While many used harsh words to criticize Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks at Regensburg, others went a step further, and took to the streets.

On September 15, about 2,000 Palestinians protested in Gaza City. In Cairo, 100 demonstrators stood outside a mosque and shouted, “Oh Crusaders, oh cowards! Down with the pope!”

On September 16, five churches in the West Bank and Gaza were attacked. At least five firebombs hit an Anglican church in Nablus, and its door was set on fire. A Greek Orthodox church was also firebombed. Later that day, four masked gunmen attacked the city’s Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic churches. The gunmen set the front doors of both buildings on fire and struck both churches with bullets. In Gaza City, militants shot at a Greek Orthodox church. A day earlier, explosive devices were set off at the church, causing minor damage.

On September 17, churches were again vandalized. A 170-year-old church in the West Bank town of Tul Karem was torched, and a smaller church in another town was partly burned.
The same day, several hundred theological students were given the day off to protest in Qum, Iran’s center for religious study.

Also on September 17, outside the Catholic Westminster Cathedral, protesters held placards reading, “Pope Go To Hell.” The protesters displayed other slogans aimed at Christians in general, including “Jesus is the slave of Allah.”

One of the worst incidents also occurred on September 17, when a 65-year-old nun who worked at a pediatrics hospital in Somalia was shot and killed while leaving the hospital.

On September 18, more than 100 people rallied in front of a Vatican Embassy in Jakarta, waving banners that said, “The Pope is building religion on hatred.”

In Islamabad on September 22, protesters held up placards, reading “Terrorist, extremist Pope be hanged!” and “Down with Muslims’ enemies!” Addressing the gathering, a leader of a coalition of six Islamic parties said, “If I get a hold of the pope, I will hang him.”

On October 11, an Orthodox priest’s body was found beheaded in Mosul, Iraq. Relatives of the priest said the group demanded that, in addition to a ransom, the priest’s church condemn Pope Benedict’s remarks.

Protesters couldn’t get their hands on the pope, so they did what they felt was the next best thing. As pictured below, they burned effigies of the pontiff.

photo credit: Associated Press

There are many who’ve denounced Pope Benedict XVI’s speech in Germany, but there are also those who’ve supported the pontiff. Here are some of the quotes in support of the Pope’s message and critical of the violent reactions to it:

     · September 21, Bill Donohue, letter to The New York Times: “‘The Pope’s Act of Contrition’ (editorial, Sept. 20) is unfair to Pope Benedict XVI. While the pope would never intentionally offend any world religion, he knows that true dialogue must be honest, and that is why his recent controversial remarks were not ‘ill-considered comments.’ They were deliberate and were intended to recall the necessity of conjoining faith and reason: it is the uncoupling of these twin values that has delivered so much needless death in history. Ironically, the Muslim response in many quarters has only underscored the veracity of the pope’s remarks: a nun was shot to death in Somalia, apparently as a result; several churches were firebombed in the West Bank and Gaza; crowds in Kashmir and London have called for the death of the pope while burning him in effigy; a senior Turkish official compared the pope to Hitler; and an Internet posting by the Mujahedeen Shura Council has called upon Muslims ‘to slit their throats,’ meaning Catholics’.”

     · September 15, Fr. James Schall, S.J., on Ignatius Insight: “It is a brilliant, stunning lecture, and it is a lecture, not a papal pronouncement. It brings into focus just why there is a papacy and why Catholicism is an intellectual religion. Indeed, it is a lecture on why reason is reason and what this means. The scope of this lecture is simply breathtaking, but also intelligible to the ordinary mind…. Civilization depends also on thinking rightly about God and man—all civilization, not just European or Muslim. Such is the reach of this lecture.”

     · September 18, Omar al-Rawi, integration officer of the Austrian Islamic Community quoted by AWA news agency (Austria), “We accept the explanation of Benedict XVI for his speech at the University of Regensburg….” Al-Rawi also said a fatwa against the pope, issued through al-Qaeda, was to be strongly condemned and rejected.

     · September 18, Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J., on Ignatius Insight: “It is at this point in the lecture that Benedict makes a statement which cannot be avoided or evaded if there is ever to be any dialogue between Christianity and Islam that is more than empty words and diplomatic gestures. For the Emperor, God’s rationality is ‘self-evident’. But for Muslim teaching, according to the editor of the book from which Benedict has been quoting, ‘God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality’…. Benedict has struck bedrock. This is the challenge to Islam. This is the issue that lies beneath all the rest.”

     · September 18, Daniel Johnson in The New York Sun: “The passage that has aroused the ire of the ayatollahs was not a faux pas, still less an aberration. And Benedict is nothing if not consistent. From his earliest days, he has been true to his vocation as a priest and as an intellectual.”

