The Pope’s visit to Bavaria was followed with close attention by the European media, in particular by the German media. Writing in Die Welt (13/09), Paul Badde notes in Benedict XVI an “ effort to rediscover in common the Christian profile which he suggested in the Vespers celebrated with Evangelical and Orthodox Christians in the church dedicated to Mary, as he also did before the representatives of science in a final lecture given from the chair of his former university: a lecture in which he asked for an act of “self-criticism of modern reason”, in a necessary “extension of our concept and use of reason”. A comment in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung points out: “ Even those who do not recognise in him an important scientist, since as non-believers they cast doubt on the value of theology altogether, cannot fail to recognise in Benedict the juridical and spiritual leader of a billion Catholics throughout the world. No other German can claim anything comparable. So, no one, however distant from the Church, or however anticlerical even, can fail to recognise in him a man who will surely enter into the German history books, so long as this country belongs to the Christian West” […] “ Benedict is not just someone nostalgic, eager to spend a holiday back in his homeland. Rather, he seems to have come here to act as admonitor of the Church of his country, of the richest association of the universal Church subject to him, with supreme authority“. Writing in the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung (14/9), the head of the Islamic community in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, fails to find in the words of Benedict XVI, in his speech to the University of Regensburg, any attack on Islam. According to Mazyek “the pope did not wish to refer to a violent and bellicose tradition of Islam. If we consider the bloody campaigns of forced christianisation in South America, the Crusades in the Islamic world, the conduct of the Church and the use it made of the Hitler regime, some apprehensions arise about the Church possibly raising its finger against the extremist activities of other religious communities“, said the Islamic exponent. In Islam, added Mazyek, “there are unfortunately some groups that, camouflaged by the institutions, aim to exploit Islam for their own ends and with their extremist ideology, and damage it. We must not allow that to happen”, concluded Aiman Mazyek. The French Catholic daily La Croix (13/9) carries the headline: “Benedict XVI forcefully reaffirms the link between faith and reason” and entrusts to Jean-Marie Guénois a comment on the Pope’s visit to Bavaria: “before the professors of the University of Regensburg – writes the editorialist – Benedict XVI gave the whole measure of his thought on the matter, confirming his will to work directly for the reconciliation between faith and reason. In his way, he solicits the two fields in a new way and proposes a pact between them. He asks scientists to go to the root of the question ‘why?’ and penetrate the enigma of the intelligence that organises matter. He asks Christians to unreservedly admit the best features of the contribution of modern reason and its ethos. This ethical principle – obedience to the truth – is the spirit of Christianity”. Another French daily, Le Monde (14/9) also comments on the Pope’s denunciation of the “fatal diseases of religion and reason” and adds: “in Bavaria Benedict XVI condemned the Islamic holy war”. “Never before has a pope of the modern period cited verses of the Koran and spoken of jihad. John Paul II – writes Henry Tinq – sought dialogue with Islam, Benedict XVI intellectual confrontation” placing fundamentalism in the dock: “pathology of religion and destruction of the image of God caused by hatred and fanaticism” . According to the Pontiff, “today it is important to say, with clarity, in what God we believe and profess with conviction the human face of religion”. “The theology of music suggests an icon of the church” writes Pierangelo Sequeri in the Italian Catholic daily Avvenire (14/9) . The image of the Church as a “well-tuned organ” , proposed by the pope during his journey to Bavaria, is called by the paper “another perceptive insight of Benedict XVI”. “There is nothing purely ornamental in the choral and orchestral beauty of the Church’s liturgies of celebration. When they are musical, as they ought to be, something profound happens to the Church. And the Church makes something happen that is irreplaceable for everyone. Through music, the church interior and the congregation of believers themselves become a musical instrument in praise of God and in recognition of his hand in the whole of creation. The choral organism of the liturgy as a whole, which condenses the image of the Church around the harmonics of the Word of God and the Body of the Lord, enables us to hear how a civilization of free and equal brothers really sounds”.
