Quote of the Day (John Paul II, on Islam)

“I remember an event from my youth. In the convent of the Church of Saint Mark in Florence, we were looking at the frescoes by Fra Angelico. At a certain point a man joined us who, after sharing his admiration for the work of this great religious artist, immediately added: ‘But nothing can compare to our magnificent Muslim monotheism.’ His statement did not prevent us from continuing the visit and the conversation in a friendly tone. It was on that occasion that I got a kind of first taste of the dialogue between Christianity and Islam, which we have tried to develop systematically in the post-conciliar period.”—Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), edited by Vittorio Messori

Last Sunday’s beautification of Pope John Paul II occurred on the same day that U.S. Navy Seals ended the life of Osama bin Laden, who had used terror in an attempt to revive the Moslem caliphate that held sway in the Mideast during the Middle Ages. It wasn't the first time that his life and message were obscured by media attention given a madman who used terror to propagate a fundamentalist vision of Islam.

In 1979, the first full year of his quarter century as pope, John Paul traveled the globe, an indefatigable evangelist spreading his message of peace. Millions responded to his charisma. Yet the same year, Time Magazine named the Ayatollah Khomeini as its “Man of the Year.” The designation did not imply goodness, the editors insisted, but was simply given to the man who had most affected the news over the last 12 months.

In a way, John Paul’s brief description of this youthful encounter with Islam in the above quote foreshadowed the West’s far more convulsive one in the past three decades, beginning with the 1979 seizure of American hostages in Iran at the urging of Khomeini. Between the lines in this quote, you can sense the pope coming to terms uneasily with the impact of Islam in the modern world.

In a college course on Catholic theology since Vatican II, my professor was at pains to disabuse us about the nature of ecumenism. It was not, he insisted, a watering-down of the essential differences between religions. In fact, he said, attendees at such sessions staked out positions and disagreed as vigorously as possible.

Seen in this light, John Paul’s treatment of Islam in Crossing the Threshold of Hope fulfills my professor’s criterion of ecumenism. The God of Islam, the pontiff notes, is a deity of majesty, but only majesty. Though Jesus is mentioned in the Koran, it’s only as a prophetic forerunner of Muhammad. There is no Cross or Resurrection—and, thus, no “religion of redemption,” or revelation of God within the world.

Far more troubling, one suspects, for this pontiff who sparked a massive nonviolent resistance movement in Eastern Europe that eventually destroyed the Iron Curtain, was his recognition of the limits placed on freedom in countries dominated by political Islam, where a fundamentalist strain of that religion held sway. “In countries where fundamentalist principles come to power," he wrote, "human rights and the principle of religious freedom are unfortunately interpreted in a very one-sided way—religious freedom comes to mean freedom to impose on all citizens ‘the true religion.’”

And yet, John Paul discusses Islam with considerable sympathy. Though he touches on Vatican II’s pronouncements about Islam, it is much more than a pro forma recognition of a recent Church document. Quite simply, he admires the fervor of Muslims:

“It is impossible not to admire, for example, their fidelity to prayer. The image of believers in Allah who, without caring about time or place, fall to their knees and immerse themselves in prayer remains a model for all those who invoke the true God, in particular for those Christians who, having deserted their magnificent cathedrals, pray only a little or not at all.”

In this, it’s easy to discern a passionate pilgrim who found it impossible not to respect someone whose prayerfulness matched his own.

It’s clear from the pope’s account that he was moved by his respectful, even kind reception in Muslim-dominated countries in Africa and Asia. In particular, his 1999 apology for atrocities committed by the Crusaders represented, according to a Beliefnet.com article by Professor Akbar S. Ahmed of American University, “a tectonic shift in Christian attitudes toward Islam.”

The many around the world praying for John Paul’s canonization might also want to pray that the vision offered by John Paul to Muslims and other non-Christians—profound respect for the beliefs of others, coupled with an absence of triumphalism—might now be coming into being with the Arab Spring and the death of one of history’s greatest murderers that have electrified the world this year.