What did the Pope achieve?

The media build-up of the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Turkey highlighted the political, even physical, risks the 79-year old Pontiff faced. His controversial University of Regensburg speech last September 12th had elicited rage among Muslims world-wide.

The jailed would-be assassin of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, warned from his prison cell that an attempt might be made on Benedict’s life. Demonstrations in Istanbul and other cities with large Islamic communities asked that the visit be cancelled.

If anything untoward would happen to the Pope, security experts worried, an armed clash of civilizations would ensue! Nothing of the sort happened. The trip went off smoothly. No assassin surfaced. No massive outpouring of popular emotion against the leader of global Catholicism was evident.

In a way, the Pope acted out of character. In Turkey he was a more conciliatory Pope, not the blunt, confrontational theologian in Regensburg, Germany who quoted a 15th century Christian Byzantine emperor. Manuel II Paleologus had criticized Islam for "spreading (faith) by the sword" and supposedly said, "Show me just what the Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find only evil and inhuman."

Muslims all over the world felt the Pope had profoundly insulted Islam. They called for his head and reminded him of Christianity’s own violent record during the Crusades and later suppression of "heretics" during the Inquisition.

But while visiting Turkey last week, the Pope focused on a message of "brotherhood" among all faiths. He called on all religious leaders to "utterly refuse" to support any form of violence in the name of faith. In Istanbul, he visited both the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as Mufti Mustapha Cagrici. He had, to some extent, confounded all the prophets of impending doom.

At St. George Cathedral, he joined Patriarch Bartholomew in prayer, in a service which sought to affirm their commitment to heal a thousand-year old rift between the two churches. At the Blue Mosque, he stood beside the Muslim leader, as both turned toward Mecca and assumed an attitude of prayer.

Benedict later said he had not prayed in the mosque, but was simply "in meditation." Still, the gesture was widely seen as an effort to emulate Pope Paul VI’s visit to Turkey in 1967 and John Paul II’s journey to Damascus in 2001. As he left the mosque, Pope Benedict XVI remarked that the visit would "help us find together the means and paths to peace for the good of humanity."

The Turkey trip was a diplomatic plus for the Pope, as it was for his hosts, who exhibited openness to his message of fraternity. But does this mean that the arch-conservative Benedict has changed his views about Catholicism as the one true faith, and about the tendency of some in Islam toward violence? I don’t think so.

One of the dilemmas of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy is whether he can transform himself from John Paul II’s 24-year long theological watchdog to a more open and "diplomatic" leader of global Catholicism. As head of the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, he was seen as an arch-conservative, one who stood as eager sentry to John Paul II’s own inflexibility on such matters as marriage, abortion, priestly celibacy, women as priests, human rights, and a host of other hot-button issues.

After all, then Cardinal Ratzinger’s office had issued a controversial document in 1999, Dominus Jesus, which argued that non-Catholics were in a "gravely deficient situation" in regard to salvation. To this day, he maintains that people of different faiths cannot pray side-by-side, the reason he probably felt obliged to explain, at Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, that he had not actually prayed but simply meditated.

At Regensburg, his intention was to draw the connection between faith and reason. Since his audience was composed largely of intellectuals, his academic presentation tried to show that rationality was the essence of Christianity, and that violence was an enemy of reason. Violence cannot be a way of advancing faith or a particular religion, since to act contrary to reason is to act against the nature of God.

But, to make his point, he chose to quote that Byzantine emperor, with whom, he said, he did not agree. But Manuel II Paleologus reflected the thinking of the time that Islam indeed spread its faith by the sword and devalued, if not ignored, reason.

That, understandably, offended many Muslims who considered themselves moderate. They felt that portraying them as violent, or unreasoning, while they argued that radical Islam constituted a noisy and highly visible, but essentially small, minority betrayed a particularly virulent kind of "Islamophobia."

To be fair, Cardinal Ratzinger had in at least one earlier book made clear his conviction that "Islam is not a uniform thing," i.e. there is a "noble" Islam and there is also an "extremist, terrorist" Islam. To identify all of Islam with only the latter, he stressed, would do it an injustice.

Pope Benedict’s reaching out to Muslims while in Turkey seems to indicate a genuine effort on his part to foster fraternity. But he also sent unmistakable signals that he was not retreating from his current thinking that some Muslim, perhaps only radicals, and concededly a mere minority, do resort to violence.

He has also not wavered in his conviction that a radical Muslim minority uses religion to further political ends. This radical minority, he says, often refuses to recognize where one ends and the other begins.

Many rejoice that the Pope has at least said what had to be said. Although Muslim leaders still try to clarify what jihad really means, and insist that Islam is essentially peaceful and non-violent, Benedict has called on those leaders to more forthrightly condemn such aberrations as suicide bombings and indiscriminate killings of civilians. Muslim leaders, on the other hand, counter that the West must pay more attention to Palestinian aspirations and the human rights of persons detained indefinitely.

It is, without a doubt, an exceedingly complex undertaking. Dialogue is not expected to be necessarily amicable. But dialogue has to be engaged in, not evaded, whatever one believes about the inevitability of that clash of civilizations. Benedict XVI, I would think, has defined some, albeit admittedly not all, of the terms of that dialogue.