few Christians in positions of influence and respect have publicly defended their faith and the civilization that birthed it. Candor, after all, can get one killed, exiled, or ostracized—whether a Danish cartoonist, a Dutch filmmaker, a Wall Street Journal reporter, or a British-Indian novelist. So here, ill and in her seventies, returned Ms. Fallaci one last time to take up the hammer and tongs against radical Islam—a diminutive woman of the Left and self-proclaimed atheist who wrote more bravely on behalf of her civilization than have most who are hale, males, conservatives, or Christians
And he ties this to the Pope's Regensburg lecture:
what are we to make of poor Benedict XVI, the scholastic, who, in a disastrous display of public sensitivity, makes the telling point, that Christianity, in its long evolution to the present, has learned to forsake violence, and to defend its faith through appeals to reason—and thus can offer its own experience in the current crisis of Islam.Exactly. Exactly.
If a sentence, indeed a mere phrase can be taken out of context, twisted, manipulated to show an absence of deference to Islam, furor ensues, death threats follow, assassins load their belts—even as the New York Times or the Guardian issues its sanctimonious apologies in the hope that the crocodile will eat them last.Which is pathetic because in fact it will eat them first. But VDH has a few things to say to our own as well, in which I join him:
I have given up on most of the neoconservatives, many of whom, following the perceived pulse of the battlefield, have either renounced their decade-long, pre-September11 rants to remove Saddam (despite the 140,000 brave souls still on the field of battle who took them at their word), or turned on the President on grounds that he is not waging the perfect fight and thus is not pursuing the good war.We abound in big talkers, but not in prudent men. "If only W. were eloquent we say," forgetting that Eloquence Itself, Winston Churchill, spent most of his political life as a failure and a mocked figure. People listened to him only when they had to.
So we really are left with very little in these pivotal times—the will of George Bush, of course, the Old Breed unchanged since Okinawa and the Bulge that still anchors the US military, the courage and skill of a very few brave writers like a Hitchens, Krauthammer, and the tireless and brilliant Mark Steyn, but very, very few others. No, this is an age in which we in the West make smug snuff movies about killing an American President, while the Taliban and the Islamists boast of assassinating the Pope.Well. I agree with that, but there is such a thing as Providence. I wrote to an old prof. of mine recently that reading the lives of the saints with the kids has shown me that besides death and taxes, the constants in life are conquering Islam and the perfidy of the French. He replied
Death and taxes are caused by conquering Islam and the perfidy of the French.The West should not have won the Battle of Lepanto. It should not have won the battle of Vienna. Often the heretics in the Church (Arians, Albigensians) have outnumbered the orthodox-- yet here we are. It's easy to forget in a crisis that yes, we're in danger of being swept away --but we're equally on the cusp of a glorious --perhaps unlooked for-- victory. (The Anchoress gets it.)
It has often struck me that --their different philosophical roots notwithstanding-- aggressive secularism and radical Islam are flip sides of the same coin. Secularism leaves a vacuum that any wacky theory will rush to fill; Wahabism is the strongest wacky theory going. But equally, at the level of practice, both secularism and radical Islam represent efforts to cope with the power of sexuality --particularly feminine sexuality. Secularism makes a god of it; Islam irrationally fears it and seeks to control it. It seems providential, therefore, to me, that John Paul the Great left us a theology of the body that addresses both. And equally providential that we have in Benedict an apostle of Reason. And we have the Queen of the Rosary on our side --the victorious Lady of Lepanto and Vienna. (A little noticed fact of John Paul's letter on the rosary was its invocation of Leo XIII's 1883 Encyclical on the rosary, which catalogues Mary's intercession on behalf of the Church against Muslim encroachment. Perhaps that's an indication what John Paul had on his mind when he urged us all to take up the rosary anew.)
Nietszche said it takes 10 (whoops! 100 --toldja I'm no good at Math) great men to change a culture. We have had John Paul and Reagan and Teresa of Calcutta. Now we have Benedict, Bush.... Maybe we know some of their names already.
