THE talk over the weekend concerning the pope’s blunder had to do with his under-instruction in diplomacy. Several matters were cited, among them that he had, for lack of intelligent concern, dispatched his principal Arabist to Cairo on a trivial diplomatic mission. The assumption is that if His Holiness had had his ship in order, somebody would have told him that the little paragraph about Islam in his forthcoming speech at the University of Regensburg would bring on a major diplomatic foofaraw.
This dark view of things seemed to be validated by the headlines on Monday, which spoke of an unprecedented “apology” by Pope Benedict for the words he had spoken. Fastidious analysts of course did not find exactly that. What he said was that he was truly sorry for the hurt those words had caused among the Muslim faithful. There is a world of difference between expressing regret and apologizing. One apologizes for something one did and has responsibility for. The Emperor Hirohito could plausibly apologize for Pearl Harbor; everybody else could only express regret over Pearl Harbor.
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