Pope Benedict XVI has done it again.In September 2006, in the course of an arcane speech about the de-Hellenisation of Christianity, he managed to enrage Muslims by throwing in a quote from a Byzantine emperor on Islam being violent, evil and inhuman.
We all missed the point, the Vatican said.
His Holiness was talking about the relationship between faith and reason.
Last month, Pope Benedict received back into the Catholic Church four clerics excommunicated in 1988, including an English-born bishop, Richard Williamson, who had just told Swedish television “not a single Jew died in a gas chamber”.
Despite widespread outrage, apparently we all missed the point again.
The Pope was trying to heal a schism in the Church, the Vatican said, and Benedict was not even aware of the bishop’s views.
As the furore grew, the Vatican ordered the renegade bishop to recant. But this simply won’t wash.
Mr Williamson and his colleagues belong to the Society of Saint Pius X and were ordained bishops – illicitly under canon law – by its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who led a rebellion against the opening up of the Church started by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65.
That is why they were chucked out, despite the best efforts of the Pope – then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – to keep them in.
Mr Williamson has long been openly anti-Semitic, from a fundamentalist group that has flirted with fascism in its defence of causes from Vichy France to Francoist Spain.
For this German Pope to devote years to bringing these errant brethren back into the fold and not know one of their number is a Holocaust denier is solipsism of cosmic proportions.
Yet this learned Pope is not just a scholar but a student of power and the guardian of a dogmatic doctrinal certitude.
His quest for Church unity is perfectly legitimate, but while he is willing to embrace the far right-wing fringe he has always come down hard on liberal theologians.
He equates pluralism and religious freedom with moral relativism and the degeneration of the Catholic liturgy – albeit more subtly than the Lefebvrists.
Yet outside the like-minded counsels of the Vatican Curia, his actions appear as a form of absolutism: in which his blinkered notion of Roman Catholic unity is placed above respect for other religions.
The Pope has declared his “full and indisputable solidarity with our brothers, the bearers of the first covenant”.
Undoing the damage he has done to Catholic relations with Jews and, before that, Muslims, will take more than a declaration.
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(Source: FT)