The "right to build a place of worship on private property in lower Manhattan", as Obama put it, is not absolute. The location makes all the difference. It is worth recalling that when Carmelite nuns built a convent at Auschwitz, provoking Jewish outrage, Pope John Paul II ordered them to move it elsewhere, to spare the injured feelings of the victims. Even if the Ground Zero mosque is motivated entirely by the desire for reconciliation, even if it were erected without a penny of Iranian or Saudi money, it could one day be abused as a platform by supporters of the aims, if not the methods, of the 9/11 terrorists. Dawa, the duty to proselytise, is in any case incumbent on Muslims, and Feisal published a book in Indonesia entitled: A Call to Prayer from the WTC Rubble: Islamic Dawa from the Heart of America Post 9/11. A base for the propagation of Islam arising from the ashes of Ground Zero smacks of triumphalism. Hence the sensitivities of the victims should be respected, especially as no memorial to their loved ones has yet been erected. Even 70 years after the war, feelings on all sides remain raw; how much more so after less than one decade.

The boundary between the secular and the religious realms must be constantly renegotiated. It cannot, though, be right to marginalise the Church, despite its strenuous, at times agonised, efforts to respond to unsparing criticism, while exempting Islam's doctrines or advocates from scrutiny. The state should be balanced in its treatment of church and mosque; so, too, must the media subject Tariq Ramadan or Feisal to no less rigorous scrutiny than popes and priests. Benedict XVI has nothing to fear from the comparison.