Benedict Sizing up the Foe?

Observer

"But tact is one thing; substance another. It is doubtless true, as the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, said yesterday that the Pope had no intention of offending Muslims. However, both yesterday's statement and the Pope's own track record make it quite clear that Benedict XVI sees it as his duty to speak out about the way in which violence in the name of religion seems to be tolerated by some Muslim clerics and actively encouraged by others.

Bertone said the Pope, like the Catholic Church, 'esteems Muslims, who adore the only God'. But it is equally no coincidence that the Vatican yesterday chose to set in a bold type the passage of his statement in which he stressed that the Pope had called for a 'clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation for violence, from whatever side it may come'.

Benedict, as his friend and associate noted, is sincerely committed to dialogue between Christians and Muslims, but he also believes that the link between terrorist violence and its sponsorship by some Muslim clerics is a big obstacle to further progress.

His reaction to 11 September gave a first hint of his view. 'It is important not to attribute simplistically what happened to Islam. It would be a great error', he told Vatican Radio. But that did not prevent him from asserting immediately afterwards that 'the history of Islam also contains a tendency to violence'.

There were two strands, he added: the other being a 'real openness to the will of God'. 'It is thus important to help the positive line, which does exist in its history, to prevail and to have sufficient strength to win out over the other tendency.'

That is the sort of thing his predecessor would never have said. The overriding preoccupation of John Paul's papacy was communism. For the Vatican, as for the United States until the 1990s, Islam was a potentially valuable ally in the struggle with Marxism.

John Paul became the first pope to visit a mosque, and he made sure that an expert on Islam, Francis Arinze, was appointed to head what became the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, the Vatican's ministry for relations with other faiths.

Benedict, on the other hand, was elevated to the papacy against an international background in which the dominant confrontation was between aggressive Muslim fundamentalism and the West - secular in parts and Christian in others."