who will rid us of this turbulent hellenizer?

I think the best commentary so far on Benny the Pope is provided by Matthew Hogan at Aqoul:

His jab at Islam is the sign of adopting a different party line from John Paul's, one taken commonly by many conservative Catholics and secular Westerners against Islam. This view is that Islam is inherently anti-rational and devoted strictly to learning from the text, with the added error of an arbitrary capricious God. But that is also not-coincidentally the Catholic party-line jab at conservative Protestantism. Quite subtle in Benedict's speech is an anti-Protestant (esp. anti-fundamentalist-evangelical) subtext.

If one can survive the boredom of the text, the West is inherently Christian-leaning is the sense of much. It is clear that Benny the Pope is even implying that historical Judaism picked up the highest forms of ethical monotheism not directly from the Deity but from Greek philosophy. This is strongly a departure from Biblical literalist Christianity and one theological area where conservative Catholics are more flexible than evangelical Protestants. (The non-adherence to Biblical literalism also expalins the relatively strong acceptance of evolution in RC Church for example). His conflation of Christianity with Western civilization is very old-line Catholic, however. (Note to that end his fight to protect hellenization and the invocation of a Greek resister to Islamic spread, and only a reluctant granting that Christianity came from the East, adding that it was a Westernized East!)

In short then, the Christian appropriation of the neoplatonic tradition, and through it the idea that classical European civilization isn’t so much pagan as pre-Christian. The late JP2 seemed to interpret this as a sense that the generally godly have to hang together or hang separately. Besides which, he was a trenchant critic of the concept of modernity that a lot of people say they want to export to the Islamic world. Benny the Pope’s thinking more along the lines that the Catholic church is the inheritor and guarantor of the whole bag of tricks known as western civilization, and to this end is a serial insulter of other superstitions. It’s the rest of us he’s really after. Muslims are mainly just a means to this end.

...a useful means, too. It's hard to believe that he'd have got away with that blood libel about the crucifixion so easily if he hadn't had a crack at the Muslims first.

Comments

[Chris Williams]

At last, someone else noticed. That speech was dominated by the theme: 'This is our unique selling point - we don't do literalism.'