These are fierce theological times. It should come as no surprise that the Vatican and Islam are not getting along, or that their problems began long before Pope Benedict XVI made his unfortunate reference to the Prophet Muhammad, in a speech in Regensburg last September, and even before the children of Europe’s Muslim immigrants discovered beards, burkas, and jihad. There are more than a billion Catholics in the world, and more than a billion Muslims. And what divides the most vocal and rigidly orthodox interpreters of their two faiths, from the imams of Riyadh and the ayatollahs of Qom to the Pope himself, is precisely the things that Catholicism and Islam have always had in common: a purchase on truth; a contempt for the moral accommodations of liberal, secular states; a strong imperative to censure, convert, and multiply; and a belief that Heaven, and possibly earth, belongs exclusively to them.

Benedict wants to purify the Church, to make it more observant, obedient, and disciplined—more like the way he sees Islam. Illustration by Mark Ulriksen

It is well known that Benedict wants to transform the Church of Rome, which is not to say that he wants to make it more responsive to the realities of modern life as it is lived by Catholic women in the West, or by Catholic homosexuals, or even by the millions of desperately poor Catholic families in the Third World who are still waiting for some merciful dispensation on the use of contraception. He wants to purify the Church, to make it more definitively Christian, more observant, obedient, and disciplined—you could say more like the way he sees Islam. And never mind that he doesn’t seem to like much about Islam, or that he has doubts about Islam’s direction. (His doubts are not unusual in today’s world; many Muslims have them.) The Pope is a theologian—the first prominent theologian to sit on Peter’s throne since the eighteenth century. He views the world through a strictly theological frame, and his judgments about Islam, however defiant or reductive they sometimes sound, have finally to do with the idea of Theos—God—as he understands it. Those judgments have not changed much, in character, since he left Germany for the Vatican, twenty-six years ago.

In 1997, when the Pope was still Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and beginning his seventeenth year as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, otherwise known as the Holy Office, or the Inquisition, he told the German journalist Peter Seewald, “Islam has a total organization of life that is completely different from ours; it embraces simply everything. . . . One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of pluralistic society.” In 2004, the year before his election to the papacy, he elaborated on that dismissive thought for the German secular philosopher Jürgen Habermas, during a long recorded conversation in Munich. Talking about the “normative elements” in human rights—rights that in the West, by consensus, are not subjected to “the vagaries of majorities”—Ratzinger brought up Islam. He said that “Islam has defined its own catalogue of human rights, which differs from the Western catalogue” and from the West’s understanding of the “self-subsistent values that flow from the essence of what it is to be a man”—values that may not be readily apparent beyond “the Christian realm” or “the Western rational tradition.” What he does seem to admire about Islam is its insistent presence at the center of most Muslims’ lives.

Islam has been in Europe for thirteen hundred years. Arab armies were at the gates of Poitiers, in central France, in 732—only a hundred years after the Prophet died and more than three hundred and fifty years before the start of the First Crusade—and southern Spain was still under Islamic rule in the fifteenth century, some two hundred years after the knights of the Ninth Crusade straggled home. But Benedict is the first Pope to have developed what could be called an active theological policy toward Islam, as opposed to, say, a military or political one—“the first really functioning Pope in the post-September 11th world,” Daniel Madigan calls him. Madigan, who is one of the Vatican’s most prominent, and liberal, advisers on Christian-Muslim relations, runs the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at the Jesuits’ Pontifical Gregorian University, arguably the most intellectually independent of Rome’s Catholic institutions. It is probably safe to say that many of the faculty had been hoping for a more doctrinally liberated Pope. They acknowledge Benedict, though, as an intellectual, and, from a critical distance, recognize his purpose in what Madigan calls “laying down challenges to Islam, telling Muslims, ‘We need to do some hard talking.’ ”