     · September 18, Irshad Manji, Muslim feminist writer on the CBS Evening News: “As a faithful Muslim, I do not believe the pope should have apologized. I read what’s been described as his inflammatory speech. Actually, he called for dialogue with the Muslim world. To ignore that larger context and to focus on a mere few words of the speech is like, well, it’s like reducing the Quran, Islam’s holy book, to its most blood-thirsty passages. We Muslims hate it when people do that. The hypocrisy of doing this to the pope stinks to high heaven.”

     · September 18, Jennifer Roback Morse on National Review Online: “You may disagree with the pope on the nature of God, or about the possibilities of a rapprochement between science and religion. But no one can doubt that both reason and truth are in retreat in the modern world. Benedict’s speech indicates that he wants to bring them back.”

     · September 19, Alicia Colon in The New York Sun: “While angry Muslims around the world work themselves into a murderous frenzy and give credence to the emperor’s words, defenders of the religion of peace and liberal editors demand that the pope apologize for asking for dialogue.”

     · September 19, John L. Allen Jr. in The New York Times: “The uproar in the Muslim world over the comments is thus to some extent a case of ‘German professor meets sound-bite culture,’ with a phrase from a tightly wrapped academic argument shot into global circulation, provoking an unintended firestorm. In fact, had Benedict wanted to make a point about Islam, he wouldn’t have left us guessing about what he meant. He’s spoken and written on the subject before and since his election as pope, and a clear stance has emerged in the first 18 months of his pontificate. Benedict wants to be good neighbors, but he’s definitely more of a hawk on Islam than was his predecessor, John Paul II.”

     · September 20, William Hawkins in The Washington Times: “Pope Benedict XVI’s citation of ‘the erudite Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus’ was historically accurate. Islamists did follow ‘the command to spread by the sword the faith [Muhammad] preached.’ They inhabit the kind of bellicose society liberalism has done so much to bleach out of America.”

     · September 21, Suzanne Fields in The Washington Times: “Pope Benedict XVI did the right thing, twice. In his talk to scholars in Germany he correctly put Islam in historical perspective, describing how Islam was perceived as ‘evil and inhuman’ by a 14th-century Christian emperor desperate for the help of other Christians to defend his country against Islamic conquest. (His fellow Christians didn’t help.) The pope was correct this week as well, to say he was ‘deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages.’ He clearly wanted to put a lid on the violence without contradicting his earlier remarks. Benedict, reasonably enough, called for reflection to seek the ‘true sense of his words’ about how violence is the wrong approach to faith.”

     · September 21, Reuel Marc Gerecht on the Wall Street Journal Online: “Although many Muslims have apparently found Pope Benedict XVI’s recent oration at the University of Regensburg deeply offensive, it is a welcome change from the pabulum that passes for ‘interfaith’ dialogue. Since 9/11, his lecture is one of the few by a major Western figure to highlight the spiritual and cultural troubles that beset the Muslim world…. Let us be frank: There is absolutely nothing in the pope’s speech that isn’t appropriate or pertinent to a civilized discussion of revealed religions and ethics.”

     · September 25, George Weigel in USA Today: “His lecture in Germany was, first of all, a celebration of human reason—the human capacity to know the truth of things. Our ability to think our way through to convictions we can know are true is the defining characteristic of our humanity and the spark of the divine within us. So reason and faith cannot be in conflict: True faith is reasonable faith, faith that makes sense, faith that can be proposed as reasonable to others…. I think that Benedict knew precisely the risks he was taking and thought the risks worthwhile. Why? Because he believes in the power of reason to cut through the fog of passion. Because he believes that serious problems—such as those posed by jihadist Islam—can be solved only by examining them at their roots.”

     · September 26, Dennis Prager on Townhall.com: “If the same people who attack Pope Pius XII for his silence regarding the greatest evil of his time are largely the same people who attack Pope Benedict XVI for confronting the greatest evil of his time, maybe it isn’t a pope’s confronting evil that concerns Pius’s critics, but simply defaming the Church.”

     · September 28, Deal W. Hudson on GOPUSA.com: “The Muslim reaction to the Regensburg speech will only strengthen the Western world’s resolve to confront the threat of radical Islam, whether it is best called fascistic or jihadist. It will reinforce the resolve of Bush, Blair, and their supporters to stay the course in the Iraq war and keep the pressure on Iran to cease its nuclear enrichment program…. The god of radical Islam is nothing but, ‘I Am Who Wills,’ to emend slightly a line from the Book of Exodus. Now it’s up to the Holy Father to find those leaders in the Muslim world, the kind who sat next to our Catholic negotiators in Cairo and Beijing, and defuse the time bomb that ticks ever faster.”

