This piece in the Trib was so good I had to post it here.
The [Pittsburgh] Tribune-Review reported on September 24, 2006:
The pope was right, and 90 percent of sensible people know he was right.
In our time the cause of religion cannot be perverted into calls for murderous violence against others. We're cursed with too many awful technologies of destruction. Civilization dare not endure their being flung about in behalf of God. Nor can the global marketplace.
It took a religious authority of great prestige to make this case and -- and, frankly, to endure the terroristic aftershocks. Who knows if it's safe for Pope Benedict to travel anymore?
He used an obscure medieval debate on violence among people of faith to make his point, but the point is rock-solid. No adherent to religion -- any religion -- can murder over differences in religion and call it anything but a particularly awful sin.
This, like many truths too long restrained, especially when "multiculturalism" makes it such a no-no to cast aspersions, is difficult to voice in public, though nearly everyone might privately agree. Such truths pile up until it may be too late.
We try to ignore them. Look, for example, at how respected labor unions, when long entrenched, can sink major industries. The work rules, health and pension burdens tend to harden toward the impossible. Airlines get healthy only after union givebacks forced by bankruptcy. General Motors and Ford might have to talk a deathbed merger. Their labor costs approach $80 an hour. That's starving their potential to come out quickly with new models while Toyota and other non-union "transplants" eat up the U.S. market.
The anti-growth syndrome in a pleasant city like Pittsburgh involves another blinding truth: the economic deconstruction done by one-party politics in cahoots with public employee unions. More damage lies ahead. The poor will grow poorer at legalized gambling and from transit fare hikes. The continuing failure of inner-city schools, though incredibly costly to taxpayers, relates in part to "single mom" households -- wrongly idealized by the politically correct -- that produce kids lacking in discipline and learning readiness. Yet taxpayers subsidize the absence of a father.
The pope's challenge to Islam is in a class with these blinding truths.
He's calling on Muslim leaders to renounce holy war. If Islam truly is a religion of peace, then peace has got to be preached. And practiced. The faith propagated by Mohammed can't have it both ways. It can't condone -- by failing to condemn -- suicide bombings and other mayhem by Muslims, while pointing to blissfully peaceful passages in the holy texts. If the bombers and hostage-takers are wrong about what their faith is teaching them what to do, let's hear you correct them, Muslim leaders!
The pope was the first to out on this. He shouldn't be the last. We're listening, leaders of Protestant Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, et al.
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