Still, not even a Jesuit could explain what the Pope intended when he addressed a group of theologians at the University of Regensburg in September, beginning a speech that could best be described as a scholarly refutation of the so-called Kantian fallacy—Kant’s distinction between rational understanding and apprehension of the sublime—with a question posed by a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor to a Persian guest at his winter barracks near Ankara. “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new,” the emperor asked the Persian, “and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The problem for people who actually read the speech (by most reports, very few did) was that the Pope chose not to dispute the emperor’s statement. He allowed that the emperor had spoken with a “startling brusqueness,” but he did not say whether he disagreed, nor, for that matter, did he acknowledge that Christianity had contributed its share of inhumanity to history. He quoted from the emperor’s argument against violent conversion—“God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature”—and contrasted that with a modern scholarly reading of the Islamist argument for it: “In Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories—even that of rationality.” After that, he did not mention Islam again. Marco Politi, the Vatican correspondent for La Repubblica, who heard the speech, says it was “like a typical Protestant Sunday sermon, with the quote as the proposition, the passage to be examined—only it wasn’t examined.”

People at the Vatican quickly covered for Benedict. Some said that he must have been talking a Regensburg shorthand; he had taught at Regensburg for most of the nineteen-seventies, and it could be argued that, in such a familiar academic context, his disclaimer was implicit. A few joked that, being an academic, he had simply given in to a professionally irresistible temptation to show off with an obscure citation. But many of the Vatican correspondents who, like Politi, travelled to Regensburg with Benedict doubt that there was anything accidental or inadvertent in the citation. They had received copies of his speech at six in the morning of the day he gave it, and, at ten, they assembled in the university’s makeshift pressroom and informed the Vatican spokesman, a Jesuit priest and Vatican Radio director named Federico Lombardi, that the passage was going to be incendiary. “The point is that at 10 A.M. somebody got the message that the text was explosive,” Politi told me, adding that when the Pope had gone to Auschwitz to speak, last May, “we got copies of that speech, too, and it never mentioned the Shoah, so we said, ‘Hey, where is Shoah?,’ and he changed it.” Putting aside the obvious question of whether reporters should be in the business of saving Popes from embarrassment, the question remains whether Benedict got the message.

Father Lombardi, a soft-spoken man who at the time was only two months into his job as the Vatican’s official spinner, told me, “I don’t know the intentions of the Pope. I do know that his Regensburg speech was directed to the culture of the West; it wasn’t given to engage Muslims.” But, of course, it did. Within a day of the speech, riots and protests had broken out across the Muslim world. Before the worst of them ended, a week later, Benedict XVI had been burned in effigy in Basra; an Anglican church and a Greek Orthodox church had been fire bombed in Nablus; and an Italian nun had been murdered in Mogadishu, in front of the children’s hospital where she worked. In Europe, young Muslims took to the streets, calling for the Pope’s death and waving placards that said “Islam will conquer Rome” and “Jesus is the slave of Allah.”

The loudest voices, not surprisingly, were the first heard. Sheikh Abu Saqer, the head of the Salafiya Jihadiya movement in Gaza, called angrily for the conquest and conversion of Rome: “This is a crusader war against Islam, and it is our holy duty to fight all those who support the Pope. . . . The green flag of Allah and Muhammad will be raised over the Vatican. . . . Until they join Islam, Hell is their destination.” In Tehran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced that the Pope’s speech was the “latest link” in the “chain of a conspiracy to set in motion a crusade.” And Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami told Iranians, “The Muslim outcry will continue until he fully regrets his remarks.”

The Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, at Oxford, described this “counterproductive game” in late September, when he wrote that Muslim leaders who lend their voices to an angry mob protesting a “perceived insult to their faith” might well reflect on the consequences of “manipulating crises of this kind as a safety valve for both their restive populations and their own political agenda.” Ramadan has roots in Egypt (where his grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood) and in Europe (where he was born and raised), and he has cultivated a reputation as a kind of mediator between the Muslims of those two worlds, an interpreter of one to the other. He said that crises like Regensburg, with their “uncontrollable outpouring of emotion, end up providing a living proof that Muslims cannot engage in reasonable debate and that verbal aggression and violence are more the rule than the exception.”

