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30 March 2007:

Upon reading about Benedict XVI in The New Yorker.

These are fierce theological times. It should come as no surprise that the Vatican and Islam are not getting along, or that their problems began long before Pope Benedict XVI made his unfortunate reference to the Prophet Muhammad, in a speech in Regensburg last September, and even before the children of Europe's Muslin immigrants discovered beards, burkas, and jihad. There are more than a billion Catholics in the world, and more than a billion Muslims. And what divides the most vocal and rigidly orthodox interpreters of their two faiths, from the imams of Riyadh and the ayatollahs of Qom to the Pope himself, is precisely the things that Catholicism and Islam have always had in common: a purchase on truth; a contempt for the moral accommodations of liberal, secular states; a strong imperative to censure, convert, and multiply; and a belief that Heaven, and possibly earth, belongs exclusively to them.

That's Jane Kramer, at the start of her Letter from Europe in the current New Yorker, "The Pope and Islam: Is there anything that Benedict XVI would like to discuss?" (Sadly, not online.) The answer to the subtitle's question is, of course, "no." There is nothing to discuss. His church is the definitively "rational" institution in human affairs.

Nothing makes me wish that I lived on another planet more than overtly religious people. The mistake that I and people who feel as I do have made is to overlook the horrendous amount of misery that religious people can inflict on the rest of us, simply because their folly - our view - is so unimaginably - to us - important to them. Their orthodoxy is no more tolerable to us than our belief in secular compromise is to them.

What has reinvigorated the ancient religious institutions is what one hopes will be the final assault on the patriarchal arrangements that all three religions "of the book" exalt. Millions of Westerners who have long since come to terms with bareheaded women, the waltz, the theatre, interest-bearing loans, midwives, Newtonian cosmology, and other objects of discarded prohibitions balk at the equalization of gender and sexual preference. Little of this balking is thought-out; like so much of the current, gee-whiz response to the problem of global warming, it is solipsistic at bottom, a matter of shallow intellectual newborns trying to think universally but not getting beyond their immediate horizons. That is to say that people who haven't much thought about such things are likely to be revolted by the idea of intimate manners other than their own. There is no more to this final siege than getting everyone to sign on with "to all their own."

The Roman Catholic Church has always devoted itself to the care of souls, and sometimes to the care of bodies. The battle of the patriarchy, which may result in the final reformation of the Church and put an end to the wholly unscriptural Augustinian settlement of sexuality and priesthood, is a terrible distraction from what any reader of the Gospels will see as its true mission. Benedict is not as interested in this mission - charity - as he is in preserving what he perceives to be orthodoxy. His message is very simple: My way or the highway. That's why people of faith ought to set out on the highway, where they will find the future and, what's more, one another, Muslim, Jew, or Christian.

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