The Regensburg Lecture: Thinking Rightly About God and Man

Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | September 15, 2006

On September 12, on his visit to his native Bavaria, Benedict XVI gave a formal academic lecture at the University at which he formerly was a professor. It is a brilliant, stunning lecture, and it is a lecture, not a papal pronouncement. It brings into focus just why there is a papacy and why Catholicism is an intellectual religion. Indeed, it is a lecture on why reason is reason and what this means. The scope of this lecture is simply breathtaking, but also intelligible to the ordinary mind. In watching my computer and listening to various colleagues the day after this address was given, I felt a kind of hush in the air. Something important had happened, something more than the ordinary went on in Regensburg, something that was addressed to the heart of modernism but also to Islam, our current enigma. When I read the lecture, I understood why.
. . .
We would be fools if we thought that this freedom to speak the truth is not a serious problem in today's world, particularly when we speak of the Islamic world, a topic with which the pope begins his lecture. Indeed, this may be the first time since Urban II that a pope has formally taken up the question of Islam in any way.
. . .