Through Force or Faith? — Page 100
?— A Reply to Pope Benedict XVI 100 or demolished. More than 1,000 churches in Germany are in urgent need of restructuring. (Prof. Graduate Engineer Karl-Heinz Petzinka, Department of Building Technology Designing, University of Darmstadt) In these circumstances, when the Christians are leaving the church in hoards and hundreds of churches are forced to close their doors for business, it behoved the Pope to try to show the rationality of the teachings of Christianity as embodied in the Bible so that people, convinced by his logical exposition, would stop abandon- ing the church in such large number. Now, he may have succeeded in garnering the sympathy of the fundamentalist elements among the Christians of Europe, he would certainly not win the hearts of the Christians who have abdicated the church only because of the Christian teaching not being compatible with Rationalism. One possible explanation for Pope’s baseless criticism of Islam could be that he wished to provide the intellectual foundation therewith for the war that some western countries have waged against the Islamic extremism, and have even attacked some Muslim countries on this pretext. Some Western political figures have started to frame it as the Clash of Civilizations. The Pope may not personally concur with these opinions, he has certainly attempted to provide the intellectual basis for the above men- tioned conflict. Many fair-minded scholars have raised voices against the Papal lecture that the Pope has very shrewdly reviled Islam in the name of promoting inter-religious dialogue but it is imprudent. Berliner Zeitung, a newspaper from Berlin writes: