Pope postscript

I came across a BBC article from April 18^th of this year, which discussed the somewhat unimpressive first year of Joey Ratz. The article is summed up nicely in a quote by Dr Lavinia Byrne, former nun and Church scholar: “We know who his tailor is [believe it or not, Prada], and whose sunglasses he wears [honest to God: Gucci], but we do not know much about what he thinks. People say he enjoys being pope, and wearing the clothes, but he has said and done nothing, and delivered little.” Holy crap.

 

But the rest of the article was quite prophetic. For reasons left unexplained, Joey Ratz fired Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, the Vatican’s expert on Islam and the Arab World. Specifically, the guy was demoted and moved to Egypt. Says Father Thomas Reese, S.J., of the decision: “The Pope’s worst decision so far has been the exiling of Archbishop Fitzgerald. He was the smartest guy in the Vatican on relations with Muslims. You don’t exile someone like that, you listen to them. If the Vatican says something dumb about Muslims, people will die in parts of Africa and churches will be burned in Indonesia, let alone what happens in the Middle East. It would be better for Pope Benedict to have Fitzgerald close to him.” Indeed.

 

Again: “Oops.”

 

Since the pontiff’s remarks: an Anglican church and an Orthodox church were firebombed in the West Bank by some folks who cited the  Popes comments in an apparent attempt to illustrate how little they know about Christianity. There have been official statements, some at rallies, by the leaders of Pakistan, Malaysia, the Saud, Egypt, the Palestinians, India, Iran, Turkey, etc. (Cf. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5348436.stm for an astonishing list.) The Pope will probably cancel his upcoming trip to Turkey. (Not a bad idea; while Cardinal Ratz he opposed their bid to join the EU, “saying [Turkey] belonged to a different cultural sphere,” and that Turkey’s “admission would be a grave error against the tide of history” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5349808.stm). And you better believe that every paper in the world is reprinting his comments, which means that there are a lot of angry people in the streets around the world right now and more to come. Best of all, the Vatican’s official position is that Mr Pope regrets the misunderstanding of his words, yet will not and cannot retract them (because, in context, he was actually trying to state how violence is bad while dialogue is good; if he retracts his statement, he would then condone violence… you get the picture.)

 

Probably shouldn’t have fired that guy.

 

Ah, but no matter. If history has shown us anything, it is that Muslims don’t tend to have long memories for offenses against their peoples or religion.