It didn’t get much coverage in the American media (no surprise there), but Pope Benedict XVI had a blunt message for Muslim leaders he met with in Germany this weekend:
“You guide Muslim believers and train them in the Islamic faith,” he told his select audience at the archdiocese in Cologne. “Teaching is the vehicle through which ideas and convictions are transmitted. There is no room for apathy and disengagement, and even less for partiality and sectarianism.”
Benedict condemned terrorism as a “perverse and cruel decision” that “shows contempt for the sacred right to life and undermines the very foundations of all civil society.” Terrorists, he said, falsely use religion to poison relations among faiths.
Exactly. Suicide bombers blow themselves up because there is some Imam somewhere telling them that doing so will guarantee them a place in paradise and 72 virgins. So long as people continue to be told such things, they will continue to be influenced by the bin Laden’s of the world, no matter where they come from.
I don’t know when or where, or even if, it will happen, but what Islam needs is the same thing that Christianity needed — a reformation that will force it back to the foundations of its true faith. Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation shook the foundations of the Catholic Church, but the truth is that there was corruption in the Church of the Middle Ages. Had it not been confronted, then I doubt that Western Civilization, and the Roman Catholic Church, would be where it is today.
Hat Tip: Professor Bainbridge
