ROME, 19 September 2006 — The Vatican’s rift with Islam demonstrates that Pope Benedict XVI has swept aside his predecessor’s strategy in dealing with Islam and backs a less diplomatic, more evangelistic attitude to the Muslim faith, Vatican watchers said yesterday.
“While John Paul II, in his dialogue with Islam, insisted that both religions shared a faith in a single God, and made this fraternity an essential part of his campaign against violence, Ratzinger has adopted the attitude of speaking ex-cathedra telling people what they should do,” said Marco Politi, Vatican watcher with Italian daily La Repubblica.
John Paul II, who died in April last year, “built a strategy of dialogue and of systematically involving the Islamic elite around the world. He was respected and listened-to by the Muslim world,” Politi told AFP.
According to Politi, Benedict adopted a different strategy with Islam from the very beginning of his pontificate.
“Already in his inaugural mass, Benedict dropped any reference to fraternal relations with the Islamic religion,” he said.
This summer, Benedict’s absence from the 20th annual inter-faith meeting in Assisi was noted by the Italian press. Unlike his predecessor, Benedict stayed away, sending a message to the gathering instead.
Gian Enrico Russoni, of the Turin daily La Stampa, ruled out “a communication error” as being responsible for the clash with Islam. Nor was it “a simple misunderstanding,” he said.
He said the pope knew what he was doing when he cited an obscure Byzantine Christian emperor during a speech last week in Germany exploring the historical and philosophical differences between Islam and Christianity, and the relationship between violence and faith.
The suggestion was that Islam was a faith “spread by the sword” and that the influence of its founder, the Prophet Mohammed, was “evil and inhuman.”
“A good professor does not have to have rely on a murderous citation...without putting that same citation in a critical context,” said Russoni.
In a speech denouncing the religious justification for violence, a self-critical reference to Roman Catholicism would have been welcome, Russoni maintains.
In a personal apology on Sunday, the 79-year-old pontiff said he was “deeply sorry” for the outrage triggered by his speech at a German university and stressed that the passages he quoted did not represent his personal opinion.
The pope said he meant his address as “an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.”
But Sandro Magister, a “Vaticanista” with the weekly L’Espresso magazine, said that Benedict is clearly less a diplomat than an evangelist, in contrast to John Paul II who regularly communicated with the leaders of other faiths.
“It’s that criteria, less diplomatic and more evangelistic, which led to pope to express such politically incorrect and potentially explosive views,” said Magister on his website.
Some foreign newspapers, like the center-right Spanish daily El Mundo, have also underscored the clear split between the two pontificates.
“John Paul II took time to soften the contradictions between the main religions. As far as Islam is concerned, Joseph Ratzinger destroyed with one speech all his predecessor’s work.”
Now, with Muslim hardliners venting their anger, the Vatican strategy toward the world’s fastest growing religion “has to be entirely rebuilt,” says Politi.
