JUSIPER

 
Very few could turn Benedict XVI into a hero

Posted by Sini

Osama is trying, though.

In the five-minute message, the speaker said there would be a “severe” reaction against the publication in Europe of cartoons many Muslims consider offensive to Muhammad. He said the cartoons — one reprinted last month in Denmark, two years after they were first published there — “came in the framework of a new crusade in which the pope of the Vatican has played a large, lengthy role.”

Without naming any specific action or target, the speaker said, “The response will be what you see and not what you hear, and let our mothers bereave us if we do not make victorious our messenger of God.”

Father Lombardi dismissed the accusations, noting that the pope had condemned the cartoons several times and stressed that “religion must be respected.”

The Vatican is right. Benedict XVI has never been known to be a friend of any speech--other than his own, of course. He has never been Osama's opposite on free expression, democracy, or women's rights--what to speak of issues of sexuality in general, on which their positions are nearly identical.

Osama has gotten it wrong. Benedict has not been the kind of progressive force an Islamist would oppose. He is the architect of three decades of changes that moved the church from an engine for human progress into a narrow body obsessed with sexual behavior and gender roles, to the detriment of world peace and comity. Bin Laden should applaud Benedict's attempts to move the Church a bit closer to Wahhabism.

Progressives should applaud neither of them.

Happy Holy Thursday!

5:12 PM |