The
pope, the president and politics of
faith By Spengler
Acting on faith in politics means exactly
what it does in personal life: to do what is right
even when it is dangerous to do so, when received
opinion howls against it, and when the ultimate
consequence of such actions cannot be foreseen.
After Pope Benedict XVI showed unprecedented
courtesy to visiting American President George W
Bush last week, much has been written about the
Christian faith that binds the pope and the
president.
It is not only faith, but the
temerity to act upon faith, that the pope and the
president have in common. In the past I have
characterized Benedict's stance as, "I have a
mustard seed, and
I'm not afraid to use
it." (See Ratzinger's
mustard seed Asia Times Online, April 5,
2005.) Despite his failings, Bush is a kindred
spirit. That is what horrifies their respective
critics within the Catholic Church and the
American government, who portray the president and
the pope as destroyers of civilizational peace.
The charge is spurious because there was no
civilization peace to destroy, but like many
calumnies, it contains an element of truth.
Never before did a pope descend to the
Vatican gardens to greet a national leader as
Benedict did for Bush, returning the unprecedented
deference that the president showed in meeting the
pope's plane at Andrews Air Force Base in April.
More than mutual courtesy is at work here; the two
men evince a natural affinity and mutual sympathy.
Prelates in the Vatican's permanent bureaucracy
fumed at the warmth with which Bush was received,
the Italian daily La Repubblica noted June 12,
given that the US president "is very distant from
papal exhortations condemning war", the Iraq war
in particular.
Benedict XVI, like his
predecessor John Paul II, disagrees with American
policy in Iraq, but not the way that the European
or American left would like. "There was not a word
from the papal throne about the possibility of an
attack on Iran during the coming months, the
catastrophic results of which terrify all the
bishops of the Middle East," Marco Politi
fulminated in La Repubblica June 14. "In the Holy
Land, the Holy See is being towed behind the
snail's pace [in peace negotiations] of Washington
and the Israeli government."
Despite his
position on Iraq, Benedict's critics within the
church regard him as a civilizational warrior as
dangerous as the US president. Bush might denounce
"Islamo-facism", but continues to believe that
Islam is a "religion of peace". Muslims suspect
that the pope wants to convert them, a threat they
never have had to confront in Islam's 1,500-year
history.
The May issue of the Jesuits'
international monthly Popoli [1], for example,
featured a blistering attack on Egyptian-born
Italian journalist Magdi Allam, who this year
converted from Islam to Roman Catholicism, and the
circumstances of his conversion, by the prominent
Italian Jesuit Father Paolo dall'Oglio, of the
Deir Mar Musa monastery in Syria. By officiating
at Allam's conversion, Father Dall'Oglio charted,
Benedict confirmed Muslim suspicion that his
campaign for freedom of religion and freedom of
conscience is a "Trojan Horse" whose aim is to
cause Islam to disintegrate. On this more below.
The pope and the president are less at
odds over the Iraq war than the Vatican's anti-war
position might suggest. America invaded Iraq and
toppled Saddam Hussein for reasons of state that
no religious leader could bless.
After the
September 11, 2001, attacks, American intelligence
had no means to determine which Muslim governments
were in league with terrorists. Middle Eastern
governments do not resemble Western nation-states
so much as they do hotels at which diverse
political factions can rent accommodations,
including factions who provide weapons, passports,
training and intelligence to the sort of men who
flew planes into the World Trade Center. Elements
within the governments of Syria, Iran, Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan, among others, supported
terrorists, besides Saddam.
The only way
to resolve the matter quickly was to make a
horrible example out of one of these regimes. That
got the undivided attention of the others. "Kill
the chicken, and let the monkey watch," say the
Chinese.
Bush chose Iraq simply because
existing United Nations Security Council
resolutions provided a pretext in international
law. Did the American president "lie"? Not
exactly, but head of states do not tell the whole
truth about such matters, and religious leaders do
not put their imprimatur on the rougher side of
raison d'etat.
Bush was magnificently
right to conduct a punitive expedition against
Saddam, but horribly wrong to wade into the mire
of nation-building. He should have found a
cooperative dictator to replace Saddam and marched
out, as American neo-conservative historian and
political commentator Daniel Pipes suggested at
the time. Nonetheless, as I wrote in 2004, "The
West should be thankful that it has in US
President George W Bush a warrior who shoots first
and tells the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to
ask questions later. Rarely in its long history
has the West suffered by going to war too soon. On
the contrary: among the wars of Western history,
the bloodiest were those that started too late."
(See In
praise of premature war Asia Times Online,
October 19, 2004.)
Going to war in Iraq
was a leap of faith, a repudiation of half a
century of American commitment to stability in the
region, to the enduring dudgeon of the foreign
policy establishment. Until the last moment the
establishment did not believe that Bush would go
through with it. A former British prime minister
assured me privately in December 2001 that he had
it on the personal authority of George Bush Senior
that war was out of the question. Despite the
grave policy errors that followed, Bush had the
faith to upset the existing order of things
without foreknowledge of the consequences, because
he knew that it was the right thing to do.
