The Regensburg Lecture

By James V. Schall

St. Augustine Press, 2007

174 pages, $20

To order: staugustine.net

1-800-621-2736

Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address (delivered Sept. 12, 2006 in Germany) will likely be regarded as one of the most important moments of his pontificate.

Having been awarded the prestigious “Address of the Year” from Tübingen University, the Pope’s lecture may help to shape man’s view of the world for generations.

And few could elucidate its main themes and properly set the lecture in the context of today’s global issues as well as Jesuit Father James Schall. Father Schall’s book explains, in a readable and engaging fashion, the main themes of the Pope’s lecture.

While the book does not discuss the process of how Pope Benedict came to write the text or the Pope’s own thoughts on the reaction afterwards, Father Schall’s book does invaluably offer the reader historical background, philosophical foundations and a faith-and-morals perspective of the issues to help us better understand the main points of the Pope’s lecture itself.

Most of us remember this lecture for how it was reported in the news. The media responded to it by focusing on the violent response by some Muslims to his having quoted a statement of the 14th century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, who in a (friendly) dialogue with a Persian scholar, said: “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.”

Father Schall notes that “Muslim reaction in fact made the lecture a political phenomenon.”

Despite one-sided media focus on the Islamic response, Father Schall points out that the Regensburg lecture was in fact a two-sided evaluation and a call to dialogue for both the Islamic East and the Christianized West.

Concerning the West, the Pope stated that Europe’s rejection of the central principles that formed it, namely its historical culture built upon reason and theological faith in divine revelation, are the root cause of its growing instability and internal unrest today. Father Schall states: “It is this problem of a freedom unbound by anything but itself that is the real theme of the Regensburg Lecture.”

As I finished reading Father Schall’s highly informative book, I see the Pope looking to the West with hope for a better tomorrow.

Pope Benedict is saying that this hope depends upon the restoration of faith and reason — for the West to restore it and then to share it in witness and dialogue with the East. But, until then, I could not help wondering how the West thinks it will succeed in its current campaign to stop Islamic extremists — who promote the murder of infidels in the name of being (unreasonably) faithful — by offering, as its alternative, our own hedonistic and amoral version of a Westernized democracy — one that sanctions the murder of the unborn in the name of being (unfaithfully) reasonable.

In the final analysis, the Pope is urgently calling the East and the West to an examination that he hopes will first lead to authentic self-conversion and then to a dialogue toward unity, so that we will together build a new civilization based on the love of the one divine Logos, Jesus Christ.

Kelly Bowring is based

in Dawsonville, Georgia.