Apologies & Retractions
So the pope makes a speech in which he makes some fairly insulting comments about Islam in the course of quoting some medieval bigot and has to apologize for causing offense. It takes him awhile to do it, too, initially relying on spokesmen and then having to come out himself and say he’s sorry. It wasn’t much of an apology, and it didn’t do a lot to calm anyone down, but the Muslims burning him in effigy and issuing fatwas and the like are a minority and should really consider whether they care so very much about what the leader of somebody else’s religion has to say about theirs. Whether or not the pope was really trying to make a point about an open dialogue between Roman Catholic Christianity and Islam – and it sounds like a stretch to me – or was name-calling or whatever, God or Allah or whatever deity you worship doesn’t need nuns murdered or street marches or anything else to defend it. However, Cardinal Pell doesn’t have to make things worse for his boss by essentially retracting the apology. There is a modern history of mass violence among Muslims that isn’t paralleled in the global Christian community and that ought to be addressed. Islam, doesn’t have the structures in place to achieve a Reformation or to broadly adjust matters of doctrine, but that doesn’t make it less necessary to do so. The fact that this religion is such an integral part of the identities of its adherents culturally, the single defining element of the lives of millions upon millions who are otherwise entirely distinct from one another, and that Islam has essentially mired itself into a nearly unreformable static condition, in no small part by making Arabic the language of God, also seems to make Muslims rather sensitive to the interpretations of others, and those others might want to take that into account in making public pronouncements. We would all, indeed, do better with an open dialogue between the factions, but that doesn’t preclude being polite.