The pope’s humiliation: all part of a deep plan?

David Yerushalmi has an article in which he strives mightily to come up with some rational explanation of why the pope went to Turkey and acted like a dhimmi. I wrote him an e-mail about it:

I must say, you can’t be serious. :-)

Your theory:

He planned it all in advance: Blow it big time at Regensburg, which would set off vast Muslim anger, giving him the opportunity to go to Turkey and humiliate and humble himself, which would win him some brownie points with Muslim leaders.

You sound like the Bush apologists who interpret every one of his catastrophes as the working of a deep plan.

If this was a deep plan, then when did Benedict initially give the “non-apology apologies,” as you discuss, and then only later give real, full-bore apologies? Was that planned out, too, to increase his humiliation and disgrace, so that on top of having insulted Islam and then having to apologize for it, he also had to be disgraced by giving insincere apologies before giving sincere apologies, and then increasingly sincere and extravagant apologies?

The absurdity of the lengths you have had to go to in order to find some positive, saving purpose in his disgraceful actions only shows that the positive purpose was not there. As much as we want a strong pope defending Christianity and the West, we have to face the unpleasant truth, which I demonstrated at length at my site: Benedict is the Larry Summers of the Vatican.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2006 10:33 PM | Send