Missionary expert calls reaction to pope speech 'manufactured'

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

Many times over the last month, I’ve been asked what people in Rome are saying about the crisis unleashed by Pope Benedict XVI’s Sept. 12 comments on Islam. One interesting perspective comes from Fr. Bernardo Cervellera, a high-profile member of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions and a regular commentator in the Italian press on church issues in various parts of the world, including Islamic nations.

From 1997 to 2002, Cervellera directed the Fides news agency of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Today he runs AsiaNews, a news agency of his order which has a similar scope.

Cervellera pulls no punches in insisting that the fallout from Benedict’s Regensburg address was largely manufactured by forces that have their own reasons for making the pope look bad.

“The speech of the pope was manipulated, in large part by forces in the Western world, including certain news agencies and massive newspapers such as the New York Times,” Cervellera said in an Oct. 9 interview at the Rome headquarters of his order.

“They wanted to put the pope and Islam in conflict … in order to corrode the possibility of a real dialogue between religions based on truth.”

Specifically, Cervellera said, “They’re afraid of what happened in Cairo in 1994,” referring to a United Nations-sponsored conference on population and development when the Holy See and Islamic nations resisted attempts to create liberal international standards on abortion and reproductive rights.

“The culture of the Enlightenment wants to divide the pope and the Islamic world in order to hide the skeletons in its own closet,” Cervellera said.

Cervellera argued that there was a similar tendency to instrumentalize the pope’s address among politicized currents in the Muslim world, especially forces such as Iranian conservatives, fundamentalist groups in Indonesia, the Hezbollah, Palestinian radicals, and Al-Qaeda.

“They lumped the pope in with Bush, Blair and the rest,” Cervellera said, arguing that the agenda was to justify violence to advance their political ends.

Cervellera insisted that the global press failed to give a clear picture of Islamic reaction, over-dramatizing protests and largely ignoring more measured perspectives. He ticked off examples of authoritative Muslim leaders in Indonesia, Iran, Iraq and Morocco who called for calm, but whose voices were largely drowned out amid images of the pope burning in effigy and churches being assaulted.

Examples of creative initiatives on the part of the church were also under-reported, he argued.

For example, he said, in Pakistan the local bishops’ conference quickly translated the full text of Benedict’s speech into Urdu and took it to local Muslim authorities, thereby blunting some of the more extreme reactions. In Iraq, the secretary of the Vatican embassy translated critical portions of the speech into Arabic and took it to representatives of Muslim groups. In the wake of the gesture, representatives of Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani visited the embassy twice to express friendship and support, and one of the representatives actually suggested a meeting between Al-Sistani and Benedict. (How serious an idea that may be remains to be seen.)

Among other things, Cervellera said, this suggests the importance of being sure that whenever the pope says something that touches Islam, the full text must be immediately available in Arabic and other Islamic languages. Part of the problem with the reaction to Regensburg, he said, is that many Muslims were dependent upon Arabic summaries or paraphrases that were often misleading.

As an example of how the outcry was not as massive as much press coverage suggested, Cervellera cited Iran, where another grand ayatollah called for religious schools to be closed in protest of the pope’s remarks, and announced a rally in the holy city of Qom. In the event, Cervellera said, only 200 people showed up – hardly evidence of massive popular outrage, he argued, and this in the so-called “Vatican” of Iranian Shi’ite Islam.

In the end, Cervellera argued, the global reaction to Benedict’s comments illustrates two “great impasses”:
•tThe difficulty of staging a real dialogue with Islam, which has to include a serious challenge to renounce violence and irrationality in the pursuit of spiritual and political ends;
•tThe difficulty of real dialogue with elite Western culture, which does not want to acknowledge that its concept of reason needs to embrace faith.

In reality, Cervellera argued, Benedict wants to help Islam maintain its values while making its way in a pluralistic world. He said that serious Muslim thinkers recognize the need for such assistance. In Iran, for example, he said there is a growing problem with young people embracing atheism because of what he called their “disgust” with political Islam.

Finally, Cervellera said he hopes Pope Benedict will continue to press for reciprocity, meaning the insistence that religious minorities in Islamic nations receive the same rights and freedoms as Muslims in the West. Benedict, he said, should insist that Western governments make this a condition of negotiating work contracts with Islamic nations, pointing to Saudi Arabia, where hundreds of thousands of Filipino, Vietnamese and Korean “guest workers” are deprived of pastoral care because non-Muslims cannot minister to them openly.

Whatever one makes of Cervellera’s analysis, he represents a circle of opinion in and around the Vatican that will have an important role in drawing conclusions from the recent crisis – and in shaping policy in light of those conclusions.