VATICAN CITY — It’s not often that a first lady of the United States makes an official visit to the Pope and discusses cartoons.

But it isn’t often that cartoons spark worldwide violence.

Twelve cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed, including one depicting him as a suicide bomber, were published in the mass-circulation Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper last September and republished in Europe and Jordan at the end of January.

At least 10 people lost their lives when Muslims rioted in protest, including Father Andrea Santoro, an Italian missionary priest who was shot Feb. 5 by a 16-year-old youth who police say was partly motivated by anger over the cartoons, which violate a Muslim rule against depicting the prophet Mohammed in any way (see related story on page 4).

On a visit to Pope Benedict XVI Feb. 9, First Lady Laura Bush said she discussed the issue “briefly” with the Pope and was asked by reporters about the violent protests. “There’s nothing constructive about violence like that,” she said after her audience, adding that she hoped all governments “will call for an end to that violence.”

On Feb. 4, the Vatican had issued a balanced statement faulting both the media outlets for printing such religiously inflammatory material and the violent protests that ensued.

“The rights concerning the freedom of thought and expression, as sanctioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, does not mean one can use those rights to offend the religious sentiments of a believer,” the statement read.

Without referring explicitly to the cartoons, the Vatican said such derisive, insensitive criticism constitutes “an unacceptable provocation.” It also condemned the violence as “equally deplorable” and added such a reaction was “less than the true spirit of every religion.”

Many Western leaders, including U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have blamed the governments of Islamic countries — particularly Syria and Iran — for stirring up the hostility.

“Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this to their own purposes,” Rice said Feb. 8, Associated Press reported. “And the world ought to call them on it.”

Some feared the dispute would spark a clash of cultures, but this was largely downplayed in Rome.

“I have always said that there isn’t one, really, but this type of action seems to aggravate it,” Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, told the Register Feb. 4. “We need to, as it were, sit down with our Muslim partners and listen to one another. We cannot hold our Muslim partners responsible for this, and likewise they cannot hold us responsible for the abuses occurring in Western countries.”

The archbishop stressed that what people hold sacred must not be ridiculed, but treated with respect. “Such publications are not legitimate ways of using the freedom of expression,” he said, adding, “We share in the suffering of Muslims and express our solidarity with them.”

But the Muslim protests, and particularly the later killing of Father Santoro, provoked a stronger reaction from some Church circles. Father Bernardo Cervellera, director of Asia News and the former head of the Vatican’s Fides missionary news service, drew attention in an editorial about Father Santoro’s death to a lack of dialogue between the West and Islam and attempts to stir up a war between East and West.

On the one hand, Father Cervellera said, there is a “Europe that is forgetting itself, its religious traditions, disrespectful of its own history,” and on the other an Islam that “continues to dump on the other, on others, the faults for its own backwardness.”

Taj Hargey, director of the Muslim Educational Center in Oxford, England, believes the war in Iraq — which even mainstream Muslims see as democracy being “imposed” upon them — underlies much of the protest triggered by the cartoons.

“For many Muslims, Christianity and Western powers, Bush and Blair, are indistinguishable, particularly for those less sophisticated and who aren’t able to make the distinction,” he said.

Hargey condemned the cartoon-generated protests as the work of “wahhabis, salafis, and jihadis,” but he also supported a public boycott of Danish goods as retribution. The cartoons’ publication was clearly an irresponsible, Islamophobic provocation, he said, noting that Jyllands-Posten had refrained from publishing a drawing offensive to Christians three years ago. He also complained that the newspaper has yet to offer an apology.

But Hargey acknowledged that Muslims tend to overreact to such attacks.

“Islam is in defensive mode, we’ve been feeling oppressed for a long time, on the receiving end of colonialism and so forth, and so we tend to strike out when backed into a corner,” he said.

Hargey added that Muslims “need to be far more self-critical,” commit to not “heed the extremists,” and to “return to the ideals of the Koran such as tolerance, justice and peaceful coexistence.”

Speaking to the Register Feb. 9, Father Cervellera blamed the Muslim reaction not so much on Islam but extremist elements in some Middle Eastern governments, notably Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, who want a confrontation with the West.

“They’re not only against freedom known in the West but also against Islam,” he said, accusing such leaders of obscuring another strand of Islam that’s ready to face modernity.

Father Cervellera rejected the argument that Islam is inevitably inclined towards producing such governments.

“We still have a lot of Islamic personalities in the Middle East who look at Islam as a religious and spiritual matter but without linking it to political power and the domination of the mullahs,” he said.

Edward Pentin

writes from Rome.

 

 

Priest: Martyred By Muslim?

ROME — Cardinal Camillo Ruini, papal vicar for Rome, said he intends to open a cause for the sainthood of Father Andrea Santoro, a Rome missionary murdered in Turkey.

“In the process for beatification and canonization I intend to open, we will respect fully all of the rules and times of the Church, but already I am internally persuaded that all of the elements of Christian martyrdom are present in the sacrifice of Father Andrea,” Cardinal Ruini said Feb. 10 as he celebrated the priest’s funeral.

Father Santoro, a priest of the Diocese of Rome who had worked in Turkey since 2000, was shot and killed Feb. 5 as he prayed in St. Mary Church in the Black Sea coastal city of Trebizond.

Turkish police arrested a 16-year-old male in connection with the murder. He was allegedly motivated in part by anger over the publication by Western media outlets of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

Church rules would require Cardinal Ruini to wait five years before opening the official process to have Father Santoro declared a martyr, a formal recognition that he was killed out of hatred for his faith.

During the funeral at Rome’s Basilica of St. John Lateran, Cardinal Ruini said Father Santoro knew and accepted the fact that his pastoral activity in Turkey would be largely hidden and quiet.

Cardinal Ruini also spoke about the reaction of the priest’s mother, who sat in the front row, nodding in agreement.

Said Cardinal Ruini, “With all her heart the mother of Father Andrea forgives the person who armed himself to kill her son, and she feels great pain for him because he, too, is a son of the one God who is love.”                 (CNS)