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Pope Benedict XVI, The Papal Science

Em. Macron, Rediscovering the Path to Europe

Page 20

    Note a : the papal speech made muslims prove, by murdering, raping, burning Christian churches, etc., that he is right about Islamic violence. Yet, this is something everyone knows (even silently), and is known ages ago, even before Constantinople fell to the Turks. It was not a pope nor a Byzantine emperor, but Ibn Khaldun who wrote that “Watch how all the countries of the world, when conquered by Arabs, saw their civilization being destroyed, their population scattered, even the earth of their ground being transformed obviously”! The pope himself has proved again and again that violence can arise even in a Christian heart, so that the problem is, what are you going to do about or inside this violence, when you are not violent anymore?

    Will you become again violent yourself? Will you hide behind your finger (that “the Holy Father did not mean, nor does he mean, to make that [Manuel’s] opinion [about Islam] his own in any way”, as cardinal Bertone ‘explained’), opportunistically refusing your own reasons and exemplars only a moment after you have invoked them?! Will you try to replace human heart (even if violent) with a ‘reasonable’ machine? - or what else? 

 

Note b : In the final form of his speech the Pope added a paragraph to alleviate Muslim anger -

"In the Muslim world, this quotation [of Manuel's, about Islamic spread of faith by the sword] has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing understandable indignation. I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Qur’an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion. In quoting the text of the Emperor Manuel II, I intended solely to draw out the essential relationship between faith and reason. On this point I am in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing his polemic."

The only new that we learn is that in Manuel's simple and sincere remark Benedict sees a "polemic" against the "holy book" of a "great religion"... This is explained further at a later (September 25) speech to the Muslim envoyes

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Cf.  Manuel II Palaeologus Resources * The Papal Chrislamism * What have we done to Christianity..
Orthodoxy and Science : A changing relationship? * Papacy * Constantinople

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