An Atheist Defends the Pope

I am very grateful to Fr. Stephanos for pointing this out to me, I wish I had read it earlier. It is a few days old, but definitely worth posting on the main page here. You can take the author's political views with a grain of salt, but his analysis is very reasoned.

I especially find interesting his "correcting" the Pope on the context of the "controversial" quote.

Emperor Manuel II Paleologus

Let's stop here, and note one error. The dialogues set down by Manuel did not occur during the siege of Constantinople, but much earlier, during the emperor's youth, when he was held as a hostage at the court of the Turkish sultan; his father, John V, was a Turkish vassal, who paid yearly tribute to the sultan. At the Turkish court, young Manuel passed the time by engaging in a series of dialogues with a scholarly Persian, and later recorded them from his notes. This historical context is important, in view of the controversy that has arisen – and arise it did, when the pope got around to his point

Hmmm, nobody in the media or Muslim world has bothered to let us know that little detail.

Like I said, this is definitely an article worth reading.

Read the whole article here.