I don’t think we want to descend into such radical relativism, especially when discussing a Pope who himself preaches forcefully and repeatedly against relativism.

As for his discourse on Galileo, I have read both the 1990 text and the defence of it against the La Sapienza critics that the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano published in Wednesday’s edition (”When Ratzinger defended Galileo at La Sapienza”). Both are linked in my post. The L’Osservatore Romano analysis fully backs up my reading of the 1990 Ratzinger text. I agree with it 100%. How can you read that and then say that I did not understand the discourse on Galileo or took liberties with what it said?

Your statement that you post on a blog and therefore present your information in a “lively” way is the very thing you’re criticizing in the Pope. It’s also tendentious. Being “lively” in one’s presentation doesn’t mean one takes no care with the truth. No does the fact that you’re “secular” mean you can take liberties with what the Pope said. It’s not clear to me that you even read his discourse on Galileo, or that, if you did, that you understood it.

There seem to be two related objections here, one to the words used and one to the approach taken. On the style, this is a blog. Blogs are meant to be written in a lively way, as an alternative to the dry style of our news stories. This blog is meant to give some background to our reporting, so it goes into other aspects of the issue that do not get into the news stories. We would not have written the headline on this post on a news story because that is not the style. But it works in a blog.

The charge of showing contempt in our approach, which I reject, is a deeper one. It goes to the fundamentals of how we cover a religious leader, both for the news file and the blog.

Reuters is a secular news organisation. We don’t exempt religious leaders from the critical approach we take to other public figures, such as national leaders. It’s not our job to dissect their profound religious beliefs — to argue, for example, that Jesus was or was not divine or whether Mohammad was or was not a prophet — but to report on what they as public figures say and do. In contrast to the lay religious media, we do not write for a specific community of believers. In contrast to official church media, we do not consider our reporting to be a means of supporting and spreading a religious leader’s views. Those functions are appropriate for them but not for us. We write for all readers, regardless of their belief or non-belief, to inform them of what these public figures are doing.

Working in this way, we approach a speech by Pope Benedict with the same questions we would ask of a political leader. What does he say, what is his purpose in saying it and what did he achieve with his argument? Sometimes, we simply report what he says because it is important to know his position on the issue involved. Thus we cover his major speeches and encyclicals as normal news events. If a speech provokes a reaction that goes against the Pope’s apparent intention, this becomes another story and requires more analysis to explain what has happened. We do this for other public figures and see no reason not to do it for the Pope.

In the case of the two speeches mentioned here, I don’t think anyone will argue that Benedict intended that Muslims should riot after his Regensburg speech or that students should block his visit to La Sapienza because of something he said in 1990. We are defending neither violent Muslim extremists nor intolerant students when we ask how a speech could be so misused. In both cases, the objections were to quotes the Pope used that were taken to be his personal opinion, although he did not say explicitly whether it was or not. In the Regensburg case, he later said the Manuel II Paleologus quote was not his own opinion. In the 1990 text, he described Feyerabend’s position as “drastic” and devalued Bloch’s by describing him as a “Romantic Marxist.” In the end, he clearly says that he cited these two views to illustrate “the extent to which modernity’s doubts about itself have grown today in science and technology”. Not to argue for or against the Church’s action in the Galileo case, but to use it as a backdrop for discussing the arguments of these two 20th century philosophers and illustrating those doubts.

Public speakers normally cite quotations that express and bolster their opinion. Pope Benedict does that, but he also uses another rhetorical device that confuses listeners. I called it the old professor’s habit because I saw it frequently when I studied at a German university, back when he was a professor at a different university, and I have seen it many times in his writings and speeches down to this day. It consists of bringing in a quotation to debate some other point. The idea is not to agree with the quotation as much as use it as a tool to advance a different argument. This is a subtle way of arguing, one that is fine in an academic setting, but it can easily be misunderstood outside of it.

This is what happened with the Regensburg speech, which was public and could have been better prepared. The Pope is now a worldwide public figure and his words are listened to by an audience far wider than the academy or the Catholic Church itself. To say he stumbled there means he did not get across his intended message (about faith and reason, not about Islam) across. This time around, his writings have been misused against him — he could not have had the La Sapienza visit in mind when he wrote that, but it has tripped him up in his plan to visit the university. That’s why I asked whether other writings, which also display this rhetorical tool, might also be misused against him in the future.

We wouldn’t go to the effort of pointing out this misunderstanding and misuse of the Pope’s speeches if we had contempt for him. If doing so shows contempt, what would it have been if we had passed over this misuse in silence?

You write like John Allen of NCR - outwardly evenhandedly, yet the contempt for the Pope is always there and it’s not even under the surface.