Eight years have passed since Pope Ratzinger said the truth about Islam, a violent religion that aims at the conquest of the world, and warned us of the terrorist and fundamentalist danger, but was lynched and crossed by squares, Islamists and left. Now it turns out he was right but now it's too late, war has already begun.
Article by Huffington Post Although the chronicles have cataloged and stored it as the classic incident of the journey, the result of a lapse and a manual gaffe, history handbooks could instead regenerate Regensburg and attribute it to a crucial epochal and crucial date, among the gestures and celebrated speeches that paved the way for the West. To the point that one day perhaps, along with 11, we will also remember the September 12. In a similar and no less dramatic context.
Eight years have passed since that 2006 Tuesday afternoon, when Joseph Ratzinger, forgetting to be a Pope and returning to a professor in front of his audience, in the homemade kingdom of Regensburg, just looking up from the text with academic discipline, sparked the perfect storm, lifting the Islamic squares within twelve thousand kilometers from Morocco to Indonesia.
It made him into the figure - and in torments - of the Emperor and intellectual Manuele II Paleologo, proud defender of Constantinople and of a declining civilization, in the terminal retreat in the face of the Turkish armies. In short, a great defeat of history, which today, after the resignation of the Pope and the outcome of the pontificate of Benedict XVI, reveals a biographical resemblance and fate with the parable of the emeritus Pope.
It extends its geopolitical shadow over the imminent Francesco's trip to Istanbul: at the invitation of the sultan army, Tayyip Erdoğan, in the nation that Atatürk re-founded - and reinvented - by abolishing the Caliphate, the 29 October 1923, as the Holy See held recently to recall.
Ratisbon, in that scenario, is the supreme attempt to define Europe as a counterpoint: as an antidote to jihad and fundamentalist derives, moving from the conception of a God that sets a limit to himself and his omnipotence, identifying himself with creative reason , renouncing the option of arbitrariness and offering what original - and original - pattern of what we would later call constitutional monarchy.
"Do not act reasonably, do not act with the logos, it is contrary to the nature of God": what Islam seemed to be an inadmissible limitation of divine absoluteness, for the West it represents the source principle and the DNA from which all originate his achievements: enlightenment and secularism, rights and democracy. Today, as in the times of the emperor, he is called to defend.
Eighteen years from Regensburg and six hundredths from the siege of Constantinople, the arguments of the Byzantine ruler find singular correspondence, tones and intentions, in the editorial-manifesto, "The West to Defend", where a week ago Ezio Mauro focused the unresolved theme of Europe's identity, in the face of conflict and the call to arms, "because democracy has the right to defend itself, but it has a duty to do so by remaining itself", he writes. As evidence of the fact that, despite the advent of a pope who promotes the culture of the encounter, the codes and the framework of the debate remain those of the clash between cultures, even in the reflection of a layman and liberal, such as the director of dresses of Manuele Paleologo of our day and in the ideal horizon set by Benedetto in Regensburg.
A horizon that even Francesco can not escape from here shortly, when in Strasbourg the 25 November will find the identity dilemma that Ratzinger brought to the extreme consequences of the Regensburg hall, concluding that if there is no Europe without Christianity, it is also the reciprocal one, so there can be no Christianity without Europe, that is without enlightenment, without the indissoluble conjunction of faith and reason, of Athens and Jerusalem. "At this point, in the understanding of God, and thus in the concrete realization of religion, a dilemma opens to us today in a very direct way," the German Pope asked. "The belief that acting against reason is in contradiction with the nature of God is just a Greek thought, or is it always true for itself?"
The question echoes in a profane and political way, while maintaining a religious tension, among the lines of Ezio Mauro: "But we are able to defend our principles and believe in their at least potential universality, or are we available to admit that realpolitik rights and freedoms must be proclaimed universal in this part of the world, but can be banned as related elsewhere? "
"Elsewhere" is primarily for the East and Caliphate, in the face of an Islamic world that, despite the pronouncements and the compact deployment of rais and muftis, did not dissolve to the bottom, in the conscience of the masses and in the thoughts of the leaders , the ambiguity of the bond between faith and coercion, which Benedetto admitted in his vibrant J'accuse, arousing the devastating reactions to all known.
Source h24news