he was right to raise the issue of how to confront and combat the religious extremism that gives rise to terror and violence. Sadly, though, he did so clumsily and obliquely, and, far from opening a constructive conversation, instead exacerbated tensions between Christianity and Islam. The episode also marks the first widely noted break with the spirit of the papacy of Benedict’s beloved predecessor. A reassuring pastor, John Paul II was the first pope to visit a mosque (in Damascus, Syria, in 2000), and he managed to project an air of ecumenicism while holding fast to the fundamentals of faith and doctrine. “This is clearly not John Paul II,” says R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. “It’s a very different direction for the papacy, and reflects Benedict XVI’s worries about secularism, Islam and a declining Christian vigor in Europe.” Via MSNBC

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