On the evening of Sept. 12, 2006, my wife and I were dining in Cracow with Polish friends when an agitated Italian Vaticanista (pardon the redundancy in adjectives) called, demanding to know what I thought of â??Zees crazee speech of zee pope about zee Muslims.â? That was my first hint that the herd of independent minds in the world press was about to go ballistic on the subject of Benedict XVIâ??s Regensburg Lecture: a â??gaffeâ?-bone on which the media continued to gnaw until the end of Benedictâ??s pontificate.
Eight years later, the Regensburg Lecture looks a lot different. Indeed, those who actually read it in 2006 understood that, far from making a â??gaffe,â? Benedict XVI was exploring with scholarly precision two key questions, the answers to which would profoundly influence the civil war raging within Islamâ??a war whose outcome will determine whether 21st-century Islam is safe for its own adherents and safe for the world.
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