George Weigel, National Review
The tender-minded will, I suppose, suggest that Renzi’s surrender to the aesthetic and culinary mores of the seventh-century Arabian peninsula were gestures of respect for difference and, coupled with the fulsome reception President Rouhani received in the Vatican, signs of a new opening to interreligious dialogue with the dominant Iranian form of Shia Islam. Two incidents from the life of Pope St. John Paul II, who knew something about both civilizational morale and interreligious dialogue, ought to put paid to such self-demeaning rubbish.