Regensburg Revisited

     A New Film To Be Released in October – “Bella”

      From Carl A. Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus:  “I urge all of our members and their families to support this film because it gives us a unique opportunity to advance the very goals and principles the Knights were founded upon – faith, family and the dignity of human life.”  Winner of the Toronto Film Festival’s “People’s Choice Award,” “Bella” is the story of heroism in the face of a strong temptation to the wrong thing.  “One day can change your life forever,” is the motto of the movie, and the line – by the lead actor – sums up the providential aspect of this film:  “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans....”

A New Book

      Fr. James V. Schall, SJ, Professor of Government at Georgetown University, has just published his latest book, The Regensburg Lecture.  It is an insightful overview and explanation of Pope Benedict XVI’s lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany, and in this work, Prof. Schall gets right to the point, professed by the Christian Emperor of Byzantium, Manuel II, to a Persian Muslim centuries ago:  “…not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.”  The point that Manuel II raised is as pertinent now, perhaps more so, than even in the 14th century when the Christian imperial city Byzantium (Constantinople) was under siege by Muslims.  The point, the question:  is Islam rational, reasonable?  We have, as Emperor Manuel II had, very little reason to say yes.  Instead we have the example of Mohammed who “received” and transmitted contradictory “revelations” from Allah, with the “explanation” that Allah is absolutely transcendent and sovereign so much so that he is not constrained by his own word.  We have, secondarily, as evidence, over fourteen centuries of Muslim history that records constant aggression and violence, not only against the West, but also against Hindu and Buddhist cultures to the East.  And thirdly, we have the evidence of Islamic irrationality in the very reaction to the Pope’s raising the question – violence and murder scattered throughout the Muslim world, that world that continues to produce in ever greater number terrorists who murder and commit suicide and claim it’s Allah’s will. 

      Emperor Manuel II’s response to watching his own lands being overtaken and brutally subjugated by Muslims, insists – in absolute accordance with constant Catholic teaching – that “not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.”  It is, we have to face it, an indictment of Islam, past and present.  But the Pope was certainly not attempting to offend Muslims when he quoted from Manuel II:  “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.”  Rather, the Pope was challenging and requesting of Muslims an explanation of their history that seems to justify Manuel’s blunt words.  Of this, Prof. Schall remarks:  “If Islam is a true religion, as it claims to be, it cannot avoid the effort to explain why to the rest of the world.”  But instead, when challenged, the response of many Muslims is not reasoned debate but irrational and widespread violence. 

      However, as Prof. Schall points out, the Pope was not only challenging Islam.  Rather, one could argue that his main challenge was, and is, leveled at the secularist West, which has also abandoned reason in its near complete reduction of the use of reason to the scientific method (where it has worked splendidly if narrowly).  The reaction of Western media was telling:  one commentator after another tried to make the point that the violent Muslim reaction to the Pope’s university lecture was all the evidence needed to prove that the Pope should not have said what he did.  Now that’s a strange limit on freedom of speech from a media who are always defending the right to say and print almost anything!  One suspects that the Pope’s sincere invitation to dialog according to the principles of logic and rationality met with such disapproval by Muslims and the Western media because they both know they are weak when it comes to rational debate and discussion.  Many in the media are used to simply asserting their point of view and are reluctant, given their lack of ability to substantiate what they proclaim, to meet at the bar of reason to logically defend what they often so readily preach as “dogma.”

      Prof. Schall’s book does the reader a service in pointing all this out.  The Pope is questioning both the Muslim interpretation of God as simply an “all-powerful” divine will unconstrained by logic as well as the secularist insistence on lowering the status of reason to be merely the means of defending the indefensible “choices” enshrined as “rights” in modern Western culture. But there is no truly rational defense of spreading religion by the sword or of killing unborn human life.  “Not acting reasonably is [indeed] contrary to God’s nature.”  If Muslims, secularists and Catholics are going to dialog, then reason and logic is the place they must meet.  That’s the Pope’s invitation.  Let’s see if others take up the challenge.