A teacher should choose his words more carefully

So you must be aware that many Muslims are angry, and a few have acted out in violence, over what they see as anti-Islam statements by Pope Benedict XVI in a speech he made to a group of academics. (CNN helpfully provides a video they title "Watch other Muslims burn the pope in effigy." Sure to be a YouTube hit.) The Pope has offered an apology and explanation, but the extremely mediagenic controversy continues to simmer. Massive furor over a barely illustrative comment made in an intimate academic setting: Pope Benedict's getting the Larry Summers treatment, a comparison I imagine would bemuse them both.

Zenit has the full text of the Pope's remarks up now, although when I checked this link last night they had redacted the offending quote. I'm glad they finally read the speech and noticed that the Pope praises "the will to be obedient to the truth" as a hallmark of both faith and science.

Quoting the anti-Mohammed statement in the full context the pope gave it would require pasting several paragraphs. He mentions both the author of the book he read it in and the name of the Byzantine emperor who actually said it, and even notes that the story is tangential to his main point. The speech is a subtle and extremely smart analysis of the role Greek culture played and plays in Christianity's relating of faith to reason. The Pope decides that reason is an integral element of Christian faith, not merely an artifact of scholarly Greek culture. The document with the anti-Islam quote also contained an assertion by the Muslim scholar that God is not required to behave rationally by human standards, which the Pope uses as an entry into his meditation.

As the Times story linked above points out, some commentors are blown away that the pope apologized at all, and others think, because his apology only mentioned the "reactions" to his remarks, he hasn't yet gone far enough. Both sides are right. The speed and sincerity of the Pope's response should make Catholics proud. The very fact that he spent time reading the document he quotes, a medieval dialogue between a Christian emperor and a Muslim scholar, shows his willingness to approach other faiths with deep scholarship and respect.

But a wise man like the Pope should have known better than to use such a negative quote, especially since it has so little to do with the message of his speech. He didn't need to associate Islam and jihad in order to tell the story about the emperor and the scholar conversing about reason, although that is a decent concrete example of assuming that God reasons with a human mind. (The Byzantine emperor asks how God can both condemn violence and advocate holy war.) The emperor's quote against Mohammed, the words that have inspired anger and violence, has no purpose whatsoever in the Pope's speech: in fact, he never refers back to the words once he's quoted them.

As he mentions in this speech, Pope Benedict was a longtime teacher. His colleagues who teach American literature probably have a very clear idea of how worthy texts--like medieval dialogues, or Huckleberry Finn--need to be quoted with sensitivity. The Pope should issue a fuller apology for a use of language that was not malicious--I don't think so--but certainly thoughtless. After all, it's his job to promote the truth that the Word has world-altering power.