I don’t think Michael Sean Winters gets the pope. I won’t pretend to know his mind — though after some meetings I’ll be a part of in the coming days here Rome I hope to be able to share some Vatican insider insights — but has Michael Sean Winters, who paints the pontiff as just another European head of state, never read the Regensberg address? The pope gets jihad. The U.N. doesn’t. And he knows that too. If you’ve been listening, you know Winters’s Washington Post outlook piece today is off.

This is a little of my interview with George Weigel this past week:

Lopez: Has Pope Benedict been an important voice in this war? Is he being listened to?
Weigel: I think Benedict’s Regensburg lecture of September 2006 was the most important papal statement on a public question of global consequence since John Paul II’s 1995 U.N. address in defense of the universality of human rights. As I put it in my small book, Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism, the Regensburg Lecture identified the linked problems at the center of a lot of turbulence in world politics today: the detachment of faith from reason (as in jihadism) and the loss of faith in reason (as in much of western Europe and too much of American high culture). The former leads to the notion that God can and does command the irrational, such as the killing of innocents; the latter leaves the West intellectually disarmed in the face of the jihadist challenge. At Regensburg, the pope also gave a pluralistic world a vocabulary with which to deal with these grave problems: the vocabulary of rationality and irrationality. Whether these issues are understand in the world’s chancelleries and foreign ministries in the terms in which the Holy Father understands them is another question altogether.
Lopez: Is there a message about the war you expect he’ll be bringing with him to the U.S. next month?
Weigel: I wouldn’t be surprised if the pope spoke at the U.N. about the natural moral law — the moral truths we can know by reason — as a kind of global “grammar” by which the world can rationally discuss the world’s future. And that has everything to do with the war against jihadism.