Joseph Ratzinger and his predecessor Karol Wojtyla were the first “foreigners,” as Italians still call them, to be elected to the papacy since 1522, when a priest from Utrecht began twenty uneventful months as Pope Adrian VI. The forty-five Pontiffs who followed Adrian were not only reliably homegrown; they were rarely driven to extremes of Christian ardor, and Italians liked them that way—for their self-interest and their discretion. Popes were not expected to transform Catholicism. Their job was to look after their land, their coffers, and their clergy, support the wars against Protestants, and dazzle Europe’s Catholic peasants with earthly displays of the heavenly pomp awaiting them once the misery of their indentured lives was past. The Church lost the last of its Papal States in 1870, with the Risorgimento, and, after years of wrangling with the capricious new entity called Italy, it settled into a fairly comfortable role. It delivered the Catholic vote to the Christian Democrats and kept the Communists at bay, and in return was assured that no unseemly new laws would disturb the patriarchal sanctity of the Catholic family. (It eventually lost on contraception and divorce.)

The received wisdom has been that the Roman Catholic Church as we know it today was born—or reborn—in 1962, with the opening ceremonies of the ecumenical council known to the world as Vatican II. The presiding Pope was the irresistibly benign Angelo Roncalli, or John XXIII, and, in calling that council, he had managed to crack a stifling papal mold, both in the huge pleasure he took in bringing together three thousand bishops from around the world and in the promise he made of opening the Church not only to the different voices of Catholicism but to the voices of the other great religions. “What do we intend?” he said, flinging open a Vatican window. “We intend to let in a little fresh air.”

The council sat for three years, and while John XXIII died less than a year into its four sessions, one of the key documents it produced—Nostra Aetate, or “In Our Time”—did revise Catholicism’s formal relationship to those religions. John had wanted to leave a strong statement about the Church’s history of anti-Semitism, and in Nostra Aetate the “spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews”—the roots of Christianity in the Jewishness of Christ, and even the dim possibility of Jewish salvation—was finally acknowledged. Nostra Aetate also acknowledged, for the first time in Church history, if not what theologians call “the salvation status” of Islam—put simply, do Muslims go to Heaven?—then at least the humanity of Muhammad’s followers. “The Church regards with esteem . . . the Muslims,” it said. “They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of Heaven and earth.”

It wasn’t a lot. “You could say that Islam entered Vatican II through a Jewish door,” the historian Alberto Melloni told me. But it held out the possibility of a revolution in relations between two religions that (as John Paul II remarked twenty years later, on a trip to Morocco) had spent more time offending each other than embracing. The assumption, perhaps naïve, was that this was a revolution that Islam would welcome, and a new Curial office, for interfaith dialogue and relations, was opened by the Vatican. At first, it was known simply as the Secretariat for Non-Christians, or Pro Non Christianis. In 1988, it became the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

Giovanni Montini, the cardinal who became Pope Paul VI a few weeks after John’s death, signed off on Nostra Aetate in 1965. Ten years later, he withdrew the Church’s long-standing objection to the construction of a Grand Mosque for Rome. He did it quietly, mindful, perhaps, of the fact that, for most Italians of his generation, the question of Islam belonged where Dante had left it—in the “schismatics” corner of the Eighth Circle, with Muhammad eternally disembowelled or, in the words of the poet, “rent from the chin to where one breaketh wind.” (It should be remembered that John of Damascus, the eighth-century saint and last Father of the Church, considered Islam to be a Christian heresy; today, by strict Catholic definition, any religion that postdates and rejects the divinity of Christ is heretical.)

Paul also left the new interfaith office pretty much to its own devices, thus avoiding the theologically sticky question of who, from the point of view of “dialogue” with a religion without hierarchies, could properly be said to speak authoritatively for Islam. This obviously pleased the priests who were off serving small Catholic communities in the Muslim world, but permission to talk about God with imams was not exactly the “fresh air” that liberal lay Catholics had expected from the first ecumenical council in a century. Despite the mythology that surrounds it, Vatican II was meant to open the Church to the world, not to liberalize its doctrine, and its most enduring legacy may have been not Nostra Aetate but the conservative backlash that Nostra Aetate inspired.

