When the Jesuits' founder St Ignatius Loyola was on the road riding with a Moor in 1522, the Moor argued that the Virgin Mary was no longer a virgin after Christ was born.
The instinct of the recent former soldier Ignatius was to kill the Moor on the spot. But they were approaching a fork in the road, and Ignatius decided that if his mule took the same path as that of the Moor, he would kill the Moor. If the Moor took the other path, he would let the Moor live. As it happened, charity, mercy and understanding ruled, and the Moor's life was spared.
We can only hope that Muslims who would like to kill Pope Benedict XVI for similar reasons will also allow themselves to be stopped in their tracks.
Australian Jesuit Daniel Madigan, a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, says in this issue of Eureka Street that both Christianity and Islam have shown themselves ready historically to use coercion and violence to root out schism and heresy.
"War and violence still find support among religious people of both traditions, and Benedict seems poised to go even further than John Paul II in his opposition to it," he observes.
Meanwhile there was no threat to kill the editor, but we provoked a strong reaction from an Adelaide reader last week after pontificating in our subscriber email about Steve Irwin's lack of real reverence towards animals. He told us to "connect with Australia's ordinary folk".
"Steve Irwin was a good bloke and a family man—the vast majority of Australians recognise this and don't need elitist pretensions... to discern his significance."
There are two sides to every argument, and often they are both right. Our iconoclasm rolls on in this issue, with Binoy Kampmark's contention that Irwin or any other zookeeper cannot be a true animal lover because zoos are essentially "cordoned off spaces, celebrating the subjugation of nature". From another angle, Brian Matthews asks why Australians barely noticed the death of Colin Thiele, who is one of our great children's writers.
"Thiele and Irwin died within a week of each other. The Prime Minister said that Irwin died a ‘quintessentially Australian’ death while Colin Thiele, whom Howard never mentioned, died of a heart attack in Brisbane."
We might well ask if Thiele's reverence is unAustralian.