Through Force or Faith? — Page 192
?— A Reply to Pope Benedict XVI 192 or a Christian monarch. It is that of a vicegerent of Jesus on earth who is remembered by the Catholic Encyclopedia as the ‘Great Pope’. Thus, if today the statement of Pope Benedict is at variance, it is against the wish and intent of the earlier Pope and we are compelled to assess that as long as Christianity had power, it had not only sanctioned forcible conversions, but the Popes exhorted Christians to do so. Although the Pope cannot dare to issue such an injunction in the present times, he has tried to attribute to Islam the unholy teachings that belong to himself and present himself as the self-acclaimed champion of ‘Religious Freedom’. In this regard, Kurt Flasch, who is a renowned German Philosopher, recently wrote, while commenting on the Papal speech: Pope says that faith is a matter of soul; many Christian thinkers, from Augustine to those in the late nineteenth century, have repeatedly expressed this idea, and they have asserted that though belief is a result of man’s free will, but he is also so completely lost in sins and bad hab- its, that he has to be liberated from his ill state by using physical and military force. Augustine reports joyfully that Christian heretics who were forcefully driven into the church by the soldiers he had called, were grateful to their fate … they were educated by the terror in order to get rid of their errors. … Thomas [Aquinas], for instance, preached: Whoever quits Christian belief deserves death penalty… since the church has no command over police and military forces today, it appears to be an advocate of religious freedom, something emphatically condemned by