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Apologies Are Not Enough
By James G. Wiles, For The Bulletin
There’s a sobering lesson for President Barack Obama in Pope Benedict XVI’s just-concluded pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Indeed, the same lesson runs throughout the Holy Father’s four-year pontificate. Our four-months-old president would do well to heed it.
That lesson is that the world’s most intractable problems are largely indifferent to good will — or apologies. The Holy See has tried both. They haven’t worked.
To the contrary, so far, every papal initiative, like every one of our fledging president’s initiatives, has so far yielded no fruit (let alone green shoots) whatsoever.
Take Islam. In Regensburg, the Holy Father invited dialogue with Muslim religious leaders on the proper role of reason in religion.
Now, this was a shrewd insight. In truth, the road Islam needs to travel to modernity is one that Christianity, at considerable pain, has itself traveled in the last 600 years. Indeed, every practice of Muslims, which we today denounce as barbaric, was de rigeur for Christianity at or before the time of the Reformation.
So, a scholarly exchange on this subject can save Islam a lot of time.
The Arab Street wasn’t interested. In response to Pope Benedict’s invitation, mobs marched, fires burned and sheiks and imams fulminated. In Turkey, a priest was killed. Elsewhere, the push by radical Muslims to render the Arab lands a Christian-free zone only intensified.
Exhausted monsignors sitting up all night in the Vatican Palace must have reflected: what the hell were we thinking? Later, scholars did exchange ideas and a meeting was held. But, as with St. Francis of Assisi’s preaching to the Sultan and his men, objective realities did not change.
A papal apology — unneeded and undeserved — only provoked more wrath.
So, too, with Orthodoxy.
Reconciliation with Eastern Christianity was particularly close to the heart of the late pontiff, John Paul II. Some small steps have been made since 1965, when the patriarchs of the East and the West, respectively, lifted their excommunications of each other. But there is 1,000 years of bad blood underlying these papal initiatives.
As a result, Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians cherish feelings for the Romans not unlike those of German Lutherans after the Peace of Westphalia.
The Israeli-Muslim conflict presents this problem in spades.
One would think that, as a son of Poland and a son of Germany, Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger could speak with peculiar authority on the Holocaust. They were eyewitnesses to it. As the Pope’s brother, Msgr. Georg, has said: “we saw the gates of hell open before us.”
Not so.
At every turn, Pope Benedict’s message provoked controversy. When he condemned the denial of the Holocaust, he offended the Muslims. Even if the Holocaust happened, they said, the commission of such a crime in Europe provided no warrant for forcibly implanting millions of alien Jews in lands which had been Muslim for over a thousand years. And, besides, he didn’t attack the Israelis enough.
Yet, when the Holy Father paid tribute to the victims of the Holocaust, Israelis complained he had not apologized as a German or for the Church’s role in World War II. Apparently one apology was not enough. Three were required.
So it goes. When John Paul II saluted Jews as “our elder brothers in the faith,” some Jewish leaders figured out that he was saying that Catholicism was, as it is, the perfection of Judaism. Can’t say that. Similarly, at Auschwitz (which he had previously visited as a cardinal with the German Bishops’ Conference), Benedict XVI spoke powerfully of the Holocaust.
Here, the Pope did speak of his personal responsibility as a German to appear and bear witness. “Yes,” His Holiness said, “I had to come here.”
But he got no credit for it. Instead, Jewish leaders said they were offended because His Holiness had said that the Nazis’ purpose in seeking to exterminate European Jewry was to tear out “the tap root of Christianity.”
Plainly, then, today’s Middle East still has points in common with Jesus’ time. Then, the birth of the Prince of Peace triggered the massacre of all male children under the age of 2 in Bethlehem. Today, as in 33 A.D., preaching peace, equality and mutual tolerance is an excellent way of getting yourself killed.
“Contrition tours” won’t change that.
James G. Wiles can be reached at jwiles@thebulletin.us
That lesson is that the world’s most intractable problems are largely indifferent to good will — or apologies. The Holy See has tried both. They haven’t worked.
To the contrary, so far, every papal initiative, like every one of our fledging president’s initiatives, has so far yielded no fruit (let alone green shoots) whatsoever.
Take Islam. In Regensburg, the Holy Father invited dialogue with Muslim religious leaders on the proper role of reason in religion.
Now, this was a shrewd insight. In truth, the road Islam needs to travel to modernity is one that Christianity, at considerable pain, has itself traveled in the last 600 years. Indeed, every practice of Muslims, which we today denounce as barbaric, was de rigeur for Christianity at or before the time of the Reformation.
So, a scholarly exchange on this subject can save Islam a lot of time.
The Arab Street wasn’t interested. In response to Pope Benedict’s invitation, mobs marched, fires burned and sheiks and imams fulminated. In Turkey, a priest was killed. Elsewhere, the push by radical Muslims to render the Arab lands a Christian-free zone only intensified.
Exhausted monsignors sitting up all night in the Vatican Palace must have reflected: what the hell were we thinking? Later, scholars did exchange ideas and a meeting was held. But, as with St. Francis of Assisi’s preaching to the Sultan and his men, objective realities did not change.
A papal apology — unneeded and undeserved — only provoked more wrath.
So, too, with Orthodoxy.
Reconciliation with Eastern Christianity was particularly close to the heart of the late pontiff, John Paul II. Some small steps have been made since 1965, when the patriarchs of the East and the West, respectively, lifted their excommunications of each other. But there is 1,000 years of bad blood underlying these papal initiatives.
As a result, Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians cherish feelings for the Romans not unlike those of German Lutherans after the Peace of Westphalia.
The Israeli-Muslim conflict presents this problem in spades.
One would think that, as a son of Poland and a son of Germany, Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger could speak with peculiar authority on the Holocaust. They were eyewitnesses to it. As the Pope’s brother, Msgr. Georg, has said: “we saw the gates of hell open before us.”
Not so.
At every turn, Pope Benedict’s message provoked controversy. When he condemned the denial of the Holocaust, he offended the Muslims. Even if the Holocaust happened, they said, the commission of such a crime in Europe provided no warrant for forcibly implanting millions of alien Jews in lands which had been Muslim for over a thousand years. And, besides, he didn’t attack the Israelis enough.
Yet, when the Holy Father paid tribute to the victims of the Holocaust, Israelis complained he had not apologized as a German or for the Church’s role in World War II. Apparently one apology was not enough. Three were required.
So it goes. When John Paul II saluted Jews as “our elder brothers in the faith,” some Jewish leaders figured out that he was saying that Catholicism was, as it is, the perfection of Judaism. Can’t say that. Similarly, at Auschwitz (which he had previously visited as a cardinal with the German Bishops’ Conference), Benedict XVI spoke powerfully of the Holocaust.
Here, the Pope did speak of his personal responsibility as a German to appear and bear witness. “Yes,” His Holiness said, “I had to come here.”
But he got no credit for it. Instead, Jewish leaders said they were offended because His Holiness had said that the Nazis’ purpose in seeking to exterminate European Jewry was to tear out “the tap root of Christianity.”
Plainly, then, today’s Middle East still has points in common with Jesus’ time. Then, the birth of the Prince of Peace triggered the massacre of all male children under the age of 2 in Bethlehem. Today, as in 33 A.D., preaching peace, equality and mutual tolerance is an excellent way of getting yourself killed.
“Contrition tours” won’t change that.
James G. Wiles can be reached at jwiles@thebulletin.us
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