The Unlikely Ambassador to Islam
By Father Jonathan Morris

It sounds like the beginning of a good mystery novel — “a German Pope and a Saudi King were meeting privately behind the Vatican walls” — but, in fact, that is precisely what happened this week.

For the first time ever, a reigning monarch of Saudi Arabia came to the Vatican to meet with the Pope.

Not just any Pope; it’s the Pope of the Regensburg address — that infamous speech against religiously-motivated violence that provoked parts of the Muslim world into proving his point. And this is no ordinary monarch; he’s the leader of a Muslim country that boasts, year after year, one of the worst records of religious liberty in the world.

Strange bedfellows? Not so. the rest photo