Sandro Magister Has Nailed It!

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Sandro Magister, who is a Professor at an Italian university, a columnist for the Milan-based Italian language magazine "L'Espresso" and in his spare time has become the world's most knowledgeable person outside and maybe even inside the Vatican, the world's smallest state. He shares his thoughts in his frequently published internet column "Chiesa", meaning "Church."

Magister (whose surname fittingly means "teacher") has brilliantly summarized in two paragraphs what the Pope was up to last week in Regensburg in the speech that has been so misinterpreted by the Islamic world. Violence, deaths and rage caused by people who have not yet read more than headlines about the speech fill the headlines. In the politically correct Western world, cries of "repent" are heard in the halls of academia and the headquarters buildings of the major media conglomerates.

Read the excerpt of Magister's cooling thoughts:

Anyone who is an expert in the art of diplomacy and a proponent of “realism” in international relations would certainly have censured as inopportune and dangerous many passages of the homilies and speeches delivered by Benedict XVI in Germany.

But this is not a pope who submits himself to such censorship or self-censorship, which he sees as being inopportune and dangerous indeed when it concerns the pillars of his preaching. His goal on his trip to Germany was to illuminate before modern man – whether Christian, agnostic, or of another faith; from Europe, Africa, or Asia – that simple and supreme truth that is the other side of the truth to which he dedicated the encyclical “Deus Caritas Est.” God is love, but he is also reason, he is the “Logos.” And so when reason separates itself from God, it closes in upon itself. And likewise, faith in an “irrational” God, an absolute, unbridled will, can become the seed of violence. Every religion, culture, and civilization is exposed to this twofold error – not only Islam, but also Christianity, toward which the pope directed almost the entirety of his preaching. [snip] Chiesa

Res Ipsa Loquitur


If you desire to know what is going on in Rome, "Chiesa" should regularly be on your reading list and to top it off, check out AsiaNews.it, an Italian news service that covers the Middle East and Asia most completely. The Church spends much of its time dealing with problems there these days.