DAGUPAN CITY - “Where’s the attack, insult or offense?”

This was asked by Archbishop Oscar V. Cruz of the Lingayen-Dagupan archdiocese, reacting on the furor over the lecture of Pope Benedict XVI on September 12 at the University of Regensburg in Germany.

Cruz, former president of the influential Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, reviewed the lecture of the Pope and came up to the conclusion that the focus of this was the relationship between faith and reason.

He stressed that the substance of the Pope’s lecture is a threefold truth. First, faith and reason are compatible, second, faith illumines reason functions, and third, reason affirms faith acts.

Archbishop Cruz opined that what Pope Benedict XVI really meant was that “just as God has disposition to make self known to man, man on the other hand has the capacity to know God.”

Cruz said that the Holy Father, in his lecture, cited the Surah 2:256 that reads “There is no compulsion in religion.

The archbishop said that in plain words, the Pope himself subscribes to the truth brought forward by Mohammed than mere force can not make man have faith.

“Man should not only see the rationality of the faith but also freely accept it. Otherwise, man would not have genuine faith. Violence or force has no place in the interaction between God and Man. In the same way, force or violence cannot make man really believe in God,” Cruz stressed.

He said that as to the alleged attack, insult or offense made by the Pope against the Muslim religion, this is not only a gross falsity but also a bad joke.

“If anything at all, the allegation is instead a shameles attack, insult or offense to the Pope,” Cruz said, adding that Benedict XVI “would be the last person on earth that could speak ill of the Muslim religion.”

In explaining the issue, Cruz cited a portion of a dialogue between Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus with a Persian scholar sometime in 1391, that said: “Show me just what Mohammend brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword, the faith he preached.”

In that dialogue, Cruz claimed, “it was not Benedict XVI who said this.” The truth, he said, was that the Pope instead countered this errant pronouncement by the said emperor by citing precisely that accoding to Mohammed himself, “There is no compulsion in religion” (Surah 2:256) (PNA)