About Regensburg

Sixty-three years ago, a watershed event occurred over the skies of Regensburg that nearly changed the course of WWII. Three hundred and forty seven bombers from the 8th Air Force attacked both the Messerschmidt fighter works at Regensburg and the ball bearing plants at Schweinfurt in an effort to drive a stake through the heart of the Nazi war machine in one bold raid. It would be a mission of firsts: first dual target mission, first strike against essential industries, first shuttle mission, first deep penetration of Nazi air space, and first mission without fighter escort.

Hailed as a brilliant strategy, the raid bombers did get through and cause significant damage, but the Nazi machine did not collapse and the air crews paid a terrible price. Sixty B-17s were shot down with enough battle damage inflicted to reduce the Mighty 8th by a third of its former strength. In witnessing the carnage over Regensburg, Bomber Command came to the sober realization that its assumptions about the capabilities of the Luftwaffe and the impregnability of the B-17 were flawed. Congress recoiled in horror at the casualty list and inevitably called for an investigation. The rising crescendo of voices clamored for the end to precision daylight bombing

The White House, the Pentagon, and indeed much of the nation understood the nature of the enemy and the consequences of backing off. So American families continued to send their sons and husbands into the meatgrinder over Europe, the 8th flew tighter formations, slung drop tanks under the P-47s, they went back to Schweinfurt, and Bremen and Muenster, continuing to slug it out until the reintroduction of a mothballed fighter called the P-51B Mustang changed everything.

Last week, another battle raged over Regensburg with shock waves that again reverberated around the world. One would like to say it was a war of ideas, but events demonstrated that it was not limited to discourse. Pope Benedict XVI delivered a didactic lecture to a theological university audience addressing the character of the Christian God as logos or of reason and postulating that violence and war in the furtherance of his word was antithical to his nature. Employing a conversation between Manuel II and a Persian diplomat as a clever device to contrast the nature of the Trinity and Allah, Benedict XVI defined the Christian God as the embodiment of reason, motivated by love for his creation, and bound to act in accordance by his own moral code and promises to his creation. Allah on the other hand is motivated by the power of will and dominion over his charges. Because he is transcendent and revels in that transcendence, Allah’s actions are capricious, and often not bound by his own code or compelled to abide by his promises. If man is created in God’s image as both Islam and Christianity profess, then what will be the character and behavior of the man who follows Allah’s example?



The Pope’s grand strategic plan, as reported to the media, was to initiate a dialogue with Muslim leaders that would help to reconcile the growing ideological conflict with Christianity. But by all media accounts, the Pope miscalculated on the effects of his words, inadvertently (and some say naively) whipped up a firestorm of irrational hatred and violence that ironically proved the Pope’s original thesis. Many were disappointed by his apologies and progressive backpedaling. Many believed that the Pope had lost his resolve when faced with such a violent outpouring from the Muslim world and the secular media.

Miscalculated?
In a schwein’s eye.

Let us not forget that before the white smoke issued from the Sistine Chapel, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger served as the chief architect of the new catechism for the Catholic Church and a major theological apologist during the papacy of John Paul II. He is an exceptionally learned scholar, serving as a professor at Bonn, Regensburg and Munchen and such an unrelenting and effective critic of moral relativism that the European press, the European Left and other bastions of moral relativism branded him Cardinal Rottweiler. He has also served in the Vatican State Department served as a liaison to the eastern churches was an expert in the historical conflicts between the Crescent and the Cross. The pontiff was well aware that Manuel II eventually lost his throne and empire to the Ottoman sword (thereby proving the Emperor’s point), and that the entire incident was anything but “obscure” to Catholics or to the Orthodox Churches. Moreover, the Pope raised the ideological stakes. By identifying the capriciousness of Allah as revealed in the Koran, Benedict XVI was indirectly illustrating why Muslims could embrace the moral relativism of jihad and kill non-believers and even other Muslims without remorse.
There is no doubt that the Pope was caught off guard by press coverage of a seemingly dry theological address delivered to an ecclesiastical audience but his message has remained on-target.


Was the Pope’s cowed by the resulting death threats and blind violence prompted by his words and retreated from his position accordingly? Highly unlikely.

The pontiff grew up in a Bavarian family in which his father was openly critical of the Nazis during WWII, and paid for it. Like the Lutheran theologian Eric Bonhoffer , killed for his opposition to Nazi doctrine, young Joseph was well acquainted with the costs of discipleship. One must remember that Cardinal Ratzinger was there with John Paul II when the pontiff took on the Communist block and lived under constant death threats that nearly succeeded in 1981 at the hand of (you guessed it) a Turkish gunman.

The Pope appeared to blink, not because he was afraid of the tumult but perhaps because he knows the West and indeed Christendom is not prepared for the onslaught that is at its doorstep. Just as the 8th AAF had to be bloodied in 1943, perhaps the Christian Church and indeed the West had to witness the mauling of the Pope at Regensburg to understand the nature and capabilities of the enemy and to understand that it cannot expect reason or compromise from the Muslim world.

Or perhaps the Pope used the incident to help smoke out the “moderate” schools of Islam that have remained suspiciously quiet since 9-11. Even the head of the American Islamic Congress happily appeared on the very conservative Jerry Doyle Show to decry the jihadists violent threats against the Pope. Bashing the United States is one thing, but picking a fight with a billion Catholics around the world is another.

Either way, a watershed mark may have been achieved at Regensburg that we haven’t even begun to fathom.