In the uproar over Pope Benedict XVI’s lecture last week at the University of Regensburg, in which he quoted Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus on Islam, one group at the center of the conflict is more conspicuous for its silence than for its commentary: American archbishops.
If these men lived in Europe, their failure to defend thepope might be attributable to (but not excused by) a fear of violent reactions by resident Muslims. But in America, their obsequiousness stems less from threats of violence than from social and intellectual intimidation. Faced with a culture imbued with moral and cultural nihilism, and deeply anxious over their place in the hierarchy of that world, too many have chosen not to defend, lest they offend.
In this milieu, the most immediate force to be reckoned with isn’t Islam, per se, but a domestic intellectual and media elite that condemns precisely those elements of our civilization that most clearly define us as Western — a Christianity whose tradition is the product of reason and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem, and a belief in the sanctity of the individual. Such a tradition must necessarily offend both Islam as practiced by millions of contemporary Muslims as well as Western nihilists who would expunge religion and, crucially, reason as it developed historically in the West. It makes for the strangest of bedfellows: radical Islamists for whom (quoting Benedict) God’s will “is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality”; and radical secularists, whose parodic absurdity is brought to fruition through an alliance with their mirror image.
You’ll search in vain for defenses of the pope from most of the men who report to him: Archbishop Wuerl, the newly appointed head of the archdiocese of Washington, D.C.? Not a word. Cardinal Egan of New York City? Nothing. Archbishop Chaput of Denver? Nope. Cardinal Rigali of Philadelphia? Nada.
One archdiocese that joined the fray is Detroit, headed by Cardinal Adam Maida and home to the largest population of Arabs in America (many of whom in metro Detroit are Christians). But it wasn’t as a staunch defense of his boss: “When I heard what the Holy Father had said in that talk, I winced,” spokesman Michael Hovey told the Detroit Free Press. “In his heart, he still is that old university professor going into a classroom. And what do professors like to do? They like to find obscure quotes that nobody has heard in centuries and throw them out to get a discussion going. It works great in a classroom, but not when you’re the pope.”
Baltimore’s Cardinal William Keeler’s is a lonely voice of dissent, which is to say solidarity with the pope. He wrote that “it should be clear that rather than being a critical analysis of Islam, [Pope Benedict’s] address invites us all to reject violence as a way of solving problems. … For the discerning reader, Pope Benedict offers his plea for reconciliation and peace in terms both scholarly and persuasive.”
A few brave clergymen abroad have defended Benedict’s speech, including former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton, whose on-the-record comments should shame the cowering American hierarchy: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”
Lord Carey may not recognize the pope’s ecclesiastical authority, but he knows Benedict’s Regensburg lecture defended Christianity’s unique history of seeing revelation through reason, and took to task not only violent religion, but spineless nihilism. And unlike his American brethren, he approves.
Australian Cardinal George Pell showed more grit than the Yanks in his strongly-worded defense of the pope, in which he said the reactions in much of the Islamic world to Benedict’s lecture, “showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence.” No lasting achievements in interfaith peace can be grounded, he added, “in fantasies and evasions.”
But evading theirresponsibility to forcefully defend the intellectual tradition upon which their faith rests, and the civilization in which that faith can thrive, is what most of the American Catholic hierarchy has done from the start of this global struggle. If they’re unwilling to take on a hostile elite that fights with social ostracism and sneers, how will they confront a foe with a taste for real blood?
Winfield Myers is a Member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at CampusWatch.org and DemocracyProject.com.
