Killing in the name of God
The Pope’s address on September 12 in Regensburg has opened a Pandora’s Box. Muslims all over the world are furious over the remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI in the German city. The theme of Benedict’s address were faith and reason, Christianity and Europe, the emergence of Islam as Christianity’s significant ‘other’, topics which did not require him to attack Prophet Muhammad and his teachings.
But Benedict went on to quote the 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II:
Show me just what Mohammed 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.
And with this statement, Benedict undid 25 years worth of work that Pope John Paul II had done to build bridges with the Muslim community.
Before digging out things from the past, Benedict should have given a thought to the skeletons lying in his own closet. If he denounces Muhammad’s call to ‘spread by the sword the faith he preached’, then what about the Crusades, called the ‘Holy War’ by the Church.
In 1095, Pope Urban II called for a holy war against the Turks and Arabs, because they were in control of Jerusalem. He claimed that it was the duty of Christians to assemble armies under the sign of the cross and invade Palestine. To rouse European knighthood to war, the pope crafted rhetoric of racism. The Pope attacked them as infidels and demonized them on the basis of race.
Urban used religion as an incitement to genocide, while claiming to speak for God. The Pope promised that the sins of crusading soldiers would be wiped out ‘by the power of God vested in me.‘
The Christian army carried out unthinkable atrocities when Jerusalem finally fell to them. The crusaders slaughtered the city’s inhabitants: Muslims, Jews and Christians, men, women and children. The Franks’ own chroniclers admitted to killing 10,000, the mounted knights splattered in blood up to their hips. Their violence shocked the Muslims, who had peacefully allowed Christian pilgrims to visit Palestine for several centuries.
A second crusade was called when Muslim forces succeeded in retaking key ports and lands surrounding the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The call to war was spearheaded by the preaching of Bernard of Clairvaux, a prominent abbot who had been active in the Gregorian ‘reform’. This soon-to-be-sainted preacher continued Urban’s policy of promoting hatred of other cultures as a rationale for conquest:
The Christian glories in the death of the pagan, because Christ is therefore glorified.
Pagan to these men meant anyone but a European Christian, including Muslims and Jews as well as followers of old folk religions.
Well… with that kind of a legacy, Benedict would have been better off sticking to his theme without quoting some medieval emperor, who had been at his wit’s end trying to defend his empire from an invading Turkish army.