Thomas Michel, the Secretary for Interreligious Affairs at the Jesuit Curia, calls Vatican II “the 1968 of the Catholic Church”—a magical liberating moment that, like ’68, frightened as many people as it freed. Conservatives in the Church saw it as a step toward ecumenical license, if not doctrinal collapse. Paul himself seems to have thought so. Within three years of the council’s closing session, he produced the encyclical letters Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, which affirmed the doctrine of clerical celibacy, and Humanae Vitae, which, despite the best efforts of the theologians on his papal commission on birth control, who after three years of scrutinizing the Gospels had tried to persuade him that contraception was morally acceptable, affirmed its sinfulness. It may prove that, in the end, the ecumenical council that really transformed the Church was not Vatican II but Vatican I, which sat from 1869 to 1870 and enshrined the doctrine of papal infallibility. The Church that Karol Wojtyla and, after him, Joseph Ratzinger inherited is in some ways as old and as new as that.

Benedict XVI, like John Paul II, had been one of the young theological advisers at Vatican II. He was thirty-five then, a full professor of fundamental theology at the University of Bonn, and on his way to a chair in dogmatics at the University of Tübingen, where he taught with Hans Küng, Germany’s premier Catholic theologian. Tübingen’s Catholic theologians were famously progressive, closer, in some ways, to Protestant theologians like Karl Barth, in Switzerland, than to their own bishops. Ratzinger, at the time, considered Küng his friend. The upheavals of 1968 changed that. Ratzinger, by his own account, was so repelled by the anarchy around him that he fled Tübingen for the conservative Catholic fiefdom of Regensburg’s new theology department—a move I have heard described as “going from Harvard to Idaho State.”

He had already written dissertations on Augustine and Bonaventura, and even a book arguing for a decentralized Church. But it was at Regensburg’s theology department that he honed his belief that the discourse of Christianity is a fundamentally rational discourse—as the West, grounded in Greek philosophical inquiry, understands reason—and as such not ultimately comprehensible, even for argument’s sake, outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. That certainty, drawn from his reading of John’s Gospel, of the inextricability of Theos and Logos—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”—was the heart of his speech in Regensburg nearly forty years later.

Ratzinger and Wojtyla shared this: an exceptionally narrow view of what constitutes a morally acceptable Christian life. That view is reflected in the daily decisions of bishops who in the past few years have denied the sacraments to pro-choice politicians (St. Louis); refused to allow Muslims to pray at a church that was once a mosque (Córdoba); and denied Catholic burial to an incurably ailing man who, after years of suffering on a respirator, asked to die (Rome). But the resemblance ends there. Ratzinger did not really think that theological dialogue with non-Christians was useful, or meaningful, or even possible. John Paul II did. His papacy, he said, was going to be a peace papacy—a papacy of bridges. Unlike Ratzinger, he was not much concerned about whether a Trinitarian faith with an anthropomorphic God was “comprehensible” to a Muslim whose God is never manifest. He would talk to anyone about God. In twenty-six years as Pope, he made a hundred and two trips abroad, many of them to Muslim countries, and it didn’t matter whether the understanding of God was the same from one airport to the next.

“He decided that he wouldn’t govern—he would go” is how Mario Marazziti, one of the founders of the New Age Catholic movement called the Community of Sant’Egidio, describes those years. “Whereas Benedict governs through the Word.” Father Michael Hilbert, a professor of canon law and the dean of faculty at the Gregorian, puts it this way: “For John Paul II, the faith was a given, something to celebrate and proclaim. Ratzinger wants to explain it. His question is, Why did the Holy Spirit choose me? What message should I be giving now?” And Marco Tosatti, the Vatican correspondent at La Stampa and an admirer of Benedict, says simply, “John Paul was not a theologian.”