The Courage to Be Truly Themselves

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - April 4, 2008

In September 2006, Pope Benedict gave a speech on the mutual dependence of faith and reason to university professors at the University of Regensburg. One of the conclusions that flow from the fact that God is both love and reason, he stressed, is an uncompromising condemnation of the irrationality of violence to advance the cause of God. In the scholarly discourse, he illustrated that point by quoting, without affirming, a 14th century Christian commentator who argued that Mohammed and many Muslims after them have felt justified in advancing Islam by the sword.

The reaction in many parts of the Muslim world was to deny the point of the 14th century commentator while proving it. Instead of demonstrating that Islam is, as most Muslim leaders insist, a rational and peaceful religion, many Muslims responded with an incredible barrage of irrationality and violence. Saying that they were acting in the name of Islam, five Christian churches in the West Bank and Gaza were attacked with guns and fire bombs; an Italian nun, Leonella Sgorbati, taking care of sick children in a Somalian hospital, was killed by multiple gunshots to the chest, stomach and back; demonstrators with fists raised burned effigies and photos of the pope in public squares; imami in various countries compared Benedict to Hitler and Stalin; Al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq, trying to benefit from the controversy for their own maleficent objectives, declared war on "worshippers of the Cross" and vowed to "slit Christian throats"; and some British Muslims, outside of London's Catholic Cathedral, held signs saying "Jesus is the slave of Allah" and called for Benedict's death.

After Pope Benedict at the Easter vigil baptized 56 year-old Italian-based Muslim journalist Magdi Allam alongside six others, various Muslim leaders said that he had repeated the Regensburg "error" by this sacramental act. They criticized him for demonstrating a total "lack of sensitivity" toward Muslims not only for baptizing a high profile one of their own but for baptizing someone who had written so extensively and critically about the violence preached in many mosques. To baptize Magdi Allam, they claimed, was to baptize his ideas, many of which, according to them, advanced the same ideas for which they faulted the Pope's Regenburg address.

Yet just as it was not Benedict who was in "error" in Regensburg, but the Muslim mobs who turned to violence in order to prove that Muslims are not violent, so it was not the pope who repeated a mistake at the Easter vigil but rather those Muslims whose response validated one of the very points they have been trying to disprove.

The Muslim leaders' criticism was focused on Benedict's "insensitivity" and Allam's ideas, but no opprobrium was given whatsoever to the fact that, for his views and his conversion, Allam's life has been repeatedly threatened, he needs to travel everywhere with police escorts and he, his wife and his young son need to live in a secret location so that radicals following fatwas issued by several imams cannot assassinate him. If anything qualifies as insensitive and unacceptable it is such death-sentences.

In Benedict's dialogue with Muslim scholars since the Regensburg address, his Muslim interlocutors have sought that the topic of their discussion focus on the love of God and the love of neighbor in their respective traditions. These are ideas, of course, dear to the thought of the Pope whose first encyclical was entitled "God is love" and concentrated upon how we were to receive and share God's love with others. But Pope Benedict has politely but firmly refused to have a dialogue based on the general theological principles of love. He has rather insisted that the conversation tackle how such love becomes concrete in analyzing how each tradition handles the question of human rights.

One of the most fundamental human rights, Benedict has repeatedly stressed, is religious freedom — and one of the greatest examples of religious freedom is the choice to convert. By his high profile baptism of Magdi Allam, the pope was, it seems, drawing clear attention to this fundamental right. Allam wrote that he had requested that the Pope rather than his parish priest baptize him because he knew first-hand — from many articles he had researched —how many Muslim converts to the Christian faith "live in the catacombs" fearful that if their conversions are discovered, they will be killed by Muslim extremists who look at conversion as apostasy, a religious crime punishable by death. He thought that his public conversion, and the bravery of the Holy Father in suffering criticism to defend the right a person has to religious freedom, would embolden these other Muslim converts to live courageously their new faith.

Allam is under no illusions that his baptism into Christ may mean not merely his sacramental but real entrance into Christ's death. In reflections the day after his baptism, he wrote:

"My conversion to Catholicism is the arrival point of a gradual and profound interior meditation which I would not have been able to avoid, since for five years I have been trapped in an entrenched and guarded lifestyle, with fixed surveillance at home and a police escort wherever I go, because of the death threats made against me by Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those living in Italy and those active abroad. I have had to wonder to myself about the attitude of those who have publicly issued fatwas, Islamic juridical declarations denouncing me … legitimizing in this way my condemnation to death….

"You asked me whether I am not afraid for my life, in the awareness that my conversion to Christianity will certainly obtain for me yet another condemnation to death for apostasy, and a much more serious one. You are perfectly right. I know what I am going up against, but I will face my fate with my head held high, with my back straight and with the interior firmness of those who have the certainty of their faith. And I will be all the more so after the historic and courageous gesture of the pope who – from the very first moment when he found out about my wish – immediately agreed to personally impart to me the sacraments of Christian initiation.…

"I hope that from the historic gesture of the pope and from my witness they may derive the conviction that the time has come to emerge from the darkness of the catacombs, and to confirm publicly their will to be fully themselves."

His courage should inspire all Christians, and not just Muslim converts, to be themselves by affirming fully the truth about Jesus.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.