     · October 2, Lee Harris writing in The Weekly Standard: “He was using the emperor’s question in order to offer a profound challenge to modern reason from within. Can modern reason really stand on the sidelines of a clash between a religion that commands jihad and a religion that forbids violent conversion? Can a committed atheist avoid taking the side of Manuel II Paleologus when he says: “God is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.”

     · October 4, Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch in New York Press: “He has called for a dialogue with the Muslim world…. Pope Benedict expressed no judgment on the truth or falsity of the emperor’s statement, but he raised the need for dialogue. In response Muslims throughout the world, including many Muslim leaders and clergy, called for angry marches and the burning of churches, and urged the murder of the Pope.”

     · October 6, Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., interview with National Catholic Reporter: “I thought it was a very impressive address. The pope went amazingly far in laying out the principles of tolerance.”

Catholics have every right to expect that Catholic colleges and universities are free from bigotry of any kind. Unfortunately, a recent ugly incident by DePaul University professor Norman G. Finkelstein has betrayed that trust. To be specific, Finkelstein wrote a column for indybay.org that suggests Alan Dershowitz be assassinated. The article is coupled with an obscene depiction of the Harvard professor.

Finkelstein has every right to quarrel with Dershowitz’s proud defense of Israel’s right to exist, but when he compares him to a Nazi (this despicable charge is made twice), elementary standards of civility have been shattered. Similarly, calling Dershowitz a “moral pervert” who “missed the climactic scene of his little peep show” is the language used by street propagandists, not academicians. A cartoon that accompanies the article depicts Dershowitz masturbating in glee over dead Lebanese civilians. It doesn’t get much lower than this.

There are plenty of arenas in and around Chicago where those who want to rant can go to express themselves, but a university is not such a venue: the university exists so that the truth may be pursued. That is what a liberal arts education is expected to provide, and it is nothing but a travesty when the rights afforded faculty members are abused in the way Finkelstein has done. This is doubly true when it happens on a Catholic campus.

On September 30, Adirondack Community College (ACC), part of the State University of New York (SUNY), sponsored Pagan Pride Day.

ACC Student Association hosted the event and said it was free to the public and designed to be “a celebration of religious diversity.” But nothing is free—New York taxpayers paid for Pagan Pride Day—and a panel on religious diversity that was initially considered did not occur. However, among the speakers was John Allee, a satanic priest and founder of the First Church of Satan.

On the First Church of Satan’s website, Christians are instructed that they can “deprogram” themselves by “making fun of religious dogma.” On the site’s homepage, a short video pops up to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s song, “I Will Survive.” A bearded man posing as Jesus dressed in a white robe starts mimicking the words, disrobes and struts down a street in a diaper before being hit by a bus.

Other videos include a diatribe that shows a picture of the Bible with a sticker on it, “Warning! Literal belief in this book may endanger your health and life.” There is also a video that features a woman dressed as a nun in a black veil wearing a black bra, black slip and black panties; she is shown masturbating. Another video depicts simulated anal sex. This isn’t higher education—it’s an obscene assault on Christianity.

You can contact John J. O’Connor, vice chancellor, at john.o’connor@suny.edu, and Thomas F. Egan, chairman of SUNY’s board of trustees, at thomas.f.egan@citigroup.com.

A new activist organization, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, issued a voter guide that is nothing more than a slick attempt to get the abortion albatross off the necks of Catholic Democrats. However, the noose is still there.

Instead of dropping opposition to parental notification laws and support for keeping partial-birth abortion legal, the best Catholics in Alliance can do is say it is opposed to abortion. But it makes it painfully clear that it will never join efforts to ban any abortions, including partial-birth. Alexia Kelley heads the new group. In 2004, she worked as a religion advisor to John Kerry (who advocates keeping partial-birth abortion legal) in the closing weeks of his campaign.

On page 9 of the booklet, the group criticizes many pro-life candidates (putting the term pro-life in quotes, as in so-called pro-life candidates) who are nothing but talk. “On the other hand,” it reads, there are pro-abortion politicians who “support effective measures to promote healthy families and reduce abortions by providing help to pregnant women and young children.” So it’s okay for a Catholic politician to give a green light to a practice that kills a baby 80-percent born, just so long as he’s against trans fats.

Catholics in Alliance has no statement urging anyone to vote against partial birth abortion (the best it can do is say it opposes the “root causes” of abortion), but the group did issue a news release over the summer urging the Senate to raise the minimum wage (an issue the Catholic Church has no official position on). Despite what Catholics in Alliance says, there is a moral hierarchy of issues, and as important as ending poverty is, it does not rival the right of a child to be born.