World Peace Day and the Pope

Who stirs up a controversy on the week that International Peace Day falls?

Why, it is the Pope Himself!

Pope Benedict said “show me what the Prophet brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’’

Says a British Times editorialist, that the Pope did not endorse the sentiment, but that he was merely quoting from the historical record the words of a Byzantium emperor.

Quoting from the historical record?

If the Pope’s words were wrenched out of context, didn’t he know that they were bound to be?

This appears as if His Holiness is taking a walk in a park of lilies and expecting that not a petal would tenderly touch his Papal habit or his Cape.

That figurative representation would have to be turned around of course. If the Pope walked in a minefield, would His Holiness not expect to touch an explosive device underfoot?

The upshot of it is that the commentators want the Pope to take cover under freedom of expression. Aggrieved sentiments are already being aired, saying the Pope tweaked the tails of rationalists, but gave no cause for the religious to be fuming over.

How did the Pope tease the rationalists?

Apparently, he has said that no religion should lose its divinity. Reason, he scoffed, is for rationalists only. His Holiness should have probably arrived at his Papal insight without having to drag the Muslim religion into his peroration.

It’s worth a cheer even in a Church, if the kind of human causalities that resulted from the Danish cartoon controversy are avoided in this instance.

It would be comic as well as tragic if 21st century followers of 1st century religious leaders went into a quarrel over a Middle Age theological confrontation. (The Emperor’s words quoted above were to convince a Muslim about Christianity’s superior virtues.)

The Pope is apparently quoted as saying that a Byzantium emperor Manuel 1 said with “startling brusqueness’’ that the Prophet brought nothing new - - and that he commanded “to spread the word that he preached by the sword.’’

This would not have been peace week in the Middle Age Byzantium kingdom in the first instance, and on the other hand, there was no international satellite propelled media that would have broadcast words that have the incendiary quality of setting the whole world on fire by its religiously activated ignition.

We should not derogate however the Pope’s prerogative to be Papal in his pronouncements..

The Pope is after all the Pope, and the people, after all, want peace.

Perhaps all the Imams and the Archdeacons and Bishops may as well now dwell on the number of religious wars in the world, not forgetting the rather overt war on terror which has been dubbed in some quarters as a clash of fundamentalisms.
September the 21st is International Peace Day, and it’s a week that the world would have had to pass by reminiscing about the human carnage of recent wars, uprisings and terror attacks. We are not sure that the Pope’s recent words would usurp that tendency to dwell on the real wars that have to be tended and attended to, by frequent peace interventions and overtures.

At home, sometimes, the conflict, by whatever name it goes, has been given a religious colouration due to various longstanding associations of ideas, such as the association of ideas that tend to place the Catholic church and the non governmental liberal supporters of the Tamil Tigers, for instance, in the same general ideological area.

This is unfortunate. Hard evidence does not show that there is any Catholic action behind Tamil terror militancy.

Yet, there are the red flags that could be seen in various separate spaces in the conflict’s various locations. There is the Jihadism that is fomenting in the East for example, which could contain the germ that could foment a war of religions of sorts.
Turning to whomever the gods we believe in, we should say god forbid that... and if we don’t believe in any gods, maybe those of us who do not, could be happy in almost a perverse way that we do not contribute to this equation of incendiary religious bigotry in any way at all.

But the larger point to be made is that peace is fostered when there is no outspoken affirmation of religious and communal identities. The Pope, in other words, should be sublime in his divinity — and all the more subtle as he is preaching a divine message that’s necessarily sublimated in its dissemination..