In the world press, the Regensburg lecture, in which the Pope quoted a robust intellectual exchange between a medieval Byzantine emperor (very critical of Islam) and a learned Persian Muslim, remains a "gaffe". In fact, however, the Regensburg lecture on faith and reason was the most consequential papal statement on an issue of global concern since John Paul II defended the universality of human rights at the UN in 1995. By arguing persuasively that our idea of God (or lack-of-an-idea of God) profoundly shapes the way we think about both what is good and what is wicked, and how we think about the appropriate methods for advancing the truth in a world in which there are profound disagreements about the truth of things, Benedict pointed out a hard fact of 21st-­century life that no president, prime minister or secretary-general was in a position to name: that the distorted idea of God-as-pure-­wilfulness that undergirds jihadist Islam was at the root of the jihadist challenge.

Benedict's second point followed closely on his first: irrational violence aimed at innocent men, women and children is, as he put it at Regensburg, "incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the [human] soul". This was no blanket indictment; Ratzinger knows that there are multiple theologies of God at work in the complex worlds-within-worlds of Islam, and that serious interreligious dialogue is absolutely essential to identify whatever common theological borders may exist between Islam and "the rest". But it is also important to recognise, as Benedict did at Regensburg, that certain currents of thought in contemporary Islam insist (to take the most dramatic and odious example) that the suicide bombing of innocents is an act pleasing to God, an act of martyrdom meriting eternal bliss. Muting the latter point cannot be the admission ticket for engaging in the deeper dialogue about the nature of God and the moral obligations of man. Moreover, the Pope insisted, it is the responsibility of all who worship the one, true God to declare unambiguously that the murder of innocents in the name of advancing the divine cause in the world is an abomination based on gravely mistaken understandings: misunderstandings about God, about's God's will and God's purposes, and about the nature of moral obligation.