In that sense, the president's war policy
and the pope's pacifism arise from a common
source, the politics of faith. Despite the
exigencies of state security, which make necessary
the employment of deadly force as well as harm to
civilians, someone must speak the voice of mercy,
and pray that the stern decree will pass from the
world. A religious leader must say, "Do unto
others as you would have them do unto you," while
a head of state must follow the maxim, "Do unto
others before they do unto you." What divides the
president and the pope is not so much their
conflicting positions, but rather a difference in
the existential vantage point from which each must
respond to the great events of the world.
Benedict XVI may preach against violence,
but in his own fashion he takes a tougher stance
than the American president. That surely is not
the way it looks at first glance. Bush invaded an
Arab country, while Benedict preaches reason to
the Muslim world, receiving in the past few months
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah as well as
delegations from Iran. He has agreed to a meeting
with a group of 138 Muslim scholars at the Vatican
in November. Why should Muslims fear Benedict?
For the first time, perhaps, since the
time of Mohammed, large parts of the Islamic world
are vulnerable to Christian efforts to convert
them, for tens of millions of Muslims now dwell as
minorities in predominantly Christian countries.
The Muslim migration to Europe is a double-edged
sword. Eventually this migration may lead to a
Muslim Europe, but it also puts large numbers of
Muslims within reach of Christian missionaries for
the first time in history.
That is the
hope of Magdi Allam, the highest-profile Catholic
convert from Islam in living memory (see The
mustard seed in global strategy Asia Times
Online, March 26, 2008).
As noted above,
the Jesuit Arabist Paolo dall'Oglio warns that the
pope has confirmed the worst fears of the Muslim
world. His views on the subject bear careful
reading. As the editors of Popoli introduce his
article, Dall'Oglio is "someone who has carried
out years of apostolic activity in the Muslim
world, and in position to understand the
sensibilities and to intuit the possible
repercussions and ways in which the event might be
exploited".
Dall'Oglio began his article
(in Italian - citations are my translation), "We
hope that we are dealing with an eclipse of the
sun," that is, a one-time event, and adds:
The moon of urgent concern for
freedom of conscience and religion has blocked
the sun of charitable discretion, of respect for
Muslim feelings, and of the renunciation of
proselytism ... [Magdi Allam's baptism]
discouraged numerous efforts to construct
harmony and friendship, in the quarters of
European cities as well as in the countries, for
secular and peaceful Islamic-Christian
coexistence. It neutralized attempts to defuse
inter-religious violence and to show how far the
Church is from the neocolonialist logic of the
Western hegemonic powers, and how a great
majority of Muslims are opposed to the logic of
hostile confrontation ...
Before the
world, and on the occasion of his baptism, Magdi
Allam has declared his intent to affirm "the
authentic religion of truth, of life and of
freedom" against the "the root of evil is
inherent in an Islam that is physiologically
violent and historically conflictive". In this
fashion he confirmed the Muslim impression,
intentionally or not, that there is an objective
strategic convergence of Christian
neo-proselytism and the blasphemous actions
against the holiest realities of Islam promoted
by the northern European media [ie, the
satirical cartoons of Mohammed in a Danish
newspaper].
In other words it is
difficult to escape the impression that the
sacred banner of freedom of conscience is being
used by the West to introduce a Trojan Horse
into Islam with the aim of causing it to
disintegrate [emphasis added].
What seems to the West a low-key
appeal to reason and Western norms of religious
freedom, Dall'Oglio warns, looks like a Trojan
Horse to Muslims. Islamic leaders already have
noted that months before Allam's baptism, the
Vatican published a "doctrinal note" on
evangelization that specifically repudiates the
notion that Catholics should refrain from
attempting to convert people of other faiths.
Church-watcher Sandro Magister notes [2] that one
of the 138 Muslim scholars scheduled to meet with
the pope in November already has filed a protest
in the Vatican monthly Mondo e Missione.
Mustafa Cherif, an Algerian Islamic
scholar prominent in dialogue with the church,
singled out the December 3, 2007, doctrinal note
[3] from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith affirming that "evangelization is aimed at
all of humanity", and seeking to correct "a
growing confusion which leads many to leave the
missionary command of the Lord unheard and
ineffective".
As Father Dall'Oglio warns
darkly, Muslims are in dialogue with a pope who
evidently does not merely want to exchange
pleasantries about coexistence, but to convert
them. This no doubt will offend Muslim
sensibilities, but Muslim leaders are well-advised
to remain on good terms with Benedict XVI. Worse
things await them. There are 100 million new
Chinese Christians, and some of them speak of
marching to Jerusalem - from the East. A website
entitled Back to Jerusalem proclaims, "From the
Great Wall of China through Central Asia along the
silk roads, the Chinese house churches are called
to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ all the way
back to Jerusalem."
Islam is in danger for
the first time since its founding. The evangelical
Christianity to which George W Bush adheres and
the emerging Asian church are competitors with
whom it never had to reckon in the past. The
European Church may be weak, but no weaker,
perhaps, than in the 8th century after the
depopulation of Europe and the fall of Rome. An
evangelizing European Church might yet repopulate
Europe with new Christians as it did more than a
millennium ago.
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