I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims… These, in fact, were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought… I hope this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was, and is, an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with mutual respect.

— Pope Benedict XVI, apologizing for the now widely publicized comments he made during a lecture in Germany last week.

The Pope quoted the 14th-century emperor Manuel II Palaeologus during the speech he delivered to scholars at the University of Regensburg, and he presented some of the Byzantine emperor’s comments about the relationship between religion and violence.  Critics, screaming accusations of Islamophobia, have leapt onto the Pope’s quotation of Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, during which the emperor declared his belief that the promulgation of faith was incompatible with violence: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Taken out of its academic context and bandied about piecemeal, the Pope’s comments have had a disastrous effect — churches were shot at in the West Bank and Gaza, a 70-year-old nun was shot dead in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, and livid protestors demonstrated in India, Turkey, and in the Iranian holy city of Qom, where cleric Ahmad Khatami addressed the massed protesters. While the Pope is certainly more than an a pure academic, to strip him of any claim to intellectual discourse would be to reduce him to an ineffectual figurehead.  

Mimi Hanaoka