This is a fine NYT piece (subscription may be required) anticipating Benedict XVI's arrival at the United Nations next year. This even handed treatment praises Benedict's message while chiding him for his political tin ear when it comes to articulating his ideas.
Part of the problem is that so far, this cerebral pope has a track record of blurring such compelling arguments during his biggest turns on stage. When he visited Auschwitz in May 2006, for example, he offended some Jews by asserting that the Nazis tried to destroy Christianity too. Four months later, he set off a firestorm among Muslims with a lecture at the University of Regensburg by quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor to the effect that Muhammad brought “things only evil and inhuman,” such as “his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” And in Brazil last May, the pope incensed indigenous people in Latin America by suggesting that Christianity was not imposed on them.
In each case, Benedict was actually trying to make a deeper point worth hearing. In Auschwitz, his contention was that objective truth grounded in God is the only bulwark against the blind will to power; his Regensburg address was devoted to reason and faith, arguing that reason shorn of faith becomes nihilism, while faith without reason ends in fanaticism and violence; and in Brazil, he argued that since Christ embraces all humanity, he cannot be foreign to anyone’s spiritual experience.
Those ideas, however, were overshadowed by a few throwaway phrases that betray a worrying insensitivity to how unfamiliar audiences are likely to hear what he says.
Perhaps a world not in constance search for offense and that sweet music of victimhood would be more generous towards the Pontiff's rhetoric, but one must take the world as it is rather than how one wishes it to be. There is a sound lesson in this. Rhetoric, like music or art, is as much form as it is content. How we say things is almost as important as what we say.
For more on Benedict XVI and lots of other topics, see this discussion with Fr. James Shall, Georgetown University political philosopher. HT to Joe K.
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