Pope Benedict's Conclusion
I was pleased to learn recently that the whole of Pope Benedict's much-maligned address at his meeting with the representatives of science at the University of Regensburg is actually available online. I rather liked his conclusion:
"Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.Evidently the Muslims, given their violent, knee-jerk reaction to the pope's address (or at least to the 30-second media sound-bite version), have elected to decline his invitation to be reasonable.
Labels: christianity, quote
posted by Fr. Justin (Edward)
1 comments
1 Comments:
I like also this part of the pope's lecture:
"Faith is born of the soul, not the body. .... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death..."
It has always seemed to me that compulsion in faith (perhaps the very phrase is an oxymoron) is the very opposite of the spirit of Christ, and it is pleasing to see the pope enunciating this argument for the freedom of religion. In this the Roman Catholic Church, has come a long way, it would seem, and--beginning with an earlier pope of the Twentieth Century, has joined a consensus among Christian bodies which did not prevail in earlier times and was absent among some of the Protestant reformers (with a notable exception in Menno Simons).
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