A German pope who publicly thanked the people of the United Kingdom for winning the Battle of Britain was, clearly, a man with an unusual perspective...

Pope Benedict Was a Powerful Voice 

for Moral Political Leadership

By George Weigel

He came to the papacy burdened by the cartoon image of "God's Rottweiler" and the fact that he had been a very reluctant draftee into the Wehrmacht during World War II. What Joseph Ratzinger displayed over the seven-and-a-half years of his pontificate, however, was an acute sense of the crisis of western democracy at this moment in history. A German pope who publicly thanked the people of the United Kingdom for winning the Battle of Britain was, clearly, a man with an unusual perspective on, and insight into, contemporary history.

That insight was on full display in his instantly controversial Regensburg lecture of September 2006, where a robust quote from a medieval exchange between a Christian and a Muslim obscured the hard truths that the pope proposed: that Islam and "the rest" could only live together peacefully if Islam found within itself the intellectual resources to warrant religious toleration and a separation of religious and political authority in a 21st century Islamic state. The uproar that followed was unfortunate; the issues Benedict XVI put on the table of world discussion remain completely salient.

Then there was the pope's 2008 address to the General Assembly of the United Nations. There, like his great predecessor, John Paul II, he defended the universality of human rights while urging the world to a deeper understanding of the human dignity from which basic human rights flow. Rights as mere trump cards for claims of personal lifestyle preference, the pope suggested, could easily be bent to authoritarian, even tyrannical ends. A polite yawn followed; but the issue of how a world that can only affirm "your truth" and "my truth" can possibly defend basic human rights remains as urgent today as when the German professor-pope stood at the U.N.'s marble rostrum almost five years ago.

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